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Going Deep: A Gay Guide to Reality

Going Deep: A Gay Guide to Reality

Written by: Mike Gerle
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 A retired WeHo gay exploring the correlation between sex and meaning.

mikegerle.substack.comMike Gerle Hygiene & Healthy Living Relationships Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Do Your Holidays Hurt?

    Do Your Holidays Hurt?
    Dec 12 2025
    Gay men, and anyone who doesn’t match the style guide of their bio-families, can get hit with a special kind of emotional whiplash this time of year. However you’re spending these weeks, please know you’re not alone. Not with the feelings, at least. Plenty of us have been there, and many of us still are.I’ve spent Christmas Eve barbacking a thinly attended Monday karaoke night at Revolver in West Hollywood. The flimsy pretense that it was just another casual hang evaporated as the holiday songs rolled in. Fifteen or twenty guys clinging to each other’s company because we had nowhere else to be that night. I wasn’t about to call it holy, but the air was heavy with something.I’ve spent Christmas Day alone in the West Hollywood City Hall server room, logged in as one of only five people on the entire network. The city doesn’t offer paid religious holidays; it provides three personal days to use however you want instead. Cool policy, sure. I thought working Christmas might feel like a satisfying “fuck you” to the culture and the Mormons who took away my marriage rights with Prop 8.It didn’t. It was lonely as hell.Watching porn in an empty server room, scrubbing my browser history, and telling myself I’d “earned” a day for International Mr. Leather in May wasn’t the triumph I’d imagined. It felt hollow.Then there was the Christmas I did the divorced-parents circuit: Kansas City with my dad and stepmom, Tucson with my mom. Christmas Eve in KC came with presents, Mormon niceties, and a nighttime outing with my older brother and two step-uncles. One uncle got drunk, the other stole his brother’s money, and we dumped the drunk uncle, literally, on my parents’ lawn before taking his car. My brother then taught me how to buy and smoke crack in it.That night convinced me never to touch crack again. That might’ve been the Christmas miracle.Two days later, I landed in Tucson to find out my grandparents had been sent home early because my grandfather punched my mom’s fiancé while calling him the N-word.I get it. The holidays, as Whitney Houston said about crack, can be WACK!If this is one of those wack years for you, I’m sorry. You’re not the first to go through this, and you won’t be the last. I hope that gives you a little ease.We’re all just trying to follow our hearts and go where we think the love might be. May you find some peace, and may whatever challenges you’re facing now deliver something like wisdom in the long run.And here’s the part I hate to admit: the best holidays I’ve ever had were the ones where I gave in and joined the conventional madness. Humans are just built to commune with each other. It’s medicine.We gay men do it instinctively, on dance floors, at onesie parties, camping trips, bike rides, sex parties like CumUnion. Give us a theme and a protocol, and we’ll build a small, temporary village of belonging.“I’m just happy to have everyone here, together!”I heard that line twice in my life. The first time, I was eleven, rolling my eyes at an elderly woman at Thanksgiving because three people at that table annoyed me. Poor old lady, I thought.The second time, I was twenty-six, sitting at a Thanksgiving table in my own apartment, surrounded by gay friends. This time, it was me saying the line. And suddenly, I got it.What made that Thanksgiving magic was that nothing in me needed hiding. My roommate had hosted for years, so there was a rhythm. I was in the kitchen making gravy (with emergency phoned-in guidance from my mom), and I didn’t have to worry about anyone tensing up when they asked who I was dating.When my roommate chimed in, “Does fucking count?” I felt seen.And now, somehow, I feel that same belonging with the family that raised me. They don’t tolerate me anymore; tolerance is for elevator farts. They accept me. Fully. The whole messy, fabulous truth of me. And because they’ve grown, and I’ve grown. I can accept them as they are, too. Funny enough, that acceptance has become its own gift: more love in my life.If you’re struggling this season, hang in there. You’re not legally required to be merry. You’re not even required to be pleasant. Notice what you feel, and let it guide what you choose to do next year.New Year’s Eve is around the corner. You’ll have months before you have to do this circus again. Use that time to find where the love lives, invest in yourself, and strengthen your chosen family.There’s no one right way to do the holidays. But if you get the chance to celebrate them old-school, with people who let you be you, it might hurt a little less. I might actually be healing. Until we meet again, be good to yourself.Mike This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mikegerle.substack.com/subscribe
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    10 mins
  • Why We Think Sex is Bad

