Gendy AlimurungSee more from L.A. Weekly's Sex Issue: “Condoms Suck,” “The Swingers' Story: How Two Married People Found True Love While Swapping Partners,” “10 Condom Reviews for the Well-Endowed Man,” and “9 Best High-Tech Vibrators to Buy for Your Valentine, Reviewed by our Experts.”
“What is your most embarrassing sexual moment?” We posed this question to customers at the world-famous Pleasure Chest adult store in Hollywood one rainy Friday night. From accidental farts to erections gone awry, from virginities lost to strange predilections found, people shared the mortifying with a surprising lack of mortification. Here are a dozen of the most cringe-worthy stories. Last names have been omitted by request.
1. The Accidental Pee
When Myke first started having sex with guys, it was awkward. No one sat him down and explained the dynamics of “top” or “bottom.”
He was 21 when he lost his virginity. The guy was 40. They'd met on a telephone chat line and talked for weeks. The guy was cool, Myke thought. The talk was comfortable. But when they actually met, Myke wasn't attracted to him. He was determined to have sex, though. “I'm going to make this happen,” he told himself.
Two years earlier, he'd fooled around with a guy, and that experience had freaked him out. Ashamed of what he'd done, he'd sworn it would never happen again: “I'm not going to let this be my life. I'm straight. I can change this.” Even though he'd always known deep down he was gay, Myke didn't want to deal with the stress.
Then he met the chat line guy.
“He was trying to fuck me and I couldn't take it,” Myke remembers. As he speaks, he rubs absently at the two stars tattooed like tears beneath his right eye. “I kept saying, 'This hurts.' And the guy kept saying, 'Just relax.' ”
“What do you mean, 'Just relax'?” Myke asked him. “You're not the one with the dick in your butt.” Plus, they were using lotion for lube, so it burned.
The guy said, “OK, you do me. I'll show you.” Myke was confused. “ 'Huh? Me do you?' I didn't realize I was a bottom, which means I like being dominated.”
They forced their way through the situation. “Come on my chest,” the guy said.
“So I was leaning over him, squeezing so hard. Because I just wanted it to be over with. In short, I peed all over him,” Myke says, laughing now. “We were supposed to spend the whole weekend together, and he just pushed me off of him.”
They never saw each other again. “I would've loved someone who'd understood,” he says, but he had no one to talk to about it.
It took him a few more years after that to come out and be proud of who he is. Now 28, Myke teaches the anal sex class at the Pleasure Chest, where he is also a store manager. The anal class is his passion. “It's learning your body all over again, doing it in the butt. You learn a lot about your diet.” He always tells people, “Get to know your asshole.”
2. The Chicken Dinner Deep Throat
Carlos, a 37-year-old vet tech, and his date were getting hot and heavy on the couch. They'd gone for a nice chicken parmigiana dinner, then headed back to his place. As they kissed, the girl began to talk about deep-throating him. She unzipped his pants, took him deep in her mouth … and threw up.
“Oh, shit!” Carlos said. He jumped up. She jumped up. He hopped in the shower to wash off her vomit. “I couldn't believe it. She threw up her entire meal on me. It was a mess. When I got out, she was freaking out. She wasn't crying exactly, but she had tears in her eyes. She felt disappointed. She wanted to leave. She was embarrassed. I calmed her down.”
She stayed. They had sex. But hold the blow jobs.
3. The Kids at the Church
When Alicia was 17, she heard about a church with a secluded parking lot where kids would go to have sex. She and her boyfriend were parked there, completely naked, when the cops arrived.
Alicia now is a 26-year-old strawberry blonde with a pixie cut, pretty gray eyes and a sly, feline aspect. She remembers everything: the flashlight illuminating the interior of the car. The fogged-up windows. The knock on the glass. The frantic grabbing for a T-shirt to cover her breasts. Her boyfriend's overwhelming fear that he was going to jail for statutory rape — he was almost 18.
Cops with bigger crimes to worry about might have let them off with a warning. But this was Rohnert Park, a sleepy town in Sonoma County. After ascertaining that Alicia was there of her own accord, the cop called her parents. “And that's how my dad found out I wasn't a virgin anymore,” she says. “I remember getting all pumped up, like, 'This is my life! They can't ground me for this.' ”
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At home, the real interrogation began.
“Have a seat,” said her mom.
“Sit on the floor,” her dad said.
The cops had filed a thorough report with Alicia's parents, down to the color of the condoms.
