Can't Stop Till I Get Enough

A gay writer and activist was doing a radio interview about his book on life in the pre-AIDS bathhouses, where gay men often would have numerous sexual encounters per night. When asked about whether the desire for multiple sexual experiences is characteristic of gay men in general, the author shot back that it is characteristic of all male sexuality, but that straight men are usually constrained by female sexuality. If, he continued, we really want to see what male sexuality is like, uninfluenced by female sexuality, we just need to look at gay men. The Taoist understands this characteristic of male sexuality in terms of the properties of masculine energy, or yang (see chapter 5 for an explanation of yin and yang). Yang is active, volatile, and expansive. During heterosexual sex, the woman’s yin receives and balances the man’s yang. (As we mentioned in chapter 5, yin and yang are variable qualities that exist in both men and women. There are some men who are more yin and some women who are more yang. According to the Taoists the universe always seeks balance in relationships as in nature.) In general, when two gay men make love, each man’s yang charges the other’s, increasing rather than diminishing their sexual desire. Gay Healing Tao instructor B. J. Santerre explains the value of multiple orgasms for gay men: “Gay men really need multiple orgasms. Most straight men are going to do it once or twice in an evening. For gay men it’s really common that they need more than that in a night. With this practice you are going to be able to fully satisfy this desire whether you have a partner or not.” The expansiveness of yang energy is hard to contain and often will want to escape through the most direct route – the penis. It is no surprise that the object of much gay male sexuality, according to gay sex educator and healer Joseph Kramer, is “to get it up and off.” This emphasis on ejaculation is understandable because it allows you to satisfy your sexual desire; once a man ejaculates he becomes more yin – in other words, stable, internal, and contractive. To avoid this endless cycle of ejaculation, which is extremely depleting to your body and your immune system, you need to cultivate your own yin energy and to spread your expanding yang energy throughout your body. Channeling this energy and containing it is also, as we explained earlier, the way to become multi-orgasmic and to experience whole- body orgasms that will be more satisfying than the genital “getting off” that most men are accustomed to. As B. J. Santerre explains, “If you conserve your semen, you are going to be able to go back to the heydays when people would go to the bathhouses and have orgasms all night long. When you learn this practice, you are able to do the same thing, but you won’t exhaust yourself and you won’t even need to leave home!”