I Love Making Out

TNG co-founder Zack's loins were left all giddy by last week's taste of spring. This week, he continues his semi-regular series on things he loves by writing about sex.


How did everyone's Saturday go? Mine was really fun. I got to participate in Crack: Journey to Uranus (which was a huge success) an then go hang out at Shift afterwards (also a huge success.) Beside the once in a lifetime fact of me both attending and enjoying Town and Cobalt in the same night, Saturday marked the triumphant return of my leaving the house with a flask full of Jim Beam. The last time that happened (a year ago to the day, incidentally) I ended up showing my penis to an old friend in the linen closet of a Columbia Heights house party. This year it lead me to go up to every guy at Cobalt I've ever been attracted to and try to make out with them. Though I am hazy on the exact numbers, I believe there was tongue contact between me and roughly seven or eight other unsuspecting guys. That doesn't even include my amused and fully-informed boyfriend. I would be horribly embarrassed if I wasn't so elated.

Making out is one of my all time favorite activities. In college, my friends and I tried to decide what all of our "things" were, the oft-repeated idiosyncrasies that defined our dating life. One of my friends went crazy and messed up every relationship at the two-month mark. The other had a habit of feeling up girls on the dance floor before he had ever kissed them. But my "thing" was making out. Aggressive, serial, almost compulsive making out. For shits and giggles, my best friend kept a running tally of everyone I had kissed-with-tongue between orientation and graduation. The final total was somewhere around 68. If there was ever a nuclear holocaust I'm sure that the entire homo population of my Alma Mater could be cloned by taking a quick swab off my tongue. That's to say nothing of the good-natured straight girls who also fell in my path.

What is it about making out that makes it one of life's greatest joys? The objective concept of it is almost as gross as sex. Lets take the moist hole in my head that food goes into and spit comes out of and marry it to yours. Then lets try to guess what we each had for lunch. But in actual execution? Heaven. A good first kiss can seal a relationship forever (just ask my boyfriend. Our was, of course, standing up in the smoking area outside the Black Cat.) But a bad first kiss — too much tongue, too much teeth, too much garlic-flavor— can send one screaming for a nunnery.

Seriously folks: What is the appeal of making out? I'm scared that if I spend too much time trying to understand it I will ruin the fun.