Anna Anthropy’s Triad: A Review

“You wanna join us?”

The man who said that did not have the largest cock I’d personally seen up till that point–that honor went to a guy I hooked up with 12 years ago who cried afterwards, obnoxious, salty tears raining down on my chest as I tried to figure out the quickest way out of his apartment–but it was in the top five. I did not expect it. All of him was big–he stood about 6’4, at least a buck fifty heavier than I was–but for some reason I didn’t think his cock would match. Well, it was a nice surprise. That I was about to have a threeway was, for some reason, a surprise too. Stupid: It shouldn’t have been. But up until the moment his boyfriend–also a big guy, though not as big–hugged him from behind, reached his hand into the guy’s shorts, and pulled out this monstrosity, giving it a couple strokes, then asking me to help out, I thought, I dunno, maybe I’m just being invited here for a platonic smoke session. Stranger things have happened.

 

***

The release of a new Anna Anthropy game puts me in mind of a stock sitcom dad. It’s Father’s Day, and his kid has given him a long thin box. Pair of boots? Tennis racket? New car? It’s a tie. Last year it was a tie, the year before it was a tie, next year it will be a tie. It will be a fine tie. Maybe it’s one of those swank Donald Trump ties he saw at JC Penny’s, maybe a Jerry Garcia one, maybe one of those which looks like cocktail molecules. But it will be a tie because his kid has only had one idea in his life–DAD LIKES TIES. And so Anna Anthropy has presented us with a long thin box called Triad, and we may make speculations about what it might be, but we know it’s going to be yet another exploration of the vagaries of queer life. Anthropy, best known for her book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters–whose premise is that it’s fun and easy to make your own game about hot lesbian three-ways–”no longer [has] any tolerance for programming” and so has asked Leon Arnott to program the game for her. Liz Ryerson has done the music, and it’s wonderful.

Anthropy makes a point of involving her slut in everything she does, and this time, the incorrigible scamp has cleverly named Triad’s characters Riff-Raff, Boodles, and Snippet. For some goddamn reason, these queer ladies have decided they need to be sleeping together (this game does not take place in New York City, where the right answer to the “how do we all sleep together” question is “you don’t, you get a fucking cab”) and all of whom have awful needs and obnoxious sleeping habits. You need to fit them on the bed without Boodles falling off because she never learned to sleep like an adult; without Snippet kicking everyone, because she never bothered to learn bed courtesy–and either way, as a punchline, Riff-Raff snores and keeps everyone awake in the end. Sorry, spoiler alert.

Lesbian three-ways, the game suggests, are more trouble than they could possibly be worth.

 

***

In the interest of discretion, I’m going to appropriate Anthropy’s slut’s names as aliases for the participants in my most recent hot gay threeway–like any self-respecting queer I’ve got a few dozen under my belt–and I can only beg everyone’s indulgence that I, an interchangeable heterosexual cis white guy, have managed to perform such a misogynist act as this appropriation. It was July 4–not one of my favorite holidays–and everyone I knew was out of town or busy and I had nothing really to do, so I ended up spending the day smoking pot and cruising for sex.

Being gay in New York City in 2010–this was in 2010, although what I’m about to say applies to 2013, but probably not non-New York City places because I don’t understand them–is an interesting thing because you can hear how easy it is to get your cock sucked on a regular basis but you can’t really realize how easy easy really is until you’re there. Apps like Grindr and Scruff and Growlr are pretty much the Seamless of blowjobs; on a good night I’ll have a dude sucking away within 20 minutes. Give me 40 and I’ll have a sweet, tight, pink asshole in my face waiting for me to fuck it. Gimme 60 and I’ll have found one who has the good drugs. You talk about the hyperavailability of gay sex in the 1970s–read some Samuel Delany for some interesting thoughts on that–but they got nothing on technology. Fact is, the other day I was at the doctor’s for a strep test, and when he asked me about my sexual history recently, I mentioned that I’d blown two guys in the past couple days and would have kept an appointment with a third for that night if I wasn’t, you know, sick. It wasn’t even a busy week or a week that I’d made any particular effort to get laid–cocks just kind of show up in my face from time to time. (For the record, the doctor immediately swabbed me for the clap–unprotected oral sex can give you gonnorhea and chlamydia–which, fortunately for the boys in New York City, turned out to be negative.)

Actually now that I think about it, I didn’t even have an iPhone at the time and so I didn’t meet Boodles and Snippet through a “location-based dating service”–I think Grindr was the only major one at the time anyway. I met them through Bear411, a site whose layout seemingly hasn’t been updated since the late 1990s and whose membership has sadly declined in recent years–although you can still find dudes to sling some come with–but who, at the time, I could sign on and in a few minutes get messages from a half-dozen hairy, fat guys who desperately wanted me to fuck them. Boodles and Snippet had been dating for about six months and had a joint profile, and so I sent them a hello message. Within a few minutes, Boodles wrote back. Snippet was at a 4th of July party, but Boodles thought I was supercute, and anyway we were both equally into drugs. And we had a fun exchange where we noted that we both lived in Brooklyn, noted that we lived in the same neighborhood–the same train stop–the same side of McGuinness Boulevard, holy shit, this is getting kinda funny, the same fucking street, and holy shit, we’re literally neighbors. This called for a celebration, and so I brought over a fat spliff and Boodles and I ended up grabbing some sushi and getting massively stoned and sloshed on some excellently-made Cuba Libres while we waited for Snippet. Snippet had some more weed, and a few more spliffs and some more Cuba Libres and we decided to go into the bedroom to make things more comfortable.

And it was here that we switched to a pipe. And it was here that Boodles and Snippet kissed. And it was here that Snippet reached into Boodles’s shorts and pulled out that gigantic cock and it was here that Boodles asked me, “You wanna join us?” This is one of the single hottest moments in my life, and it’s one that I’ve masturbated to countless times since. I’m getting hard just thinking about it. Excuse me for a minute.

Hm. Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t remember much of the sex. We’d had a lot of weed and Cuba Libres. Boodles had fucking amazing tits though. I like a guy with a nice rack, I’m a total chest man, and Boodles had super sensitive nipples. I do remember saying at one point, “Jesus, I remember when I was a kid I hated my chest”–I’d been overweight since I was a kid and had been made fun of for being a nine-year-old boy with boobs–”but how fucking hot is this?”–Boodles, Snippet, and I were all pretty top-heavy–and going to town on Boodles’s nipples, I’ve never understood the whole “Duh, why do men have nipples, they’re useless!” thing because nipples are fucking wonderful, and in fact Boodles and I hooked up a few times afterwards, being neighbors and all, one of us would text the other a picture of our cock and I’d go downstairs, two at a time, skip over to his place, and there was one time that I bit down on his tits so hard and sucked so furiously that he came just from the nipple stimulation at all, shooting surprised ropes of come all over my dick and my stomach, neither of us previously aware that such a thing could happen but we managed to repeat it a few weeks later so it must be a Thing. A couple weeks after our threeway, after about three or four times that Boodles and I sucked each other off, Boodles and Snippet broke up. I’ve fucked Boodles a couple times afterwards, asking him every time if Snippet would join us sometime–the two remained friends–but nothing doing. It’s a shame. I’ve wanted to fuck Snippet again.

 

***

Triad is well-designed and features excellent music and innovative programming. It’s a game made with a lot of care and I had fun with it. 10/10

 

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