When it comes to taking on projects, I tend to focus on what is either going to give me a good grade or on what is pazing the bills. The217 does neither of these, but I really do enjoy blogging. The only issue is that it’s a lot easier to write sporadic thoughts than it is to write the things I have done heavier research on. What I’m getting at is, I’m finally taking the time to write about those fucking frat boys.

Many moons ago I conducted interviews with several frat bros here at U of I. Some of them currently go to school here and some are alumni. Today, my friends, is the day where you can start hearing their stories. Names of both people and of frats will remain anonymous.

Without any further adieu:

Gay Frat Boys and the Tongue that Loves Them: Ron

Our story starts with Ron, a cute guy who I met up with at Legends over a beer. Well, I was only 20 at the time, so I just had a Pepsi (gross I know) but the sentiment was there.

Ron is currently a grad student here at U of I and completed his undergrad here, too. During his undergrad he was a member of, as he put it, “one of the top 6 frats here on campus.” Against labels, he could see himself being with a guy or a girl. Though he considers himself out of the closet, he is not out to his family or some of his best friends, saying that such an announcement would be inappropriate.

We talked quite a bit about his experience as an undergrad. Ron was no stranger to cliché hookups. Ron got trashed at a barn dance and went back to the frat house with a buddy. Ron passed out in his bed and woke up to his friend feeling him up. Ron decided to just roll with it and started to experience what he referred to as closet “bedding.” He never had a relationship with anyone during his undergrad, but he did have 2 regulars who were good for 2 AM drunk dials. Once he got caught hooking up with a guy in an academic building, which just made the experience hotter. But, being gay in a frat isn’t all about fucking (who would have thought?).

When asked why he didn’t come out during his undergrad, he replied that a lot of it dealt with indifference mixed with insecurity. Not only that, but his major left him constantly busy and there wasn’t really time to worry about whether or not he should be out. A final factor was that coming out as bisexual (or whatever you wish to call it) could potentially limit the amount of action he would get from girls. Guys tend to love the idea of dating a girl who has gotten with another chick, but unfortunately the sentiment isn’t often returned when it comes to guys messing around with other guys. He had been in relationships with women before and he did not want them to think that their relationships were lies. He was very adamant about expressing how much he did care about these girls and that by no means were they just a tool for hiding his sexuality.

When it comes to pledging a frat, Ron insisted that you be in the closet while doing so, otherwise you’ll be bonged. Bonging, for those of you not up on your frat boy lexicon, means that you’ll be kicked out of the pledge race. Ron says that pledging was both the best and worst part of his life, “an emotional rollercoaster where I would at one point be dying laughing and the next minute I’m fearing for my life.” Hazing is simply ritualistic with fraternities, much like in sports or the military.

When asked what happens if you come out after getting into a frat, Ron said, “After being initiated, a frat cannot really deactivate you, but you’re an idiot if you think nothing changes. Your frat may vary. Some guys are accepted whole-heartedly and others are simply alienated. Naiveté says it is physically safe to be out. In my experience there weren’t any physical bad happenings. Alienation was the most common form of homophobia.”

I asked Ron about other forms of homophobia within a frat, and he said that words like “faggot” or terms like “that’s so gay” are extremely prevalent. Once he witnessed guys throwing bricks at a frat house and shouting “faggots!” but these guys weren’t even in a frat themselves.

When it comes to dancing with guys, Ron says that you can definitely do that anywhere, including at a frat party, but you better be able to deal with the judgment. “There was never a single instance where I felt defenseless.”

One thing I have personally witnessed when it comes to dating guys who are heavy into sports or are in frats is that they act differently with their straight friends than they do with their gay friends, so I asked Ron if he noticed any of these characteristics in himself.

“I don’t necessarily act differently with gay guys and girls than straight guys, but I’m guilty of sometimes playing it up with gay guys, usually just for the sake of the joke. I need to be able to keep up with gay guys.”

He still hangs out with the same friends now as he did before he was out, but admittedly has been to C St. a bit more often.

“I’m too into this campus to be limited to one niche. I was an RA, a TA, in a frat, in a choir, the president of an RSO. I can be friends with just about anyone and am able to always find something in common. It’s called having people skills.”

