In more recent years I look back on my mid-1970s (and then again early 1980s) Bangkok adventure and just shake my head, wondering what we were thinking we were doing then and how shallow we must have been to be so totally focused on beautiful bodies and the striving for perpetual orgasm.
I think that for most of those I played with for two-and-a-half years in the 1970s, the hedonist urges resulted from the intersection of a few "realities." As a society, Americans were coming out of a decade of national hedonism in the form of the flower child/hippie generation that, itself, lifted the orgasm and the concept of "if it gives pleasure, do it" to the level of both a desirable and an obtainable goal. Overlaying that was that we were just coming out of a physically and emotionally draining Vietnam War period in which we not only suffered the depression of defeat (no matter what a spin our government tried to put on it) but in which, like so many other wars, we had lost the cream of our generation—our very generation, those we had grown up with and had mistakenly assumed we would grow old with. The "pack all of the pleasure in today, because tomorrow we die" syndrome was laying heavy on us, especially on those of us in Thailand, close to Saigon in terms of physical threat as well as location.
Add to that that Americans finding themselves living and working in Bangkok were basically adventuresome folks and that, with the jobs they did, they tended to be beautiful and very fit, Bangkok was, morally, a wide-open, "if it feels good, do it" environment. So we had a heady brew of an invitation to sexual adventure, openness, and experimentation. The horror of AIDS wasn't even a moat in anyone's eyes yet.
This mix was particularly heady for me. I came to Bangkok a vanilla monogamous heterosexual, who had had thoughts of a world further afield than heterosexuality, but who had been so narcissistic that I hadn't given more than a passing thought to sex at all outside of marriage let alone in pursuing the goal of perpetual orgasm with multiple partners, and those of the same gender as I was. All of that exploded early in my Bangkok diplomatic tour when, naïvely not even seeing what I was sinking into, I was seduced by a sexual magician male Indian doctor, who was an expert in the sexual positions of the Kamasutra, and whose goal it was to totally debauch, master, and control largely innocent young men—and to make them open to having multiple partners simultaneously.
Within months of arriving in Bangkok, I was attending male-only nude pool parties and laying on a chaise lounge by the pool, with my legs perpetually open to a parade of cocks—and not thinking a bit of anything but the pleasure of being wanted by beautiful men, one after the other, with hard, muscled bodies and a goal of the perpetual orgasm.
Particularly perplexing to me now, decades later, with all that has happened in my life and the trending of societal attitudes and medical reality, is how easy it was for me to accept the dripping cock of one man to be immediately replaced by the hopeful hardness of that of another one—as long as both men were beautiful and hardbodied and said they wanted me . . . extending sometimes to the third and the forth cock. The thought of life-threatening disease wasn't even an issue then, as AIDS was a reality for the future, not for that present. Ironically enough, I once again was living—and fucking indiscriminately—in Bangkok in the mid 1980s, when the reality of AIDS did thunder in—and it coldcocked much of the freewheeling rolling sex party atmosphere of the city's expatriate gay male community. But not at the time I am speaking of here, the mid-1970s.
When I look for explanations for my own behavior, I see my narcissism as a dominant factor—more than the physical pleasure of melding with a beautiful body, being closely embraced by hard muscle, and feeling a hard cock churning in my gut, the explosive release of my own building orgasm and the jerk and spout and flow of hot cum inside me, again and again. But what motivated me most was the emotional pleasure of knowing that someone worshipped my body and wanted to possess it fully, was willing to surrender their manliness and the control of their desires to the squeezing of my channel muscles. It was at the height of my partner's impassioned, uncontrolled drive that I felt the most powerful—when they couldn't stop even if they wanted to. This was why it was sometimes the rough, dominating sex that made me soar the highest—the man wanted me so badly he was lost in his primeval lustings. It wasn't him in control; it was me—and my beautiful body. Pure narcissism.
And the thrill of partners in quick succession? To see the look in the eyes of the man standing behind the man then plowing me—and to the man standing next to him—to see the want and impatience of them, the way they couldn't keep their hands off their own cocks and how hard their cocks were getting—in anticipation of me, of being inside me, of having their turn at doing to me what someone else was then doing. To see how they couldn't keep their eyes off me. The enjoyment of the assessing of their individual attributes, an unusually muscled chest here with prominent nipples, a riot-of-color tattoo there. A flaming red bush, ebony skin next to alabaster, unusually beefy hands, black, curly chest hair in an arousing pattern, a short but thick cock, an unusually long one, low-hanging balls the size of ping-pong balls, a crook on a cock that had me wondering whether it would be felt differently inside me, an "oh my god" thick cock ring. All of these observations, even while I was arching my back and the lover of the moment was thrusting, thrusting, thrusting hard inside me and sucking on my nipple, made the multiple partners, in succession, hot, and a desirable goal in the atmosphere of gay Bangkok in the mid-1970s.
There were only a few Caucasian men in the city who would go on a string—that's what we called taking one guy after another in a session. Mostly young Thai men did this—and usually effeminate ones. Thanks to the conditioning of the Indian doctor, I was an American who, under controlled circumstances, would do so. And most who flocked to me said they appreciated that I wasn't limp wristed and affecting the pretense of being female. The same men who fucked me in succession on lounge beds by the pool on a Friday night were battling with me on the tennis court or soccer field on Saturday afternoon and receiving as good as they got.
* * * *
Rodney—insisting to go by Rod—was a Marine guard at the embassy. I passed him there, standing guard in the embassy's foyer, a couple of times a week. But where I knew him from was as someone else who played tennis on Saturday mornings and afternoons with me, some other embassy men, and high-ranking Thai military officers at the Thai Military Academy compound adjacent to the American embassy complex on Wireless Road. We played in that venue as much for the business of diplomacy and intelligence gathering—the contact with high-ranking military officers in a nation that was having a military coup every two years or so—as for the exercise. The exercise was good, though. The Bangkok climate is sweltering hot. We'd go through a couple of two-liter bottles of Coke each during the three or four hours we were at it. The fat would boil off of us and flow away in the sweat. Everyone who participated was hardbodied; most of them were beautiful to boot—or, which was fine with me, arousing in their confident, domineering thuggishness.
We played shirtless and in skimpy shorts that quickly became sweat soaked and clingy. You couldn't be on a tennis court for very long in the Bangkok sun without everyone knowing what you were packing. And most who played at the Thai Military Academy on those Saturdays were interested in what others were packing.
I liked the way Rod looked. He obviously liked the way I looked too, as he propositioned me. Pretty straightforward and bald about it, he was, which I learned was a trademark of his. He thought the world of himself, of his own looks, and he assumed everyone else did too. He was fucking one of the Thai colonels there. Neither of them made much of a secret of it. This was Bangkok in the mid-1970s. Thai men tended to be at least bi, taking their pleasures where they could get them. The colonel had propositioned me, too, but was disappointed to learn that I wanted my sex the same way he did. I didn't tell my embassy mentors of this proposition, as the colonel was so well positioned in the Thai military hierarchy that they would have wanted to me somehow accept his proposition and do what pleased him to establish the contact. My supervisors didn't mind my activities as long as they served their needs when they saw the need.