The Pleasure Index, Cont'd

Here are a few of my other favourite things from this year that I can't believe I omitted from the first list.

Modern Family. When I first saw the ads for this mockumentary comedy, I cringed. Here we go again, I thought. Another ham-fisted American attempt to pigeonhole characters into sexual stereotypes. I watched it and loved it. Cameron and Mitchell, the gay characters, do fulfil some cliches - they live a cloying modern lifestyle, in a committed relationship with their adopted baby. But who cares? They are also hilarious, as is just about every other character on the show, from the patriarch's exuberant and much younger second wife Gloria, to her wise-cracking son, to the more conventional nuclear family of Phil, Claire and their three kids, who are just as dysfunctional. What I love about Modern Family is that for all its "wacky" genre tropes, the way in which everybody interacts is incredibly realistic.

This Rolling Stone cover: How on earth did I forget this? Sookie, Bill and Eric, naked and drenched in blood. It sums up everything that is great about True Blood - gratuitous sex and violence. I have often joked that this show is good porn with a good story. Which is why I can't praise it enough. For something to be as sexually provocative as it is satisfying in terms of character and plot is a huge achievement for any writer. Which leads me to my next item...

"Sweet Tooth" by Philip Ellis. A friend recommended this ebook of short stories to me, and I sped through it. These pieces range from short and sweet pieces such as Nine Lives, in which a cat and dog reminisce about the good old days, to much more adult fare, like Toffee, a cautionary tale about talking to strangers, and The Girlfriend, a funnier tale about a man and his imaginary fancy woman. My personal favourite was Black Rabbit, which is told from the perspective of a magician's assistant who finds herself replaced by a younger model.

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Glee, Season 2. Gwyneth Paltrow singing Cee-Lo Green. I was so baffled and charmed I fell over.

Jemima Valentino. A writer I stumbled across on the Twittersphere who I can genuinely say is very talented. The first story of hers that I read, "Broken", sent shivers down my spine. She keeps teasing me with suggestions that a novel may be on the cards in the New Year. I live in hope. You can follow Jemima at http://jemimavalentino.blogspot.com - I would recommend spending a little time in her virtual company.

And there we have it, folks. My entire year, condensed into a blog post and a half. I've excluded some of my favourite episodes as they are quite graphic and will probably work their way into my Little Black Blog sometime in the New Year in the form of "Red Shoe Diaries"-style vignettes.

In the meantime, have yourselves a merry little Christmas. Make the Yuletide gay. That pun is so obvious I won't even make it rude for you.

J. x

The Pleasure Index

December really does seem to be a month of lists. Shopping lists, to-do lists, wish lists... I'm a huge fan of The Huffington Post, and all month the majority of their content, particularly in the Books section, seems to be countdowns and best-of lists. What's been this year's greatest novel, who are the top ten writers of the decade, and who will take the title of biggest publishing story since the Millennium: will it be Twilight, Harry Potter, eBooks, or those cheeky fraudsters JT Leroy and James Frey?

So I've put together a list of my own. Be it literary, musical, visual or sensual, here are the things that made me happy in 2010.

"Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry. I was a fan of hers already, but this love letter to youth and optimism makes me smile every time I hear it. The pitch-perfect (and shamelessly autotuned) boyband version in Glee also makes me weak at the knees.

Hurts. The musical partnership burst onto the scene this Spring with their New Romantic throwback hit, "Better Than Love". A few months later I invested in their album, Happiness, and was swept away. Every song on this record has epic scope, spinning tales of broken hearts, personal tragedies and fragments of hope. Highlights include "Devotion" featuring Kylie Minogue, "Stay" and "Evelyn". This album was the soundtrack to me falling in love this year, and getting my heart trodden on.

Twitter. I joined this month out of boredom and curiosity. So far, I have the impression of it being a kind of Facebook for celebrities, spammers and perverts of a very particular sort (they like to post 'twitpics' of their own naked parts). A constant source of amusement.

First dates. I've had a lot this year, as part of my resolution was to get "out there". I became something of a dating machine, and may well have got hooked on that feeling you have about half an hour before you meet someone; the butterflies, the hopes, the shiver of lust.

"My Horizontal Life" by Chelsea Handler. Never before has the written word had me in fits of giggles. I'd not heard of Chelsea before she hosted the VMAs this year, but she seems to have become ubiquitous since then, gaining particular notoriety for her choice words against Angelina Jolie. I have nothing against Ange, but I'm not sure she could sit down and write a memoir as searingly funny as this, without a single note of pretension.

Bulgaria. This is where I learned that skinny-dipping at sunrise is an effective preventative measure against hangovers.