One thing Ron wanted me to make sure I got across was that homosexuality is not a taboo topic and that frat guys are indeed able to hold discussions about things other than just Keystone. Homosexuality as a topic is not taboo, and politics are talked about to death. Being in a frat is about building brother-like friendships, and whether or not you will be accepted depends on your own level of confidence and your ability to form friendships, “If you feel you’re surrounded by people who aren’t going to accept you, pledge a different frat.”

When it comes to being gay in a frat, “I’m for it. Be an example that it’s possible. But you really have to have the people skills.”

One of the last things we talked about over our beer and Pepsi (fucking disgusting, I know) was what advice he would offer to a gay guy who is in the closet and in a frat.

“Come out whenever you want to. Don’t feel pressured to come out. If your friends do care in a negative way, they were never your friends in the first place. Friendships are not and should not be conditional to you. Coming out doesn’t have to be a big announcement. You can come out with your own subtleties. Also, ask yourself if being yourself is more or less important than what people think of you. You’ll live a miserable life if you care about the latter. But, it really was exciting and hot being in the closet for a while. It’s so hot that no one else could know it was going on.”

Now, it’s important to note that Ron is one of many different gay guys out there on campus. These are only the opinions and experiences of one guy. I’ll be posting more interviews over the next few days (don’t worry, they’re already written and you won’t have to wait 6 months to read them) and each guy is different from the last. Though Ron was ultimately able to be himself, it’s not the case with every guy in a frat who messes around with other guys.

More to come in the next few days.

First and foremost, I finally decided to finish writing The Frat Boy Diaries, that little set of interviews I did back first semester with seven University of Illinois frat boys. They will be released one at a time every other day starting this coming Monday, so if you’re interested in seeing what the guys had to say, check back Monday. In the meantime, I’m going to tell you the story of my first blowjob and the nickname I got that tormented me for years.

The first time I got head I was in a forest preserve about a mile away from my house in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. I was 15 years old and was seeing a 21-year-old guy who we’ll call Pedo Pete. At the time, I thought it was perfectly rational for this 21 year old who was still living with his parents to be interested in a then-high school sophomore with dyed black hair and a mouth full of metal. I knew there must have been something wrong with the guy, but I was a horny teenager and the dude was hot. Spiky blonde hair and blue eyes like fuckin’ crystal. Gorgeous.

We were going for a walk in this forest preserve when he asked if I wanted to wander off the beaten path. I knew where this was going and I quickly agreed to follow him. The sun was shining and we found a secluded area where he started to make out with me. He pulled my pants down and had me lay down in the dirt. I started to get head for the first time, and since I was so nervous I wasn’t able to cum. I tried to give him head too, all the while trying to pick up a few tips and tricks of the trade. He didn’t cum either, and thank god for that.

On the way back to his car he mentioned the hair I had in between my ass cheeks, promptly giving me the new nickname of HAC, or Hairy Ass Crack. I was 15, I had just started becoming sexually active, and since puberty hit me so quickly, I didn’t even realize that my ass did indeed have hair on it. It was pointed out to me, I was given the name HAC by the guy I was seeing (we won’t even pretend to call it dating) and I became more self-conscious and awkward than I already was. What made it worse was how he told me I should go buy a disposable razor and bend down a certain way in the shower to get rid of all of it.

Over the years I have come to realize that most, if not all, men have hair on their ass. Some have more than others, some care, and some don’t. What I wish I could have realized about Pedo Pete was that he probably wanted me shaved so I could further fulfill his desires of having a young boy, and not that I was physically inadequate.

I have wanted to talk about body hair for a while, and after divulging this secret story to someone this morning, I decided that there’s really no better introduction to the topic than my own embarrassing story.

I did end up buying that disposable razor and crouching down exactly the way Pete had told me to. Every time I noticed hair growing back I would get down there and go at it again. Every once in a while this would result in cuts in the most horrible of places, places I would rather you just imagine on your own rather than going into detail about them.

Body hair, however, should not have been something to feel ashamed of. Hair helps us define who we are. Long hair vs. short hair, red heads vs. blondes, spiky hair vs. long flowing hair vs. a shaved head. And that’s just the hair on your head.

I feel that men are judged, heterosexual homosexual or whatever, depending on what their body hair situation is. I know a lot of gay guys who shave their chests so they can give off that smooth model-esque look. If you shave your chest, what little abdominal muscles you have are more apparent, and that’s sexy. But at the same time, your masculinity is challenged whenever you shave any part of your body other than your face. If you’re not a swimmer (and often, even if you are) and you shave your legs, a lot of guys probably look at you as though you’re some sort of pussy.

