The following can also be found in the book Chicago Stories 2001-2004. Click here to learn more, and to download a free electronic copy.

To understand my story, you need to first understand the following two things about me. Number one, I am bisexual. Number two, I am a sex columnist for a British lifestyle magazine. I am not one of these things because I am the other one; but believe me, if you are one of these things, it certainly doesn't hurt to be the other one.

One of my columns was about running racy personal ads on the internet and all the strange and interesting people you can meet because of it. To put my money where my mouth was, which I frequently do when it comes to the column, I ran my own racy personal ad at Nerve.com and then wrote an article about the various people who contacted me. Two of these people were a couple, a male and female couple, both of them bisexual and with a relationship where they occasionally invited a third person into bed with them. We'll refer to them Ben and Jennifer, mostly because I always get a chuckle out of people when I refer to them as Ben and Jennifer. They explained in their email to me that they weren't necessarily inviting me at this point to a night of sweaty, kinky group sex, but at the very least they were interested in meeting up with me for a drink and seeing if the possibility existed for the three of us in the future.

Now, this unto itself would not normally be that big of a deal. I had been meeting up with couples for a little over a year at that point, first because of a book I wrote about the Chicago swinging community and then because of this column for this British magazine, and I had actually had kinky, bisexual group sex a good three or four times before ever hearing from Ben and Jennifer. The thing was, though, that the couples I had met before this point were almost always from the suburbs or a downstate rural location, almost always a little older than me, almost always into things I'm not necessarily into, like...NASCAR, and camping, and listening to those crappy Top 40 bands I've never heard of. In fact, to this day it's still very rare for me to hear from my fellow urban, snotty, overeducated little shits when it comes to actually having kinky sex. You may be asking yourself at this point the same question I repeatedly have, which is "Why?" And my answer will be the same as yours, which is "Fuck if I know." My fellow punk-rock intellectuals seem to be endlessly fascinated with kinky sex, they buy expensive books about kinky sex, they love hearing about kinky sex, they love talking about kinky sex, but for some reason none of them seem to want to take their clothes off and actually participate in kinky sex. Hey, man, your guess is as good as mine.

Ben and Jennifer, though, at least according to their online profile, seemed to be that couple I had been waiting my whole life to meet - that comics-reading, Radiohead-listening, Quimby's-loitering, science-fiction-loving bisexual couple secure in their relationship and more than happy to drag people into bed with them on a regular basis, hell, yeah. By the way, Ben and Jennifer don't actually look like Ben and Jennifer; you can imagine Ben as a tall David Duchovney and Jennifer as a short Bridget Fonda. Once again, because it bears repeating - hell, yeah.

So, I invited them to an orgy. Specifically, I invited them to an orgy I was throwing in my apartment, just a week after they first contacted me, which, yes, was another direct result of my sex column. Namely, the number one subject of the emails I receive from readers is that of group sexual parties - where are they, how do you find out about them, how do you get invited to them, why am I never getting invited to them, do single males ever get invited to them, why is it so hard to find them, why is it so hard to get into them, etc etc etc. My answer was a very simple one - if you can't get invited to a group sexual party, suck it up and throw your own damn group sexual party. And again, to put my money where my mouth was, I decided to throw my own orgy first, just to show my readers how easy it could be to do. By the way, throwing an orgy is not an easy thing to do, but don't tell my readers that.

This being the midwest, of course, I didn't throw a Roman-style orgy, what with the grapes and the drugs and the flinging of bodily fluids every which way but loose, but rather something called a massage party, which is for people who are interested in group sexuality but not necessarily ready for group sex. The idea behind a massage party is very simple - you gather anywhere from four to twelve people, and each person takes a turn receiving a twenty-minute full-body massage from every other person in the group simultaneously. When that person's twenty minutes are up, another person sits in the middle of the circle and the whole thing starts all over again. The great thing about a massage party is that the level of explicitness is strictly defined by each individual person as they enter the middle of the circle. I, for example, stripped naked when it was time for my massage, gave blanket permission to touch me wherever anyone felt like touching me, to jerk me off if they wanted to, to french-kiss me if they wanted to, even to stick a finger up my ass if anyone was feeling particularly daring. Other people at the party stripped to their underwear and said it was okay to touch them anywhere where naked skin was showing, while yet others stripped nude but then gave specific caveats about where they shouldn't be touched, like in their bellybutton or on the bottom of their feet.

I had seven people attend my massage party, three women and four men, and it went fantastic - but that's not the point of tonight's story so I won't go into it anymore. The point of tonight's story is that Ben and Jennifer and I discovered two important things about each other that night - that we definitely all got along in a platonic aspect, and that we definitely all were sexually compatible with each other. Which is why, a couple of weeks later, the three of us decided to meet up again on our own, to sit around a bar in Uptown and have many, many drinks and talk about whether we wanted to throw ourselves into a more intimate situation than had occurred at the massage party. The evening went great and, in fact, we would've all just gone home together right there and then if not for the fact that Ben and Jennifer had agreed beforehand that they wouldn't invite me home with them that night, to avoid the potential of a weird drunken argument in a bar in the middle of the night. Like I said, though, the evening did go well enough that the two of them invited me over a couple of nights later, where after smoking a ton of weed and having an animated discussion of the 1980s television show "V," the three of us suddenly found ourselves naked and rolling around on their bed.