    Why We Think Sex is Bad
    Nov 24 2025
    I keep wondering how “sex-positive” became a buzzword at the exact same time everybody started having less sex. When we live in a reality where medication protocols like PrEP and DoxyPEP can prevent a person from acquiring or shedding HIV and STIs, when U=U, why are we having less sex now than when sex was literally deadly?Race Bannon, who writes the Substack Love At The Edges, shared a story in his post, From Passion to Performance, that may explain some of it.“I was attending a large gay men’s kink play weekend. One of my friends there said he had talked to a guy who my friend had noticed was not interacting sexually or erotically with anyone, running counter to the weekend’s intent. My friend said the guy told him “he was afraid to do anything because he might make a mistake.”In the United States, the sexual revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s made it seem like we were finally abandoning our sexual hangups. Then, pandemics, socializing on screens, and educational efforts, in both academic settings and niche sexual enclaves like the one Race shared, make us all feel more like we’re taking a final exam than experiencing sexual liberation.If the idea of sex fills you with trepidation, like you might make a huge mistake engaging in it, that makes perfect sense. You have been told sex is physically, socially, and intellectually scary for decades.But, with isolation and loneliness now killing men at an alarming rate, with gay men being impacted even higher than non-gay men, it’s foolish to ignore the positive physical, mental, social & romantic, and spiritual benefits of skin-to-skin orgasm.There are many reasons why people think sex is bad, and once we admit to having that feeling, we might be able to ask why we feel that way and be able to move past it.Let’s go way back.The authors of Sex at Dawn, an anthropological study of human sexual behavior, argue that humans didn’t care about who was fucking whom until we started owning things. Before that, when we were nomadic hunter-gatherers, the sperm donor was not all that important. Caring for the tribe’s offspring was.When we became farmers, land and property ownership became tied to paternity: Who’s your daddy?” became a critical question, and sex started getting weird. It was no longer just about fucking; it was about property and power. Kings and peasants. Law and order.In 1620, Puritans and Pilgrims settled in North America, bringing their hyper-paternal ideology with them that we still feel today: monogamous, baby-making sex is the only holy sex: end of message.American politics illustrates our country’s ongoing devotion to scandalizing sex. Here’s a lengthy list. Sexual scandal is an old political fetish that never goes out of style.The Sexual RevolutionIn 1960, birth control pills were invented, paving the way for straight people to experience sexual liberation.With sexual liberation in the air, gays flocked to San Francisco and other major cities where they harnessed their sexuality as a form of power. Sex was a unifying rite of passage. Alluding to and consummating dude-on-dude shenanigans was a political act of solidarity and liberation.Then, AIDSI was lucky enough to sample gay sex before AIDS, before I saw it mercilessly kill my best friend, Alvin, my boyfriend, Tony, and my mentor, Gustav, and a quarter million other gay American men over 12 years.That kind of trauma does not occur without leaving a mark on the soul of a community anchored in sexuality. It was truly traumatizing and has left a permanent mark on the psyche of gay men.Guys now in their early 40s learned sex education from the Grim Reaper himself. “BANG YOU’RE DEAD!” “No ifs, ands, or cures.”Sex will kill you.Bathhouses and sex clubs were closed, regulated out of existence, or left limping along in a legally dubious state, making them unattractive to investors. We see the rotting corpses of those establishments still languishing in Los Angeles: FLEX, Slamer, and North Hollywood Spa.The appalling facilities and our inability to make them legal again manifest our collective attitude toward gay sex, and the Google reviews illustrate what we think we deserve.“The whole place smelled of urine, and it is not maintained. It’s filthy, neglected, and has seen better days.”The fallout of AIDS is still with us.Gay sex was against the law in 13 states until 2003.Until the 2003 Supreme Court Of The United States (SCOTUS) decision, Lawrence v. Texas, butt sex was still forbidden in 13 states (including Nebraska, Wyoming, and Idaho, where I grew up). Before that, even if you were doing it in your own home, behind closed doors with another consenting adult, you were breaking the law.That kind of institutional threat is hard to shake off.Pre-Exposure Porphylaxis (PrEP)With the introduction of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medication in the summer of 2012, we finally had a tool to thwart the horrific menace of AIDS.This should have been a good ...
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    21 mins
  • The Community of Men.

