The Toronto writer recently released his memoir The Vinyl Diaries: Sex, Deep Cuts and My Soundtrack to Queer Joy, which chronicles his second coming out…
By Paul Gallant
When we think of sexual adventurousness, we might think of a particular era, like New York in the 1970s, at the very beginning of the modern 2SLGBTQI+ liberation movement, when all the old rules seemed to have been tossed out the window, just before HIV/AIDS ended that sense of freedom. Or we might think of a particular stage of life, like a gay guy in his 20s who has the brazenness and wherewithal – and the physical energy – to try out a variety of sexual partners and situations, figuring out the sexual tastes and desires he’ll follow for the rest of his life – and learning which intimate acts and scenes leave him cold.
But in his new memoir, Toronto writer Pete Crighton lays out another scenario: middle-aged promiscuity. The Vinyl Diaries: Sex, Deep Cuts and My Soundtrack to Queer Joy chronicles what you might call Crighton’s second coming out. “Finally I met a guy who blew it all wide open for me, and at forty-five I was about to have my heart broken for the first time,” he writes early in the book.
Crighton had spent his 20s, 30s and early 40s with his back mostly turned to the gay scene, afraid of HIV/AIDS and tucked inside two unsatisfying long-term relationships. “There was safety in monogamy. I swallowed it wholesale,” writes Crighton. “I finally met a man in the year 2000…. I didn’t have to enter a gay space, I didn’t have to put myself out there, and I didn’t have to introduce myself to a stranger…. I spent the entirety of my thirties in a monogamous relationship with a man who wasn’t right for me, nor was I right for him.”
When his second long-term relationship came to an end, and the guy who helped end it proved to be unavailable, Crighton took a leap of faith and got himself on the hookup apps, a way of meeting up for dates and sex that until that point had passed him by. He nearly backed out of his first app-arranged hookup, thinking “this was exactly the kind of encounter I was convinced would kill me.” But it didn’t. He had fun.
Over the next few years, Crighton met a series of mostly younger gay men (and eventually ditched his corporate job to become a full-time writer). Each liaison had its own character – furtive, passionate or friendly, which Crighton recounts to readers in prose that’s neither pornographic nor shy. “He was moaning and twisting on top of me and in a minute or two his cum joined mine on my chest.”
Almost every liaison was marked by a soundtrack that was usually, but not always, provided by Crighton. He’d put on Kate Bush, Stevie Nicks, Billy Bragg or maybe k.d. lang, advocating each artist’s brilliance to his lover of the moment. In an interview, Crighton, who once worked as cultural programmer at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel, told me that his life has been defined by music, so it was natural that music defined each sexual adventure. “A great love of mine is listening to music, but also sharing it. In my younger years, it was easy to associate with certain people because they liked a certain kind of music,” he says. “These days I wish there was more embrace in the gay community of difference genres – rock ’n’ roll, real soul, punk. It just seems like there’s a diva du jour every six months and everyone hops on that train and that’s all gay guys want to talk about.”
The idea for a book that married music and chronicles of casual sex emerged from Crighton’s lifelong habit of keeping a journal. As he went through this new stage of his life, making observations about moments that were sexy, funny or awkward, he was encouraged by his friend Carolyn Taylor, of Baroness von Sketch fame, to write it all down. “After every one of these dates, I would call her or text her: ‘Oh my God, you will not believe what happened,’ and I’d recount the story. Every single time she was like, ‘Write that down, put it in your journal.’ I was like, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘One day you’ll know.’ She was right.”
Though casual sex is Crighton’s method for opening up his life, getting off wasn’t the goal itself. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Well, I’m gonna have a ton of sex now.’ It wasn’t that conscious a decision. I just followed my heart and met some interesting men,” he tells me. “That was a wonderful discovery for me because I’d always sort of thought casual sex was shameful. I didn’t think it was true intimacy. Those were great things to be proven wrong about.”
While many gay men complain about feeling invisible as they grow older, Crighton did not seem to have such a problem. Maybe it’s simply that daddies are hot these days. Though Crighton was eager to mentor his younger partners on music, he also learned a lot from them – and not just about the latest cool bands.
“Many of them had hot experiences when they were in their teens and met someone older, like late 20s or early 30s. But some not so much. I think the bigger damage is that they kept it all in secret and they carried a lot of shame about some of those experiences. It’s not because of the sex, but the inability to talk to their peers, to talk to their parents about it,” says Crighton. “But then, I met a lot of men who had zero sexual inhibitions and fear of sex, which was transformative for me. Wow, that’s possible.” Seeing younger guys’ willingness to have sex with older men also made him more open to dating guys older than himself. Not to give anything away, but that new open-mindedness plays a part in the book’s happy ending.
For most of his midlife adventures, Crighton continued using condoms; old habits and fears die hard. He did eventually start using PrEP, which he says gives him the choice to use condoms or not. But again and again, for Crighton, it was less about the sexual pleasure itself than in being relaxed enough to build a queer world of his choosing.
“That fearlessness played out everywhere in my life. As I was turning 50, I looked around and thought, ‘These are the people I want to be surrounded by. These are the relationships I want to foster.’ All of these things helped lift me up to this amazing place,” he says.
The Vinyl Diaries: Sex, Deep Cuts and My Soundtrack to Queer Joy was released in May by Random House Canada. It is available online and in select bookstores across the country.
PAUL GALLANT is a Toronto-based writer and editor who writes about travel, innovation, city building, social issues (particularly LGBT issues) and business for a variety of national and international publications. He’s done time as lead editor at the loop magazine in Vancouver as well as Xtra and fab in Toronto. His debut novel, Still More Stubborn Stars, published by Acorn Press, is out now.
POST A COMMENT