I remember years ago when I was studying for my current health care role and my professor mentioned 'secretions and excretions'. Having already tackled the difference between 'misinformation and disinformation' in my teaching life, I couldn't help but interrupt my teacher and ask her what the difference was.
I've always had a blunted nose, and somewhat dulled senses generally. I only discovered I was colour blind after mixing up choices reaching for a jumper after my sister asked me to retrieve one when she was changing my nephew. "That's not red," my sister said. There is some solace in this. In health care one is essentially assaulted by odours and foulness that I think the average person wouldn't generally stand. Not that I don't smell anything, I certainly do, but it could also be a preternatural patience allied with dulled senses that lets me shake off what most people would consider highly gross. In the middle of a shift when dinner calls me I eat with gusto. The messes I may have dealt with have nothing to do with my appetite.
It was winter and I wasn't even ten. My father owned a war surplus jeep that he used to plow the hill to the house. We never had a fancy sedan. The only thing that could make the hill to the farmhouse needed four wheel drive. Neighbours in these parts also had such machines and plows, and we would sometimes help each other out, sometimes ask for a fee to clear a driveway. One night a man had finished up the long road to the farmhouse and my father invited him in. His young son had tagged along. It was only after a few minutes when the man and his son had taken off their boots that my not-quite-ten-year-old nose detected an overpowering foot stank. It filled the living room. The father rambled on with pleasantries, seemingly unaware. His handsome son sat cross-legged on the floor. He was strikingly handsome as I recall, and I had a hard time reconciling that sweet face with the odour coming from his well-trod wool socks. I do remember he sat sheepishly and quietly with sparkling eyes, but fully aware of the harm that he was weaving. How, I thought to myself, could someone so beautiful smell so bad?
Loving men means putting up with the fact that they can on occasion smell pretty bad. Not that this is always a bad thing. Being gay means having a nose that enjoys musk. One exception is Middle Eastern men. They are usually meticulously groomed and well-perfumed. It is an interesting counterpoint to how brutally homophobic Islamic culture truly is. There is a stopping point for me. I don't think I could get it on with a man who is so completely florid (in the old sense of the word, of course).
Odour is memory - and they say, one of the strongest triggers of recollection. This did indeed happen to me about forty years ago and I recall it vividly. I was in Woolworth's (if that isn't an indication of the past in every sense I don't know what is) and as I passed an aisle I got the overpowering and intoxicating sense of my mother. She wore a not expensive perfume regularly, the name of which I never knew. But she was there in the aisle with me for an evanescent few seconds and I was flooded, almost swept with emotion. All the love and security, the pain of her death, the longing and the heartache, were captured in that few seconds that my nose truly worked for me. I looked around but could find no woman nearby. I was ready to accost whatever female I found and demand to know the fragrance that she was wearing. I found no one. The scent faded. It has never happened again. Whether a woman, or a trick of my nose, I have never forgotten it.
Men's semen is a varied concoction. Manufactured pure and deep inside a man's scrotum, it gorgeously erupts from the tip of a man's penis, shooting and plopping wherever it wishes. But depending on the man, his mood, the drugs he takes, the food he eats, it has its own texture and taste. A young man I know who was a bit depressive took a handful drugs to alleviate his worries. I think the pills he was taking left his semen as quite a bitter brew. My old Portuguese boyfriend, who leaks copiously and shoots abundantly has salty delicious semen. I can't attest to the pineapple diet to enhance the sweetness of semen if any of you have heard of it, but maybe some of you have found success with it.
There is a craze I've noticed in the last few years in porn to spit into a sub's mouth. I've seen it and frankly, it is not my thing. Teddy Torres, who I happened to see and say hi to a few years ago during Pride here in the city, seems to relish in it. He's so damn cute, but when he extends a finger to open his partner's mouth I fast forward the video. Another is drinking urine. Definitely an excretion, if we are to get particular with terms. There is a quite famous cock sucker with a glory hole in Washington state who not only drinks men's streams of urine but also whips the semen deposited in his mouth into a frothy mixture and then let's us see it. The way he makes love to a cock is pretty amazing. Call me a square, call me a prude, but I can do without the drinking and frothing 😂 To each his own, of course, although I strongly think this is a reflection of my job. I deal with secretions and excretions every day. I don't also need them in my sex life.
Years ago at the gym I was changing to shortly hit the floor and two twinks came into the locker room. They were completely unself-conscious and free in their attitude and comments. Speaking without a care, they were discussing someone else. The one turned to the other suddenly and said, "He smells like ass, and not good ass .." I looked up, smiled and laughed, and said, "I know exactly what you mean."
"We look at the world once in childhood. The rest is memory"
Louise Gluck
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