True Blood, Season Three. The loveable, if daftly named Sookie Stackhouse returned to my screen and my heart this summer, bringing her impossibly sexy co-stars with her. This was the year that everybody began to doubt vampire Bill's devotion to Sook, which meant that his tall, blond, Scandinavian rival Eric got more screen time. Yay! We also got werewolves this year - naked ones. And Sam showed a darker, manlier side. Not to mention the actual storylines, which revolved around a centuries-old vendetta and Sookie finally discovering the source of her unusual powers. All in all, I am physically on tenterhooks until the guys, gals and gays of Bon Temps return for Season Four in 2011.

Thai food. I overdosed on conventional curry while staying in India this Autumn, but can't get enough of this lighter, fresher tasting cuisine. A Thai green curry is even simple enough for novices to make - perfect.

The bookstall on my local market. I am a sucker for a deal, and with each almost-new paperback averaging around two pounds each, I easily became addicted. Some great finds this year included Out by Natsuo Kirino, a Japanese thriller, Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland, an existential soap opera, and Summer Crossing by Truman Capote, a slim novel which holds the seeds of Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Vodka. Has never let me down, and never will.

Heartbreaker. A French comedy about the art of seduction. I watched it on a plane, after a day and night of sleep deprevation, and it still impressed me.

The Taj Mahal. I expected to be underwhelmed. I anticipated an anticlimax. I have never been more happy to be proven wrong. In fact, my entire Indian experience was one great pleasure, if you exclude the cursed gifts which I have mentioned in a previous post. My best friend and I were in Rajasthan a mere week before Russell Brand and Katy Perry visited. Always nice to be able to say we did it first.

Ke$ha. It's not often that I find myself wishing a celebrity was my friend. Next to this wonderful woman, my own antics would appear self-contained and conservative. Her songs are pretty good too.

Guilty Pleasure Reads - December 2010

I've been revisiting some of my teen favourites this month. For a lot of people, that may mean returning to Hogwarts, or Narnia. For me, it means falling back in love with Steve and Ghost, the best friends, lovers and rock stars from the weird and wonderful Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite.

A vampire story in part, Lost Souls tells of how a young girl is impregnated by a bloodsucker. She does not survive the pregnancy, and her half-breed child, christened Nothing, is left with a human family in the heartland of America, to grow up ignorant of his origins. Luckily, this grim beginning gives way to a colourful opus of blood-drenched Americana. Nothing runs away from home, hitches

a ride with a van full of vamps (unaware that one of them is his father), and together they go on a road trip to Missing Mile, North Carolina, which is the hometown of Nothing's favourite band, Lost Souls. The Lost Souls musicians are dealing with their own complicated problems - Steve loves to hate his ex-girlfriend Ann, and Ghost, his best friend, is cursed to hear the thoughts and dream the nightmares of those closest to him.

Events spiral out of control, Ann joins the vampires on their hedonistic voyage, and Steve and Ghost must pursue them to New Orleans for a deadly showdown. I cannot even begin to describe how good this book is, nor how it made me feel. A complete antidote to more modern teen vampire tales such as Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, Poppy Z. Brite's world is one of isolation, of bitterness and longing. Even the most human of the characters have demons, but what I love about Brite's prose is that even in the midst of death and destruction, you just know she is having the most wicked fun.

Her follow up horror novel, Drawing Blood, brings the reader back to Missing Mile. A young man fresh from social care returns to the house where his father killed his entire family, and there he crosses paths with a criminal on the run. Naturally, they fall in love, and together face the spectres from their pasts.

Perhaps the most extreme of Brite's books is Exquisite Corpse, in which two serial killers meet by chance on a hot New Orleans night, and realise they may be soulmates. They join forces to find the perfect prey, and then conspire to commit the perfect murder...

Gruesome, unsettling fare, the lot of it. And when I was fifteen, I couldn't get enough of it. I will never throw these three paperbacks away, because even the quickest flick through their pages takes me back to the first time I ever read those words, met those characters, and realised that I too could be controversial, provocative, sensational. Who knows what I might have been, had I not read those books. But I thank the Lord and Poppy Z. Brite that I did!

J. x

Life on Venus

I sometimes think the Midlands is a boring place to live, but then I get propositioned by a transvestite and I have to reassess the way I see the world.

For a moment, I considered it. I mean, it was a man, dressed as a woman, but it would still be a man, so I wouldn't be betraying myself or my sexual orientation. That logic made sense in my head. Unfortunately this particular cross-dresser was not a Sweet Transvestite in the vein of Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Show. But still, a part of me was curious. Would I get a funny story out of it? Yes, certainly. Would it be worth it? Perhaps not.

But I have always seen myself, a little conceitedly, as a very sexual being. Who cares who's going down on you, a voice in my head says, as long as they're doing it right!

I'm open minded. I watch a lot of freaky porn. So I said yes. This is it, my inner hedonist cried, you are about to cross your greatest taboo yet. You will soon know what it means to be free and uninhibited by society's sexual dogma.