“Why were you using condoms? Aren't you on the pill?” asked her mom. “Is he sleeping with other girls? Are you worried about STDs?”
“It turns out he was sleeping with other people,” Alicia says. “So the condoms were an extragood idea.”
Her dad didn't speak to her for weeks.
4. The Lesbians Shopping for Sex Toys
Christine's most embarrassing sexual moment is happening right now. She and her new girlfriend Teresa, 47, are shopping for sex toys. Out of a big shopping bag, Teresa pulls a double-ended dildo, a personal massager, a strap-on dildo with leather harness and a slim, pink vibrator. Christine cringes. Teresa keeps a running commentary as she inspects the various items, while Christine looks on in mild horror. “That's a starter one. … This goes on both of us. … We're still struggling with that one. … And this is just 'cause I want a vibrator that will be out of my way, so I can still use my tongue, I'm very creative … and then we got a new strap-on because I was getting a little frustrated with the old strap-on. You don't want a buckle, because you want something that cinches.”
“We did some shopping,” Christine summarizes.
Christine, who works in finance, left her husband for Teresa. She had never been with a woman before. She never considered herself bisexual, still doesn't and probably never will. Teresa, she says, will be her one and only. They had a connection — intellectual, emotional — and they're working out the physical. “I'd fallen for her, the person,” Christine says.
“I thought she'd had too much wine,” Teresa says.
Christine laughs. “We had a lot of wine.”
They kept it to fingers, tongues and mouths the first time they had sex. It was familiar, Christine says. The mechanics and sensations were the same as she'd experienced with a man. “Though the first time you tried that on me, it was uncomfortable,” says Christine, pointing to the dildo. She can barely look at it. She shakes her head, and a profusion of honey curls falls across her face. She covers her mouth. “It was baby steps. The first thing she said to me was 'Just be.' Then she said, 'Just be … with me.' ”
They'd met playing Bocce ball at a country club. They progressed to golf. Then to drinks. Then to love. They had so much in common. Christine had never been attracted to women that way before. “It's not that I was lusting after sex with women. It's more that I want to please her,” she says. “I didn't know what to expect. But she's very knowledgeable. She's been with a lot of beautiful women.”
5. The Man Who Likes Feet
Mansour doesn't just have one embarrassing moment — he has a series. That's because Mansour likes feet. He's had a foot fetish ever since he was a child. He doesn't know where it came from, only that when his mom's friends would come over, he would stare at their feet and play with their shoes.
The desire grew as he got older, but so did the shame: “A lot of women, they're not into feet.” When he would tell them about his fetish, they'd be grossed out by it. “Even if it's their feet. Women, they like foot massages, but if you want to suck on their toes, they're not OK with it. Especially if you want them to stroke you off using their feet. They think it's just really, really weird.” He shakes his head.
But, he says, it's more common than they want to admit. “Feet and shoes is the No. 1 fetish in America. Over bondage and cross-dressing,” he says. “A lot of men pay attention to women's feet but don't say anything about it. It only takes one woman saying 'ewww' for us to go, 'OK, I'm never telling another woman again.' ”
The first time Mansour told a girl about it, she did not understand. “What do you mean you like feet?” she demanded.
He explained that he likes to kiss feet, suck on toes, use feet to masturbate with. She didn't stick around. Then for seven years he was with a woman who accepted his proclivity but never showed enthusiasm for it, which “kind of ruins the mood,” he says.
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Strangely, the specificity of his desire wound up helping his dating life. It gave him focus. In time, he took ownership of the fetish: It became a source of pride. Now, at 34, he knows this is who he is and what he likes. Who cares what anyone else thinks?
Then one day, he met a woman with pretty feet, size 6, who liked to tease him with them under the table. He asked her, “Have you ever given a foot job before?”
“No,” she said.
“Would you be willing to learn?”
He smiles now at the memory. “The thing that made me love her even more was she kept practicing until she got good at it.”
She was bad at first. Then OK. Then decent. Then stellar. Eventually she got so good she could make him come in that position. Hallelujah! Yes, dear reader, he married her.
Giving a foot job is tiring, he has learned. It exercises your calf and thigh muscles. “It's very hard, so I've heard. Because you have to keep your feet and legs up and keep moving them back and forth.”
It is, apparently, an excellent core workout.
For those moments when his lover does not want the exercise, Mansour has invented a foot toy called the Sole Stroker. “It's also for guys who are still in the closet about their foot fetish,” he explains. The prototype is made of rubber and consists of two feet, actually modeled on his wife's, which are clasped sole to sole, as if in prayer — perfect foot-job position. There's a small hole in the middle where the arches would be. His company, Exxxotic Toes, is currently in the process of licensing it to a bigger sex toy company for manufacture.
