I’ve been accused of slut-shaming, and I’ve also been called a whore. These things are not mutually exclusive, I realize, but it’d be hard to maintain that dual identity without getting called a hypocrite—the ugliest of the accusations by far.

You may already be familiar with Mischa Badasyan’s art piece, Save the Date. The 28-year-old performance artist spent a year having daily dates, and he maintained a diary throughout. Just what constitutes a date is debatable, especially within the modern gay aesthetic (something I wrote about in these pages quite recently), so to ensure some degree of continuity, he made sure to have sex with a different man each day—all 365 of them—whether or not an actual date transpired. 

A year later, VICE caught up with Badasyan to survey the damage. Apparently, the project ruined him, sexually, much the way porn ruins many of us (another recent Grumpy Ghey topic). So desensitized became the Russian-born, Berlin-based Badasyan, that he found himself resorting to violence to reach climax as the year progressed. Now he says the only way he can enjoy sex is through voyeuristic experiences in public restrooms or by picking up Berlin street urchins who define their sexuality as something other than 100 percent gay. It’s a bleak outcome for sure, but Badasyan is nothing if not honest. 

Another VICE article came to my attention recently, published just a few weeks before David Levesley’s update on Badasyan, entitled, “The Beauty and Splendor of Being a Slut.” It was penned by Jeff Leavell, a celebrated gay commentator with bearish charm. Leavell is perhaps best known for his writing on open relationships and, more specifically, his triad with his husband Alex and their boyfriend.

He tells us that he realized he was truly a slut when reading an article in Attitude by Dylan Jones entitled “Calling All Slut-Shamers: There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Sex.” (You might want to ask Badasyan about that.) Jones attributes his slut status to sleeping with around 400 guys. Leavell’s hair-raising realization was that his tally blows Jones’s out of the water: 3,500 partners, and no, he’s not using the HIV math where you also factor in the previous 10 people each of your partners has been with. 

Leavell sets up a shortsighted dichotomy in his op-ed, and unfortunately it’s a pervasive one: Either we’re sex-positive or we’re slut-shamers. It seems like there’s a zero-tolerance policy on having opinions that don’t embrace everyone’s sexual choices, regardless of motivations or psychological concerns. Problem is, this leaves little room for those of us in the grey area between extremes—neither unequivocally sex-positive, nor perpetually slut-shaming—which, I would guess, is where the majority resides. Referencing the comments below an aggregated posting of Jones’s article, he establishes the two sides of the aisle: sex-positive folks vs. puritans or close-minded moralists behaving “as if one’s worth lowers with each dick you take.”

Instead of addressing the middle ground, Leavell argues that sex is about more than just getting off (sometimes), and that its deeper meaning is rooted in connection and intimacy (again, sometimes). But then he veers off onto a dusty dirt road with “Sex is transcendental and beautiful, even if that stranger pushes you away, zips up, and leaves.”

Transcendent and beautiful is reaching, which he does a lot. True, there is something extremely gratifying about reducing another man to his base instincts: finding out what makes him groan with pleasure, pushing his limits when you don’t even know his name or what he’s like in any other respect. In that sense, anonymous sex can transcend our personal differences. It’s a language we can generally count on one another to know.

But Leavell proceeds to go off on a tangent that wholeheartedly (and repeatedly) equates sex with love. Not so fast. Despite some considerable overlap, most of us know they’re two distinctly different things. The human desire to be loved is inherent, as is the desire for sex. But loving and fucking are different, even if we sometimes refer to the latter as “making love.” And in this case, he’s not talking about what most of us think of as “making love.”

Leavell writes about his sex life as a wayward teen, looking for hookups in Central Park some 30 years ago, which he cites as more of a search for belonging than anything else. He relocates to Los Angeles in the 1990s and made Griffith Park his cruising ground. He mentions having read John Rechy’s Numbers (1967) as a precursor. 

This is revealing. Numbers (which is Rechy’s second novel, following his similarly themed 1963 debut, City of Night, which, by the way, the Doors’ Jim Morrison thought of as required reading) follows the exploits of a retired boxer who uses the dark alleys and park alcoves of LA’s outskirts as a means of testing whether he remains desirable. It’s about sexual validation, not the search for love or belonging. Rechy’s character wants to know he’s still a hottie, that the body he spent so much time and energy shaping is still something that people yearn to touch. His M.O. is fairly selfish, and that’s not something he tries to hide. 

But Leavell maintains his pursuit of sex aspires to something higher, and he spends much of his article cloaking various behaviors as things other than what they really are. When he later reveals that he was once a heroin addict and, perhaps as a byproduct of that, spent time as a sex worker, it comes into focus that his relationship to sexual behavior is really just another manifestation of an addictive personality. Arguably, it’s the lesser of evils. But saying that Leavell is celebrating life and making connections with people through his compulsive sexual behavior is like saying that a heroin addict is merely celebrating the natural substances god (or whoever) put on this earth. More reaching. 

Now, as a recovering addict myself, I can’t help but find myself wondering: Where is his self-awareness? Is he really so deluded that he can’t see his tireless pursuit of sex for the addiction it is? 

In the end, Leavell’s column for VICE is just an opinion piece, much like this one. What troubles me about it is that it perpetuates this aforementioned concept that all sex is loving, and that all loving is wonderful and healthy. Horseshit. 

We’ve grown into a gratification-oriented culture. We are obsessed with having our needs met, and, more and more, we let the ends justify the means. We want too much, and we let that dictate how we define our relationships. We create convenient ways of excusing ourselves: You’re bored with your partner, but he provides comfort and stability, so you get his permission to seek out a boyfriend to meet your sexual needs. Soon, however, that loses it’s luster, so you start engaging in anonymous encounters. Where does it end? At one point are you responsible for creating your own comfort, stability, and sense of belonging? Are you ever beholden to anyone besides yourself? Will the boyfriend serve as your fluffer for the anonymous hookups?

I’m not suggesting that the trend toward polyamory is entirely negative. But I do think many of us are just finding new ways to repackage the same old sexually compulsive behaviors. Leavell says he refuses to apologize, refuses to feel shame for his sexual exploits, and I’d tend to applaud him, except that it isn’t believable. I might buy it if he was less hell-bent on equating anonymous sex with love, or cruising to achieve a sense of belonging, but so long as he’s calling that anything other than chasing sex and getting off, I’m skeptical. 

Thirty years ago we may not have been able to get married, but we were more honest with ourselves about our motivations. Now we’re busy lying to ourselves and expecting everyone around us to buy into the lie. In the process, we run the risk of creating an emotionally feeble community of men who look outside themselves to have all their needs met.