Sex with Ben and Jennifer was...hmm. Well. Imagine every single thing you think would be fun about a threesome - the chaos of it all, the slipping of various body parts into various other orifices, the not quite knowing which particular orifice was currently wrapped around your particular body part, or whose orifice it is, and not particularly caring. Imagine the lines of gender and orientation getting so blurred that it literally starts to seem that there are no such things as 'men' and 'women' anymore, only one giant omnisexual supergender simply entitled Fuck. Yeah, that's how sex with Ben and Jennifer was. Now remove everything bad you've ever heard about threeways - the awkwardness, the power games, the jealousy issues that can sometimes rear their ugly head right in the middle of it all. In short, it was one of the better threesomes in the history of bisexual group sex, and a strong argument as to why everyone should be having bisexual group sex on a regular basis. Yes, even you.

In fact, the night went so well that Ben and Jennifer and I ended up having this ongoing relationship throughout the rest of the summer, sometimes sleeping together again but much more often just getting together for drinks, or for dinner, or to see a play, or to hang out with friends at a party and to drink too much and to quietly let the details of our relationship slip out to the shock and jealous laughs of those in attendance. It wasn't exactly like the three of us were dating each other; it was clear from the very start that Ben and Jennifer were the ones with the ongoing romantic relationship, and that I had simply been allowed temporary access to it, like a frustrated UN inspector futilely driving all over Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction. Still, though, it wasn't exactly like the single guy hanging out with his couple friends for a night either. This is, in fact, the hardest thing to describe about the events of that summer, simply because the relationship the three of us had defied all traditional attempts of definition. I was closer than a friend but not as close as a lover. I was having sex with them, but I wasn't exactly their partner. I wasn't exactly gay, and I wasn't exactly straight, and in fact all three of were very careful not to define our sexual activities in those kinds of terms in the first place.

I enjoyed making out with Ben just as much as I enjoyed making out with Jennifer, and I enjoyed fucking Ben just as much as I enjoyed fucking Jennifer, albeit for two incredibly different reasons. Jennifer brought out the dominant in me, and there was nothing I loved more while in bed with her than grabbing her hair with my fists while she was giving me a blowjob, or rolling her over on her stomach and giving it to her really hard from behind. Ben, on the other hand, brought out the submissive in me, and there was nothing I loved more in bed with him than having my hair grabbed by both fists while I gave him a blowjob, or having him roll me on my stomach and giving it to me really hard from behind. Being in this newfound position we were in, the three of us decided to finally fulfill all the sexual fantasies we had ever had about group sex - like Jennifer's, which involved getting into a 69 position with me while Ben fucked her really hard from behind. Or mine, which involved Jennifer being the creamy center of Ben and I's Oreo cookie - which I won't describe in any more detail, but I think you can already figure out how that story ends.

More than this, though, and which a lot of people have a hard time believing, my favorite thing about that summer was simply hanging out with Ben and Jennifer, smoking a little dope and talking about the genius which is Grant Morrison, stopping by Ten Kat or Long Room or the Duke of Perth for a late-night cocktail. It was the taboo aspect of the relationship I loved so much, of sitting at a table with the two of them in public, looking around at all my fellow slackers in the room and thinking to myself, "I'm having sex with both of these people and NONE OF YOU HAVE ANY FUCKING CLUE!" Which, of course, when you're high, makes you start wondering how many of those fellow slackers are looking right back at you and thinking the same thing, which then makes you start wondering if, in fact, the entire planet is all having weird, kinky sex on a regular basis and that they just never talk about it. Which then gets you all freaked out until you're bought another shot and you calm down a little again.

Needless to say, relationships like this have a short shelf life, and ours was no exception. The trouble with ours had nothing to do with any problems that arose between the three of us, but rather that it kept going so well - better and better each time we hung out, as a matter of fact. The more I kept spending time with Ben and Jennifer, the more I started liking them in a deeper, more emotional way, the more I was reminded that I WAS the third wheel of the relationship. The ghosts of my own last relationship, which I had assumed had been exorcised a long time ago, started popping out of my closet and haunting my brain again. The more I admired Ben and Jennifer for having the strong, close, honest, communicative relationship with each other that allowed for someone like me to be added to it, the more I was reminded of how badly my own last relationship had gone. I started remembering how...single I was. How alone I sometimes feel. How hurt and betrayed I had felt by the last person I had let into that very intimate part of my being. How there's a big part of me that believes I'll never have a stable romantic relationship, that I'm just too fucking weird of a person to ever get a normal person to become attracted to me.

So, we broke up. But, as befitting the rest of this story, it wasn't exactly a break-up per se; we simply agreed that things were getting a little weird, and that we didn't want to ruin our friendship for the sake of pushing the weird stuff too hard, and that it would probably be best if we all stopped sleeping with each other. The three of us still get together fairly regularly for drinks and dinners and plays and the like, but it's different. They've gone back to being my couple friends whose relationship I admire, and I've gone back to being their single friend they're always trying to find a date for. I don't necessarily mind this kind of relationship - I have a very similar one with lots of other couples here in Chicago - but still, remembering the experiences I did have with them always produces a bittersweet tinge to the evenings out. I doubt I will ever have a relationship again quite as strange, or nearly as good, as I did with Ben and Jennifer over the course of that long, fateful summer; then again, given how rare it is that circumstances like that line up so perfectly, I'm grateful for having the experience in the first place.