    The Community of Men.
    Nov 11 2025
    My heart aches to share the community of men.Not a widespread sentiment among left-leaning queers, I know. Inclusiveness — meaning all people of all kinds should be in all spaces, every time we do anything — is the only acceptable way to socialize nowadays.I get it.But, I miss the fuck out of those all-male spaces.Even before sex became important to me, all-male spaces provided the kind of mentoring a boy can only get from men. Like that feeling I had as a 13-year-old Boy Scout, sitting under the stars around a campfire in the Rocky Mountains, singing songs led by mentors who had taught us earlier that day the skills necessary to earn merit badges in First Aid, Cooking, Camping, Citizenship, and so many others. Grown men singing heartfelt renditions of Kumbaya, verse after verse in a call and response: “someone’s laughing Lord, Kum ba ya”…someone’s singing, someone’s crying, someone’s praying. Grown men teaching young men that all of us have a variety of feelings, and somewhere, right now, you’re connected to someone who feels all the feelings, just like you.That sensation of attending early-morning Mormon Priesthood meetings before the sun came up, resenting the early hour but welcoming the skin-to-skin, firm, friendly handshakes with eye contact they taught us to give. I knew my role in the tribe and had a sense of useful responsibility. All of us suited up, unified, ready to take on the challenge of serving our community.The surge of kinship I felt with three other gays in a small car driving from Cheyenne, WY, to Denver, CO, on my first gay pride parade and bathhouse pilgrimage. I was 18. Feeling protected as the older guys (in their 30s/40s) gave me pointers on cruising. “It’s all about eye contact, look into his eyes, and think about what you’d like to do to him. Then pass him and look back, if he does the same, you’re on!” said the driver. “‘I’m just resting,’ means ‘no,’ in the bathes,” said the guy next to me in the back seat. We were all on a mission, pulling for each other to get as much dick as possible.Falling in love. Later that night, on the dancefloor of a Denver gay bar, I fell in love with a boy named Robert as Irene Cara sang, and we slow danced to the opening 45 seconds of “What a Feeling” from the Flashdance soundtrack. That very niche Denver gay bar served “3.2 beer” (regarding its low alcohol content), which the state of Colorado deemed acceptable for 18-21 year olds. My friends were at the cooler, hotter bars for older, 21+ gays, but we had plans to meet up at The Ball Park bathhouse after the bars closed. When the boy I had just fallen in love with turned out to have a jealous, dramatic boyfriend, I couldn’t wait to rendezvous with my comrades at the bathhouse.Feeling grateful for my bathhouse tutoring on the drive down, I seamlessly made it through The Ball Park’s entry process.I was soon standing at the foot of an enormous faux-stone hot tub, fed from above by a two-story indoor waterfall. The sound and scent of water crashing into the hot tub. In the misty open space above, men used the conspicuously placed shower stations lining the floors above to lather up, cruise, and be cruised. Like a chandelier of male sex, I felt their energy rain down on me.The fact that it was still a crime to have gay sex in Wyoming, the state I woke up in that morning, (and the two other states I’d lived in: Nebraska and Idaho), made the three floors of cruising, two hot tubs, a steamroom-cave-maze, a full-sized semi truck cab, a three-tiered orgy/porn room, a giant fish tank, a maze of glory hole booths, what seemed like miles of private rooms, a snack bar, and a dance floor to dance the night away, all the more opulent and liberating.The idea that this playground was designed and made for me and my kind made me feel seen and empowered, like I’d received a gift. I belonged there.I miss the protocol of Men’s Class at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School summer session, where the rituals of the ballet world focused on the specific proclivities of men. The surprisingly delightful competitiveness between us as we showed off for each other and the ballet master. Jumping, turning, and beating our legs together, proving who was best. All of us working to perfect the same art form gave us unity, while we simultaneously competed to be the best, the soloist who stands out. Ballet tights accentuated our crotch mounds and lined the deepest crevases of our well-developed glutes, providing a hormone-charged surge that didn’t occur during mixed class.“Ladies, re-rack your weights!” was a call to order routinely made over the Athletic Club’s speakers. It made me grin every time. There were no ladies. The Athletic Club was not a gay friendly gym; it was a GAY gym. Only one locker room, stacks of free gay publications by the front door, working out with our shirts off, a tanning service, a pool, a kitchen, and sections of glass brick separating the...
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    13 mins
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