Accidental Daddy

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I wasn’t looking to dominate anyone; I wasn’t even looking for a boy. The accidental part of becoming a Daddy is kind of funny: My husband found my first one for me.

From 2013 to 2019, I was Daddy to two collared boys. I performed this role until my husband and I moved to Spain, and I’m still in touch with one of them. Yes, I’m still his Daddy, and he is still my boy. The bond is real, but for many years I was walking a dark parallel path to the exhilaration of my BDSM/polyamorous relationships.

One boy was 21 when we met, and the other was 34. They were adults looking for a kinky, filthy-mouthed older top; I was looking for a long-term arrangement with a submissive bottom who was eager to receive everything I gave him—pleasure or punishment.

Let me be clear: BDSM, power play, and any other consensual sexual activity between adults isn’t shameful or wrong. Nor are drugs and alcohol a prerequisite for power play and other kinks; many sober people happily participate substance free.

This is only my own story. For me, being a Daddy became a “fake it ‘til you make it” performance I hoped would quiet the chronic anxiety and self-esteem issues I had tried but never managed to overcome with medication (self- and prescribed), therapy and countless other self-help strategies.

In my debut novel, Lamb, which borrows heavily from my own emotional landscape, two teenage boys explore sex for the first time in the 1980s. They’re friends, but in a kinder world, they would almost certainly have been more. Neither knows how to ask for what they want.

“Even when you are naked in the dark, you hold back. He wants to go further. One time he crawls on top of your back and starts to push himself inside you. It hurts so bad you yelp. He stops. You don’t know how to say slower or gentler. Words aren’t easy. You go back to hands, and you let him suck you but you can’t wrap your head around doing the same thing for him. He doesn’t ask.”

In this book and in my recently published second, Waterspout, I deal with the great struggle of my own and many men’s lives: Raised without a vocabulary for intimacy, tenderness, and sensuality, shame sometimes rushes in to fill that silence. For me, learning how to understand and talk about my feelings requires actively disregarding decades of programming from society at large, my family, and also some of the most visible elements of queer culture.

The pressure to be a muscled, gruff, cocky, and pugnacious fantasy man is a strikingly dominant visual image to gay and straight men alike, echoed in gay culture and a wider media pantheon staffed with stunt doubles and fitness trainers. In the same way that drag queens can’t just be women but must be Stars, men can’t just be men, they must be Heroes. And much like a worship-economy that holds up super-models, Kardashians and plastic surgeons as guides for beauty and self-esteem, men are alternately lauded and shamed into painting ourselves as caricatures of manhood.

Years before, when I was still single, I discovered that changing my body changed the way the world responded to me. When I lost weight and packed on muscle, men who had once overlooked me suddenly sought me out. Before, I’d drifted through bars and clubs hoping someone might notice me while rarely feeling confident enough to make the first move myself. Small talk felt forced; I couldn’t find the words.

More often than not, I went home alone. I understand now that part of that hesitation also came from something that resembles demisexuality, needing an emotional connection to feel attracted to someone. Anonymous hookups never interested me much. I needed familiarity before my nervous system could settle enough for my guard to come down. Crowds and strangers often left me in a diffuse, dissociative state, unable to articulate much even with the lubrication of a growing dependence on alcohol.

But muscles solved that problem—or so it seemed. For the first time, I felt visible. The attention was intoxicating. So was the illusion that I had finally escaped my anxiety, and that I didn’t need words to make connections. I met my husband in 1999—at the gym. The first time he laid eyes on me, I was naked in the locker room, no words required.

But the problem started long before that. When I was 20, I told my mother I was gay a few weeks before I told my father, and both, separately, gave the exact same reply: “So what?”

Never outwardly affectionate to begin with, it was their shared, curt acknowledgement that their feelings toward me hadn’t changed. They weren’t going to make a big deal out of it, case closed, end of story. Both conversations were pointedly brief. But over the weeks and years afterward, it became obvious they weren’t cool with my being gay at all, that I needed to meet certain conditions to sustain the peace of our relationship.

First and foremost, I must never talk about homosexuality. What I did with my privates was none of their business, no thank you—never mind that being queer is so much more than who (and what) we do. The ick-factor tainted for them even the slightest reference to my “choice.” Fears for my future? HIV scares? Finding love? You’re on your own, kiddo.

