Security

Foreword: This is a piece of m/m gay flash fiction based on a keyword – “security”. I was inspired by a documentary I watched on Netflix last night, called 100 Men, in which gay filmmaker Paul Oremland looks back on 100 of his sexual partners (it’s not clear how many he’s actually slept with, but he counts down and meets up with most of his top 100) whilst taking the viewer through the history of how gay rights has evolved over time. I’ve also been thinking about communities and how powerful they can be, so tried to feed that into the narrative.

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Security

Security. What a strange word. Is its purpose to protect us from undesirable outcomes in life—getting your car stolen, having your bank account hacked into, ensuring valuables don’t get robbed from your home—or is it simply the very idea that brings people together? When we hold a sense of warm, tactile security close to our chests, it can mean that we never have to be alone in this world.

I’ve pondered the true meaning of security for some time now, searching for that opportunity to settle down with the man of my dreams. But it might be impossible for a man like me, someone so deeply connected with the lives of others that it’s become hard to separate my own thoughts and opinions from theirs. I’ve fucked my way across Soho—both in London and New York. I’ve expertly perused every sex shop in the world. I’ve lived in places like San Francisco and Amsterdam. You’d be surprised how many glorious things there are to discover if you just look for them.

I suppose I’ve always been struck by little sparks of security—a series of fleeting yet precious moments where my body feels like it’s been wrapped in a velvet blanket. I’d be pressed up against the back of a man I won on a tombola, with my arms around him, my cock resting limply between his buttocks. Wasted semen would cover the bed sheets in white sprinkles, like someone had done the frosting on the cake wrong. But, content in our post-coitus delusion, neither of us would get up to grab a Kleenex. It’s far more comforting just to lie there on a mattress that was way past its time, feeling all those drops of semen dry ever so slowly, like paint.

In these moments, I know I will feel warm, loved and so secure. I can hide inside a temporary cocoon of lust all I like—and it’s so good there—but I will never emerge from it as a butterfly. No, my wings would surely be clipped before I have a chance to transform into something beautiful and accepted.

Without a true place to belong, over the years I’ve built several homes inside other men’s anuses; after all filling them up with cum fills me with joy, and the sense that I’ve done something that leaves behind a mark. They might move onto a new and different fuck the next weekend, but I want them to remember the way I felt inside them. I want them to be standing in the queue at the supermarket, clenching their ass muscles while they remember how my cock filled them right up. I want them to recall it a month from now, a year from now. Hell, I want them to remember that feeling until the day they croak. And if that nostalgia makes them feel secure, then I know I’ve done my job.

Last week, I did get robbed, my car was stolen and my bank account hacked into. Unbelievable, right? That all of those incidents could occur simultaneously. But they did. And that’s when I really started to think more deeply about the meaning of security. Because when I told a close friend of mine what had happened, he put his big, strong hand on my shoulder and reassured me that everything was going to be alright, that this was just another symptom of society. A day later, I truly felt that the entire gay community were looking out for me. They had scraped together all the spare cash they could offer—some of these people have very little left to their name—and they threw a huge yard sale for my benefit.

So for me, the notion of security is a counteractive kind of permanence that comes about not from monogamous relationships or long-term career, but from an ongoing series of encounters. You only have to touch someone’s life once, and that string of security connects them to you, and you to someone else, and that person to another, and so forth.

It’s in this way that I’ve built a spider-web city of security all around myself. And I too, am part of the webs constructed by others. We merge, we overlap, we pool together—always with the unspoken goal of offering a deep-seated warmth and closeness.