I have hairy legs, too. A few friends of mine kept bringing up how hairy they were and would not be satisfied until I let them trim them. There’s video footage out there, and it’s not pretty (but go ahead and look for it on YouTube).

The world of fashion is interesting when it comes to body hair. I have a GQ open on my lap right now and the ads with shirtless men for Armani Exhange show a guy with an impossibly bare chest and ass. In the ad a girl has her hand reaching over the fly and into his shorts, and I’m really wondering what clothing they’re possibly trying to sell. I can’t find a downloadable version of the ad and I’m not taking the time to scan, but you can find the pic here.

However, mere pages later, there’s an ad for a cologne by Diesel with a fairly hairy dude with an open shirt. The ad reads “Fuel For Life,” which I assume means you can wear the cologne both at work or whilst having sex. Then, in an ad for Armani underwear, David Beckham sports both a sock-like package as well as a hairy chest.

So does this mean that when you’re younger and still wearing Armani Exchange you should be hairless, but when you’re six years older and wearing “actual” Armani you are an adult and therefore allowed to have hair?

I like UFC a lot, and lately I’ve noticed that most of the guys fighting are sporting bare chests. This is more likely than not so that the other fighters don’t have something to grab on to while they’re kicking your ass, not just for aesthetic appeal.

What I find most interesting about the question of body hair is that while gay men do care a bit, it seems that straight women care the most about whether or not a guy has a shaved chest or not. When asking my usual gang of friends whether or not they care if a guy shaves, it’s usually the straight women who have the strongest opinion, and more often than not it is in favor of keeping the chest hair, saying that shaving is emasculating. These women, of course, are big fans of keeping their own body hair in check. There are special razors made for women so that they can easily make little designs in their pubic hair to please their partner. I know women who have shaved stars, squares, circles (showoffs), and even the symbol for Pi. There are products created specifically for shaving certain areas! Have you ever heard of Coochy by Pure Romance? Apparently it’s the best stuff out there.

When it comes to body hair, I’ve tried to find a happy medium. Unless I’m dressing up as a cartoon character for Halloween, my chest is never going to be completely bare. Our bodies grow hair for a reason. I guess it’s probably to keep us warm or something, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s natural and therefore acceptable, yet at the same time I’m grossed out whenever I see girls with hairy underarms running around Urbana.

What I’ve concluded is that we as Americans have defined what it physically means to be a man and what it physically means to be a woman. We try to break out of these rules by saying that both can be sexy, yet ultimately deep down we know how a man is supposed to look and how a woman is supposed to look. This even goes for transsexuals like Buck Angel, you know? He could have stayed in his female-gendered body and just call himself a man, but he wanted to look like how we as a society define what a man should look like. So, my question in the end i should we really be that pissed about calling a spade a spade?

Last night I came across two great discoveries, the first being that Friar Tuck does indeed carry Stiegl, one of my favorite Austria beers from the good old town of Salzburg. It was after a pint of Stiegl that I found myself on the 22 with my friend Lucas, the guy who invented the queer studies major here at U of I. Lucas has recently been studying transsexuality and decided to look up FTM porn for some hands-on research. For you mijos out there who aren’t up on your LGBT terminology, an FTM is a transsexual who was born with the genitalia of a female but identifies with that of a male, and thereby undergoes surgery from female-to-male.

Enter Buck Angel. Buck Angel is an FTM porn star who was born a woman and underwent hormone therapy and a breast reduction to become a man, the only catch being that he’s decided to hold on to his vagina.

After watching some of his free stuff that’s on Xtube, it’s pretty clear that he enjoys what he does. The man has a pussy and he’s more than proud to be flaunting it, his first movie being titled something like Buck’s Beaver. The dude’s the shit, but he’s also a total mind fuck.

Being the American that I am, I like to define everything. This guy is messing with my head. It really proves to me that sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender. It’s just hard for me not to try to define it. He was a chick who liked to be fucked by dudes, but he wanted to be a dude while being fucked. So he was a chick who thought she was a gay dude. Yet he’s held on to the vagina. When a gay guy is fucking him, is it gay sex? Or is it fucked up heterosexual sex? You can call it trans sex, but is he really just a third gender? Or sex or orientation or whatever? A transfag? Are we all just flesh with lubricated holes? Does something like this decrease the romance, or actually increase it? On the one hand it says that sex is just sex, but on the other it says that if this sex is about love, then it means you fell in love with a person, not a man or a woman or … Who watches this porn? Clearly I’m a new subscriber but am I watching because it turns me on or because I just find it so terribly interesting?