Then I looked down. He/she was wearing ugly, sensible shoes. Thick, hairy legs were visible through laddered stockings. Their satin dress bulged and stretched unflatteringly, and a monobrow peered out at me from beneath a heavily fringed wig which looked like it had originally belonged to Lady Gaga. And I realised; this wasn't erotic, or liberating. It was sad and a tiny bit grotesque.

I backtracked so quickly I gave myself whiplash.

J.x

The elephant in the room

I'm starting to believe in curses, and here's why.

I recently went on a trip to India. It was an adventure, an eye-opener and all-in-all a rather great experience. My old pal Z joined me, fresh from a month in Kenya, and as I flew back to London, it was with a pang of envy; she was moving on to Thailand. But I digress.

I brought back some gifts for my friends and family, and among them were three small wooden elephants, all from a tiny shop in one of Jaipur's many bazaars. I'd haggled shamelessly with the shopkeeper and got them for a steal - looking back, I suspect he may have wrought some kind of supernatural revenge.

The first carving, I gave to the man I was seeing at the time. While I was away, he'd moved into his new place a few neighbourhoods over from my own, so I gave him the elephant as a housewarming present. The second elephant I gave to Al and Kay, a lovely couple that I've known for years. And I gave the third to my good friend Cleo, who had just moved in with her boyfriend.

The mojo took a few days to work. I spent some time with my man, happy to be home and even happier that he was now living so close. Then, one rather chilly Tuesday, an innocent conversation turned serious. We had a difference of opinion. The conversation went on, and ultimately we decided we weren't right for each other. I brushed it off as best I could, and chalked it down to experience.

The next week, I got a call from Al. Kay had left him, after two and a half years, with no explanation other than he didn't love him anymore. Al was devastated, and my heart went out to him. A part of me couldn't help feeling the slightest bit culpable - after all, all had been well in our love lives until I brought those little wooden elephants back from India...

That was a few months ago. Now I hear that Cleo and her boyfriend are fighting. I'm usually a very rational person, but under the circumstances, I've advised her to burn the gift I gave them.

Harlot's Web

I made a joke earlier today about how online dating is like looking for a job. I then followed this up with a comment about online dating being for losers... until I realised that I fall into that category.

For some reason, I've never seen myself as the looking for love type. The online dating websites that I see all over the telly - Match.com, eHarmony - seem completely separate from the kind of sites that I've been frequenting since I was a teenager - namely, Gaydar and Fitlads.

These are pick-up sites for gay men, who let's face it, have a very different approach to "dating". If a woman were to sign up for a site like this, she may well be shocked to be asked questions about the size of her vagina and how open she is to the idea of anal. Gay men exchange photos of their genitals before they do phone numbers. Internet dating may have been conceived as a fairy tale for the modern age, but when it comes to my experience of this particular corner of the web, there has always been a distinct lack of romance.

I was fifteen when I first met up with somebody from the Internet. It was eight years ago, but the media was already abuzz with talk of online predators. It added an element of risk to what I was doing, a cheeky thrill, that made me even more determined to see what the big deal was.

The whole experience was rather awkward, for a number of reasons. I had, of course, lied and said I was older, and my age, nerves and false bravado had failed to prepared me for the very adult expectations that come with that kind of meeting. I went home later that night feeling ashamed and slightly exhilarated. It was a very rude awakening to the kind of life that a lot of men lead, and after allowing myself a few more years to grow up a little, it was a world I re-entered with a much healthier and more mature attitude.

The Internet is invaluable to a lot of gay men. If you live in a small town, what is the likelihood of bumping into Mr Right in the supermarket? Or, you could live in a vibrant city, and detest the gay scene. Have you ever, like me, felt a pang of jealousy at the ease with which your straight friends can meet people spontaneously, fall in love, break up and start all over again, simply because it's all there right in front of them?

Sure, there's a lot of sleaze out there. I choose to find the humour in it rather than let it enrage my inner Puritan. Just as the Internet's primary use seems to be for porn, so gay dating sites are for sex. It's just one of those things. I've enjoyed it at times, and hated it at others. But I don't think it's going to change any time soon.

The world of mainstream online dating isn't just for perverts anymore. My own mother met her current fiance on the Internet. She likes to think of herself as something of a pioneer, as she met her previous husband through a dating agency in the very early Nineties, back when it was a bit racy. Nowadays, dating agencies are a thriving industry and looking for love (or sex) online no longer carries a stigma.

Which is something of a shame, as I always enjoy doing something more when I feel like I shouldn't.

J. x

Have You Heard?

Amber Heard, the foxy nymphet from stoner flick Pineapple Express and this year's creepy comedy The Joneses, has come out as gay. I called it! No girl that hot or that clever could ever be straight. She reportedly told the media: "I personally think that if you deny something or if you hide something you're inadvertently admitting it's wrong. I don't feel like I'm wrong." Well said, Amber. I can't imagine the number of hipsters crying into their pillows tonight...

