Today we introduce Michael Troy’s new blog Sex in the Shadows. Michael has made a life’s work out of exploring the darker boundaries of the sexual experience. His adventures will take you places you may have not dared to go — not yet, at least.

I’m prowling MLK and Florida Avenue in Tampa because I know that with five dollars in my pocket I can get a blowjob here.

What the Tampa Chamber of Commerce doesn’t tell you is that Tampa is the easiest city in the U.S. to get fucked in. Behind all the sanctimony, and the Marriage-is-between-a Man-and-a-Woman bullshit, among all the churchgoers, the SUV drivers and the Bucs fans, Tampa is populated by a hotbed of freaks.

The crack whores on MLK look like they’re pretty evolved on the chain of transmittable diseases, so even though I’m not exactly a safety-first kind of guy, I make a turn onto Nebraska.

This article appears in Mar 25-31, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...