For a while, Mansour's Sole Stroker had a Facebook fan page with 5,000 fans. But the powers that be deleted it. It's Facebook, after all. Not Footbook.
6. The Ben Wa Balls Go to Court
Slim decided to surprise her husband by inserting Chinese Ben Wa balls into her vagina one afternoon. Ben Wa balls are metal spheres that can be as small as marbles or as big as ping-pong balls. They wiggle around inside the pelvis as a woman moves, creating a subtle stimulation. Slim's were about the size of quail eggs and had little chimes inside.
But when her husband, Ricky, came home, he was in a hurry. “I totally forgot we were supposed to go to court with his father,” Slim says. “I think because I got nervous, or it swelled up, I couldn't pull the balls out. So I left them in there without telling him.”
She could hear the soft jingle-jangle chiming of the balls as she walked from the car to the courthouse. No big deal … until she saw the metal detector looming ahead.
Improvising, she ripped the top button off her pants and fastened them with a safety pin she found in her purse. When the guards asked her to remove the pin, she was ready. “I can't! My pants will fall off,” she protested. She beeped through the metal detector, decoy safety pin and secret balls intact.
“The whole time I never knew,” Ricky says. “My dad was discussing what he had to do in court, and she was trailing behind. I kept looking back, and she's giggling and giggling.”
Later, when she was more relaxed, he was able to pull the balls out.
“It was the first time I did that,” she says. It wasn't the last.
Slim is a 44-year-old court reporter with long, straight, black hair, a jolly, plump face and a jolly, voluptuous body. Ricky is 47, stocky and gruff. They have been married for 20 years. The sex is good. “Can't complain,” Slim says. “He was my first and only. I lost my virginity at 25. I made him wait two years, though.”
Slim used to be “kinda repressed,” Ricky says. At first, she threw away his dirty magazines. Two decades of monogamy later, she has a collection of smut. And, these days, she is the kind of girl who can sit calmly in court with metal balls clanking around in her private parts.
7. The Girl in the Gondola
On Valentine's Day five years ago, Crishawn went on a private gondola ride with a guy in Newport Beach. The man brought Champagne and strawberries and roses. They glided through the water, admiring houses along the shore. “It was nice,” she says. But then they got carried away.
Maybe it was the alcohol, she figures. One thing led to another, and soon she and the guy were having sex. She'd never had sex in public before. She didn't even think about the gondola tipping over until it started rocking.
Looking refined today in cashmere and Louis Vuitton, Crishawn is a 37-year-old investigator for the U.S. Postal Service and a self-described social conservative.
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“It frightened me,” she says. “It was uncomfortable, too. It's not like a bed or anything. It's one seat.”
The gondolier was up in front, with just a curtain separating him from Crishawn and her man in back. The water lapped up the side of the gondola.
But the boat did not, to Crishawn's great relief, overturn. She still blushes, though, at the thought of the gondolier having to steady the boat, and the people on shore wondering why it was bobbing up and down in the water.
Did she date the man for a while? “Yeah, he's right there,” she says, laughing demurely as she points to a tall, handsome man lurking in the condom section.
8. The Blood on the Floor
Nicole, a 21-year-old dental student, was having her period. But the flow wasn't heavy, so she and her boyfriend decided to have sex. They did it in the dark. They did it standing up. They did it here. They did it there. They did it everywhere. Then they lay on the bed for a while and cuddled. When they turned on the light, there were drops of menstrual blood all over the floor.
Blood was smeared in places where he'd stepped on it. It was smeared on his feet. “Even though he was my boyfriend, and he was joking about it, I was mortified. I told him we are never doing this crap again,” Nicole says.
The floor, thankfully, was wood. Easy to wipe up. “If it was carpet, I would have died.”
9. The Lacrosse Coach's Butt
Dan is a 26-year-old regional planner who poked his lacrosse coach in the butt with his dick. He was a high school senior at the time, and the statistician for the girls' team. Coach was a “broad-hipped in a not-good way” 50-something woman.
Dan had signed up for the stats job because he was a shy kid who figured girls would never talk to him otherwise. Ironically, he wasn't especially attracted to the athletic type. He was more into artsy theater girls. But girls are girls. Long, bumpy rides on the school bus with lots of women to think about made for a deliciously tense season. “The vibrations would work their way into my body and manifest themselves in a particular way,” he says.
