This week in Savage Love: Full-throated

I’m a middle-aged gay man and I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea. This is a disorder caused by the soft tissue in the throat collapsing during sleep. On top of making me feeling tired and awful all the time, sleep apnea is associated with a long list of health complications. I’m writing you because I’m into very rough oral. I like it when a guy treats my throat like a Fleshlight. Gagging and retching turn me on. Since I don’t want to risk making my condition worse, I stopped giving blowjobs after my diagnosis. But will giving blowjobs the way I like to give them actually make things worse? The internet was not helpful, and I didn’t feel comfortable asking the sleep specialist.
Really Excited To Choke Harmlessly

“The vast majority of people with sleep apnea have obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), which is what I assume this individual has,” said Dr. Anna Grosz, a board-certified otolaryngologist in practice in Portland, Oregon. “It results from muscle relaxation and collapse in the airway (throat), which narrows the passage for air to flow and then makes it harder to breathe and get oxygen.” (Otolaryngologists specialize in diseases and disorders of the ear, nose, and throat.)

So when you fall asleep, RETCH, the muscles in your throat relax and collapse, restricting your ability to breathe. Your brain—which doesn’t want to die—responds to this oxygen deprivation by waking you up, which tenses your muscles back up, un-collapsing them, and allowing you to breathe again.

“Someone with OSA gags or chokes in response to the apnea, not as a cause,” Dr. Grosz clarified. “And while the contraction of the muscles opens the airway, it leads to poor sleep because the person is constantly being woken up.”

Now for the good news: Dr. Grosz doesn’t think choking on dick is going to make your OSA any worse, RETCH, and it might even make it better. “Theoretically,” said Dr. Grosz, “increased tone of the muscles of the airway might be a good thing in terms of strengthening those muscles.” Now, there’s no evidence that having your throat used like a Fleshlight will strengthen your ol’ throat muscles, but there’s no evidence that getting face-fucked will weaken them, either. (Needless to say, there aren’t a lot of studies on OSA and rough oral sex—and seeing as our public-health officials are busy trying to protect us from a worldwide pandemic and our imbecilic president, there probably won’t be any studies anytime soon.)

“Ultimately, I don’t think your reader is at risk of making his sleep apnea worse by continuing his oral sex practices,” said Dr. Grosz. “And to improve his sleep apnea, he could make sure he maintains a healthy weight, doesn’t smoke, and avoids excess alcohol or sedatives.”

You just had a child—because of course you just had a child—which means now is not the time to do anything stupid. Or rash. And ending your marriage because your wife failed to understand how important your fetish was to you before you understood how important your fetish was to you would be both stupid and rash. So take a deep breath, help care for your baby, and have a conversation with your wife the next time she isn’t completely exhausted, CAST, which could mean waiting three to six months.

If it’s clear when you talk that she hates the thought of pulling on a fake cast and watching a movie with you—what you say you need to be happy—that will come out in the conversation. But if she’s come to understand how important this cast business is to you and how little it actually requires of her, please do yourself, your wife, and your baby a favor and take the yes you’ve always wanted for a motherfucking answer.

And finally, CAST, I don’t know what your dick is telling you right now, but just in case it’s telling you there are hordes of women out there with cast fetishes who are also into recently single new fathers with child-support payments to make, your dick is lying to you. A new girlfriend, if you can find one, might wear a cast for you, but she’ll be doing it for the same reason your wife is willing to: in order to make your kinky ass happy.

First thought: If gay men collapsed into puddles every time someone assumed we were straight, GEAR, we’d have to be reclassified as a liquid.

Second thought: As a gay man, I’m sometimes annoyed when people assume I’m straight. But it’s not an unreasonable assumption, since most people are straight. It’s also rarely a malicious assumption. Similarly, GEAR, since all of the men who’ve commissioned this Etsy artisan to make them sleep sacks in the past have been gay, the assumption he made about you wasn’t unreasonable. And it’s hard to see malice in it. The offense you’ve taken, on the other hand, strikes me as both unreasonable and malicious; it’s unreasonable in that you would come crying to a queer person about something like this, and it’s malicious in that your reaction is so obviously rooted in homophobia (so what if some dude thought you might be gay?) and yet you came crying to a gay man about it.

Final thought: Whereas a straight person who’s assumed to be gay can correct the record without fear, a gay person who’s assumed to be straight has to do a risk assessment first: Is this person going to freak out or get violent? Having to do those sorts of risk assessments all your life—starting in childhood with your own family—can take an emotional toll. So instead of being angry or offended by this experience, GEAR, you should be grateful that you can say, “Actually, I’m straight,” without having to worry about being punched in your stupid face or kicked out of your parents’ house.