See, it’s a mind fuck. I wish I could better understand what it means to be a transperson, but there is clearly something brilliant going on in these minds that I just can’t entirely grasp no matter how many times I watch Transamerica or Hedwig and the Angry Inch. At it’s very basics it’s simple. The girl feels she’s a guy so after some therapy, hormones, and surgery, he becomes a guy. But there’s no way I can really know what that means. Dating is hard enough when you don’t have to explain to someone what your genitalia used to be, or what it currently is.

Damn man. That’s some crazy shit, and it definitely takes some balls.

All I know for sure is, is that this world is one crazy place and I cannot wait to see more of it. Think of all the interesting people out there that you can learn something from. This place is out of control and I love it.

There are several websites I like to check when I’m in need of something aesthetically beautiful. Dockera is among the my favorites, sporting a collection of photos that have to do with 1 of 3 things: beer, meat, or sex. The best ones have a combination of two or even all three. Another one is Ffffound!, which is a collection of found images that select users find interesting or beautiful and upload. And then of course there’s this random thread from a site called Yay Hooray, the thread being called “Best of Live Journal.” This is where I found a photograph that turned me on more than I would like to admit.

I haven’t really talked much about Furries. The reason for this is that Doin’ It Well did an article on the subject and at the moment I can’t find a link to it so you’ll have to search for that on your own, homes. Anyway, I didn’t want to rehash a topic that has already been covered quite well on the217 and the Buzz. But now I’m doing it anyway.

For those of you who aren’t aware of what a Furry is, a Furry is a subculture that has defined itself in so many ways that you can’t really have a single definition of Furry. You can try to give a few versions though, and one of these versions is that a Furry is a person who identifies with a particular animal/creature/mythical creature and likes to dress up like the said being whilst fucking. The costume allows the person to lower their inhibitions and better act out these animal urges and desires.

I want to fuck Pikachu. I’ve never had the desire to fuck a Furry before, but after seeing this guy my desire has definitely increased. The only thing I would change would be to give him a human mouth, because licking a plastic mouth doesn’t turn me on as much as one might assume. I know, weird right?

This got me talking to a few people about fetishes and one that immediately entered the conversation was the one where grown men dress up as babies and are sexually aroused by being taken care of by a woman or man acting as their parent. They go all out, from bottle or breastfeeding and shitting in their almost comically large diapers. I wish I could really get inside one of these ManBaby’s heads and see exactly how this turns them on.

When I think of fetishes, I’m always reminded of a fantastic woman named Lauren who I befriended in Germany. Lauren introduced me to a book titled The Best American Erotica: 2003. This book, which I highly recommend, includes a story about a guy who dresses as a pony and gets into the world of Ponyboys. Ponyboys use anal plugs that have horse tails on them, bite down on a bit, and become slaves to their masters. Whippings, racing, and fun times ensue.

The stories never end but I’m not going to spoil any of the endings, so go out and grab it if you have the chance. You’ll be surprised at what turns you on, or at the very least, you’ll be disgusted in what turns me on.

With these images popping up all over the place, whether it be in books or on websites or wherever, what I really want to know is where these fetishes actually exist. It’s really hard for me to imagine someone creating that Pikachu costume in one of the art rooms here on campus. I can definitely see a Ponyboy existing in one of the many farms, but why can’t they be mainstream?! It’s not that I want to stare and gawk at them, but I want to learn from them. Here they are leading a lifestyle that most Americans more than likely object to and they’re having a damn good time doing it. In the meantime I’m reading documents written by Martin Luther and eating Triscuits. Don’t get me wrong, Martin Luther is fucking hilarious. He calls his peers Hee-Haws. The man is a genius. I just wish that instead of reading documents written by this incredibly condescending man that every once in a while I got to hear about how shitting in a diaper turns someone on. Why isn’t there a Major in Sex here? Gender & Women’s Studies just doesn’t cut it.

Maybe I should move to California. They probably have that there, right? Those wild liberals.

I think I should probably stop writing articles while hanging out with friends. I’ve realized that the only reason I wrote any of this was because I wanted to show off how hot I find Pikachu. And he’s damn hot.

VIVA LA KINK!