One time he got an erection just as they were getting back to school. But Dan had his exit all planned out: The driver would stop the bus, someone would open the door and he would dart out before anyone was the wiser.
It just didn't work out that way.
“As I made my move, I slid out into the aisle,” he recalls. “My lacrosse coach had her butt in the aisle and was bending over to pick up something from her seat.” He ran into her, penis first.
She jumped up with a startled “oh!” and dodged back into her row. Dan kept going. “I was really paranoid because I thought I was going to be fired for being inappropriate,” he recalls. “It's usually not a good situation when you poke your lacrosse coach in the butt with your erection.”
In the end she said nothing. He's not even sure she knew what happened: “I kinda also hit her with other parts of my body. But I definitely led with the erection.”
If she could tell, he says, he's very glad she kept quiet.
10. The Anal Butter
It was Jeanine's boyfriend's birthday. As a special treat, they agreed that one of her girlfriends would take him for the first part of the night. Then Jeanine and her other girlfriend would take him for the second part.
Jeanine is 31, a patient-care liaison for heroin addicts. She tells the story in a droll, world-weary way. They went to a motel, she says. They had a lot to drink. “Then he wanted to do anal,” she says. “But I didn't have any lube.”
Necessity, however, is the mother of invention. Or maybe he'd just seen Last Tango in Paris. “He had bought food from Denny's beforehand. He grabbed one of those little plastic tubs of butter and spread it on my ass.”
Did it feel good? “Once you got past the butter part, you didn't really notice anything different.”
11. The Bondage Mistake
In addition to anal butter, Jeanine is into bondage. She once took home a guy who tied her up but got more than he bargained for. He chained her to the wall, attached a spreader bar to her ankles and then tried to fist her. But it was painful and she asked him to stop.
“When he pulled out, his entire arm was covered in blood,” she says. He fainted, hit his head on the wall and blacked out. As he lay passed out on the floor, Jeanine wriggled out of her cuffs, an S&M Houdini.
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She dragged the guy to the shower, where he awoke and sat in the fetal position. After a while, he begged her to go to the emergency room. Jeanine refused. So he crawled into her bed and cried himself to sleep.
He left in the morning. But not before he took out her trash. “He was,” she says, “a real gentleman.”
12. The Fart on the Penis
Oh my God oh my God oh my God oh my God. Stop stop stop stop. This is what Adrian thought when he farted on the guy he was fucking.
Adrian hesitates even to call it a fart. “Some air escaped,” he says now. He'd been worried about cleaning himself. “So it doesn't get dirty down there?” he explains. “Like, you know … poop?” Certain men, he notes, won't even give you the time of day if you don't meet their cleanliness standards. He did such a thorough job of cleaning that, with the in-and-out/in-and-out friction of penetration, his bowels betrayed him. “And I'm, like, oh my God, I did not fart.”
He clenched and tightened: “Please tell me that was not a fart.”
“It's fine. It's just air,” said the guy, consolingly.
He's probably thinking I farted on his penis, Adrian thought.
Adrian is a dapper young gay man whose entire early sex life was composed of embarrassing moments. There was the time he used too much lube and kept slipping out. There was the time his partner had to show him how to put a condom on properly, how to pinch the reservoir tip so it doesn't rip. There were the many times he worried about having a smaller penis than his partner. “Am I pleasing him? Am I doing what I need to be doing?” he'd ask himself. That cycle went on for a long time. Admittedly, he tends to overanalyze things.
The fart gave him a phobia for a while. Adrian considers himself versatile — he can be either top or bottom. But for a long time, he worried about not being a good bottom. He decided he'd “just top” for a while. He sighs. “There's so much to know about gay sex,” he says.
Adrian is 21 now, a psychology major at Cal State Northridge. His boyfriend is 18. “He got a little dirty down there,” says Adrian of their last sexual encounter. “We were in the moment and being passionate with each other. And he got self-conscious.”
“What about the smell?” the boyfriend asked him, after they'd come. He got really quiet. He turned away. Adrian bent down, looked him in the eye.
“Don't be embarrassed. It happens. I didn't stop because I was connecting with you. It didn't matter,” Adrian told him. “I've been where you are.”
See more from L.A. Weekly's Sex Issue: “Condoms Suck,” “The Swingers' Story: How Two Married People Found True Love While Swapping Partners,” “10 Condom Reviews for the Well-Endowed Man,” and “9 Best High-Tech Vibrators to Buy for Your Valentine, Reviewed by our Experts.”
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