In which I learn the meaning of NSFW

Twitter has become my latest obsession. I joined a whole three days ago, around the same time as I started this blog, and it is a source of constant fascination, amusement, and morbid curiosity. What kind of magic is this, I find myself thinking, that one gets to practically spy on willing figures such as Stephen Fry, Russell Brand, Joss Whedon, and of course Snooki from Jersey Shore?

I soon learned that Twitter is also a devil's playground when it comes to the original and truest purpose of the internet - porn. People, you can follow adult film stars. Voyeuristic thrills abound.

And it's something of a pick-up ground. Within minutes of joining Twitter, I was "followed" by several exotic sounding women, none of whom had a single tweet to their name. Prostitutes, I would imagine. And there also seems to be a thriving, incestuous community of gay men. Needless to say, I was in my element.

This afternoon, I decided to avoid my work for a little while and indulge in a little harmless surfing. I was browsing one particularly attractive gentleman's Twitter feed, and followed a link he had posted to one of his TwitPics, unaware of what the #NSFW warning might refer to. Seconds later, a window opened with a close up of this lad's newly waxed anus. It was a very nice anus, I must admit, but I think I pulled a muscle in my hand trying to click the X button before anybody in the office could turn around and see what had made me audibly gasp. I then hastily Googled the term NSFW, only to find that it stands for "Not Safe For Work".

Better late than never.

Go hard or go home

So we had our work Christmas party the other night. And I was put in charge of organising it. Now, when it comes to parties I'm your guy, if you want to wake up in Scotland married to your dog. I wasn't entirely sure what my boss wanted when he gave me a budget and just said "go for it". So I went for something vaguely sophisticated; a three course meal at a posh local hotel, followed by a disco.

It began well. The entire workforce turned up, dressed snazzily as requested, and we were seated for a delicious meal. Where we fell down, however, was when my boss told the waiter that I was the organiser and therefore the wine list was to be handed to me.

I'm not a big wine drinker. It messes with my head. With beer and spirits, I know where I am. But it was a special occasion, so I ordered three bottles each of the house white and house red. These were promptly decimated, so I ordered another six bottles. Then another six. And so on. I realised at some point that about half of the people there weren't drinking, as they had to drive home. I looked around, and all of the wine bottles seemed to be on the table, in front of me and my other twentysomething colleagues. And it occurred to me that I was very, very drunk.

I've never gone into work on a Monday morning with such a mix of fear and excitement. Will the boss remember our dance off? Will he remember that I won? And does everybody else remember how the night ended?

Myself and about four others were holding up the bar, with another hour to go before our taxi showed up. One of the new guys, a self-professed lad, was catcalling suggestively at a cougar in a blue dress. "Blue dress! Blue dress!" He hollered. I decided this was fun, and joined in.

"Blue dress! You filthy slag!" Time stood still. Then Blue Dress's husband was towering over me, and I knew we had to get out of there.

Which is how we ended up waiting an hour for our taxi outside, in the snow, swigging from a bottle of red wine that a colleague had smuggled out in his coat. We took turns doing roly-poly's in the road, waving and making other gestures at passing cars, and generally acting like a bunch of louts. The cab eventually picked us up, and the others started giving the driver directions to their homes.

"No fucking way," I bellowed. "We're going to a club."

Work was interesting today. The boss did remember our dancing, although he seems to think he's got more game than me. I've allowed him to continue believing this. The others have laughed off our hour-long sojourn in the snow, in the small hours of the morning. It's been deemed, all in all, our best office party yet. Although I'm not sure I'll be given control of proceedings next year.

And we certainly won't be welcome at the hotel.

J. x

Suck My Blog

Well, there goes my blog virginity. I'm running out of V-plates and fast!

So what's happening on the big wide blogosphere? Be honest people, how many of you are sat hunched over your screen, typing one handed while pleasuring yourself to photos of Robert Pattinson or a pre-jail Lindsay Lohan? I won't judge.

I suppose I should introduce myself. My name's Johnny Hudson, alternately JayJay, J-Dogg, Rubber Johnny. I'm twenty-three and work in marketing. I'm a big believer in living life to the fullest, whether that entails doing a tandem skydive with your best mate, shagging your way through your entire hometown or partying so hard that Ke$ha is forced to write a song about you.

One thing you might want to know, is that I'm a boy who likes boys. A lot. A fair number of my stories revolve around my sex life, which is colourful to say the least. I've started this blog in the hopes that some of my mistakes can become a learning experience for others, but if you're the kind of person that takes offense to man love, then feel free to wander off. Or stay, your choice. You never know, you might see something you like.

So I'll be posting soon. See you there? There will be vodka.

Oh, and Ke$ha - call me.

J. x