Then, in 2007, my father died. He and I weren’t especially close, though we both had shown that we cared about each other in a thousand ways. We just didn’t know how to talk, and we often clashed over his conservative Republican values and ties to the military in terse, truncated arguments. We disconnected over his love of sports, and my complete lack of interest in them. We had nothing to talk about, so we stopped even trying.

After he died, I went into a tailspin. I was crushed that the closer relationship I wanted with him was now impossible, and my debilitating chronic anxiety led to a cocktail of prescription drugs. I’d been in therapy for four years, but was also smoking weed every day and often went to my sessions high.

The next year, I told my therapist I was ending therapy. I had been bemoaning to him for years that I wanted my “day in the sun”—to experience a period of time without the crushing doubt, to feel free, empowered, and happy for once in my life. I was approaching 40—if not now, when? Five years of therapy was enough, and the prescriptions and substances had quieted my anxiety to the point of anesthetization.

My husband and I had dabbled in non-monogamy for several years before the idea of having a “boy” even occurred to me. Though I had made it clear when we first got together that I was interested in kink, I wasn’t able to articulate and negotiate my needs with him—we were not perfectly aligned in our tastes. Following his lead, I began searching for an arrangement that let me play my way.

In 2012, we attended Lazy Bear Week in Guerneville. He knew I had been struggling to find a connection through the impersonal grid of Grindr and Growlr. I wasn’t a rapacious dom prowling for conquests, but an overly analytical and self-conscious thrill seeker with a wild streak. He noticed a young man I’d been quietly watching from afar and, with considerably more assertiveness than I would have demonstrated, pushed us together.

It didn’t last long, but it introduced me to a role I hadn’t imagined for myself. Within a year, I had found two more boys, and in what felt like a declaration of dominance, I told both I wouldn’t choose between them. If they wore my collar—one of those thick chain necklaces with a padlock you’ve probably noticed a few men wearing—they could each have only one Daddy, but I would have as many boys as I wanted. They both accepted.

For years, I alternated between my boys, usually weekly, with other regular but uncollared boys in between. Play dates became my weekend routine. Curiosities were explored, boundaries pushed; feelings developed, changed, and evolved.

“Too many words,” was my terse warning to the chattier boy when he got to blabbing. I thought I’d finally become the man I’d always wanted to be, ignoring the fact that while I felt fulfilled sexually, every play date was soaked in substances.

Gratification had arrived in full force, but the exhilaration and freedom I sought were always just out of reach. Smoking weed daily for 16 years had raised my tolerance and dulled its ability to quiet my anxious brain. I drank massive quantities of beer, smoked and chewed tobacco, and heavy poppers use led to chronic asthma. I was going through an albuterol inhaler every month and one night ended up in the emergency room with a severe asthma attack.

I was lucky: I never got into the hard-core chem sex of the PNP crowd with its crystal meth, ketamine, and GHB. Read Jason Yamas’s Tweakerworld memoir if you want a hair-raising account of just how bad it can get. I’d steered clear of meth early on in my clubbing days when several friends took a dark turn, and I never encountered it again until we moved in 2019 to Barcelona, where smoking meth is rampant.

By the end, having said goodbye to my boys, but finding the new hook-up culture in Spain edgier than I was used to, I was mostly just drinking heavily on my own. On the night of November 9, 2021, I woke from a blackout lying on a beach in Sitges, the waves of the incoming tide washing over me. My husband delivered an ultimatum that morning, and I realized in a flash just how much I had to lose.

I am grateful I got sober. I may roll my eyes sometimes at the AA patter and slogans, but the program and fellowship has supported enormously. I also finally found a therapist who helped me learn to lean into a wider spectrum of emotions than a chase for euphoria.

Today, I’m a work in progress. The unspoken bravado and sexual shorthand of power play failed me, and I still struggle with intimacy and the words that go with it. I’m most comfortable expressing myself in writing—the page allows me to clarify and revise what real life rarely does. And it is slowly leading me to what I really needed all along: a love language for myself and partners that leads to more connection and emotional depth.