When I was seventeen

 

When I was seventeen
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for tearoom sex at Four Seasons Mall
Hands under the stall
Sometimes faces unseen
When I was seventeen

When I was twenty-one
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for new wave boys with big trendy hair
We’d make a lovely pair
Till the weekend was done
When I was twenty-one

When I was thirty-five
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for backroom sex on Folsom Street
There was often a treat
Though the bar was a dive
When I was thirty-five

In observance of the day, I’ll be skipping the final verse about how old I am, thank you.

Sincere apologies to the Kingston Trio, Frank Sinatra, and Homer Simpson

 

 

It was 40 years ago today…

… that I first had sex with a man in a bed.

I’d had sex with men before, generally in sleazy cruising spots that were really the only option available to a queer teenager in North Carolina at the time, but I’d never gone home with someone and done it in a nice respectable apartment with a nice respectable bedroom.

I was 17 years old and was coming out with a vengeance. We met, as was the custom at the time among those of us too young for bars, at a tearoom at Four Seasons Mall. He was 23 and was (I swear) in a fraternity at UNC Greensboro. His apartment was actually just a couple of blocks from my house. I don’t remember a lot about the sex, but it was an important moment for me because of the location and because I actually had time to talk to the guy for a while. It’s one of the first times that ever happened for me, actually conversing with a fellow sodomite.

This encounter obviously made a big impression on me as I’ve never forgotten the date, and as I kept having sex with other men (many, many other men) over the years. I’ve seen many apartments and had many conversations. I even picked up another member of that same fraternity a couple of years later, quite by accident.

I’m happy to say that I don’t do frat boys or tearooms anymore, but I do still have sex on occasion. It usually happens in a bed now with someone I already know, so that part of the novelty has worn off.

 

 

I’m so queer that…

I had sex for the first time on National Coming Out Day.

Actually, it was 11 October 1980, and there wasn’t really a National Coming Out Day yet; that didn’t happen until 1988.

But it was good enough for me, anyway.

I was 16. My parents were doing something that night and I had the night off from McDonald’s, so I drove up High Point Road to the neighborhood dirty bookstore. Somehow, without being told, I instinctively knew that was a place where things might happen. Maybe it’s because the place was called “Dudes.” Once illegally inside, I browsed the literature that was on display, much of it more photographic than textual. And older guy (he must have been thirty) approached me and somehow coaxed me into one of the video (actually 8mm film, I think) viewing rooms in the back. Things happened. Surprisingly many things. I was not as shy as I might have expected.

It was not really all that enjoyable. I wasn’t really excited by the guy. I was just excited by the fact that it was finally happening. There was a certain inevitability about it; it was something that just needed to happen with whomever happened to be handy. I have no idea what the guy’s name was. I didn’t really care all that much. I still don’t. To be brutally honest, I just sort of needed to get it over with so I could (a) know for sure it was what I was supposed to be doing, and (b) start focusing on doing it right with people I was actually attracted to.

I may have done it at that bookstore one more time, but I quickly graduated to the tearoom scene, because the mall was ultimately a safer place for a high school kid (especially one with a fairly recognizable car) to hang out than the dirty bookstore. I had fun with it. I regret nothing.

As an adult, though, despite the fact that I had sex in some fairly lurid and semi-public places, I never really did the bookstore scene again. It always kind of gave me the willies.

My first time was a checkbox on a list, not a romantic scene from a movie. And I’m really OK with that. I think the number people who hear angels playing harps or whatever the first time they have sex is probably not very great.

And just to complete this romantic story, Dude’s Adult Books became a sketchy used tire store several years ago.

I made a sex map

This map displays every spot (or at least every spot I remember) where I’ve had sex. Reds are precise locations while oranges just mark the vicinity. Yes, that means I don’t necessarily remember everyplace I’ve had sex down to the building, address, alley, or bush. The 1990s version of me was a major slut, OK?

Try building your own. It’s fun, if sometimes mildly disturbing…

Sex map

Bullies

It’s interesting how so many on the right have suddenly recognized that bullying is a problem now that it’s their primary means of excusing school gun violence rather than just the “innocent teasing” that LGBTQ students and other “snowflakes” were supposed to ignore.

And by “interesting” I mean “typical.”

Valentine musings

Random thoughts on that most annoying of all holidays:

  • Other than the years when I was long-term coupled, I can only remember one time in my life when I was actively dating someone on Valentine’s Day. I was 20 years old at the time, and didn’t much care for it. I don’t even remember how he and I celebrated the big day.
  • I have a friend with whom I spend a lot of time. We’re often told we seem like an old married couple. When I think about it, I realize that (1) we frequently eat at the cafeteria, (2) she criticizes my driving all the time, and (3) we never have sex. So yeah, we pretty much are just like an old married couple.
  • As Valentine’s Day civil disobedience options go, this one was a pretty cool (if soggy) one to be part of.
  • The suckiest thing about middle age is that no one gets crushes on you anymore. I don’t care about the romance particularly, but the ego boost was always nice. Not that it happened all that often even before I hit middle age…
  • At least I’m not having a Valentine’s Day colonoscopy this year.
  • Screw the candy. Give me pie. And apple fritters.

About nice, friendly white supremacists…

I’m of several minds about the controversial New York Times piece on the friendly neighborhood white nationalist racist prick. I recognize that the article did go a long way toward “normalizing” his behavior, though I think it stopped short of being an apologia. That said, I also believe that there is some validity in demonstrating that racist nutjobs can be your neighbors and can seem like “nice people” until you learn what they really stand for. And I think there is a significant part of the population that doesn’t realize this.

I’ve written about Oleene before. She lived right across the street from me and seemed to many people to be a very nice lady, a good Christian, and the kind of person you’d want watching your kids during the day. But as one of the kids she watched, I realized that she was not a nice lady at all. She was horrible. She said things about people of color that make my skin crawl to this day; these were awful, hateful, and — in retrospect — violent things. She was a despicable human being and, despite having known her since childhood, I couldn’t make myself attend her funeral when she died. I used to try to excuse her, but by the time she died, I didn’t feel any sense of loss at all.

But yeah, she seemed like a sweet little Christian lady until she started talking about anyone who was different from her. And ultimately, it wasn’t just people of different races or ethnicities. Not surprisingly, I never quite fit the mold of what she thought a boy should be interested in. I wanted to read and draw and use my imagination and learn things. She constantly pushed me to go outside, pick up a ball, and act like the other boys and stop being so “silly.” She minimized and ridiculed everything that mattered to me. She made me think there was something wrong with me, and I grew to hate her for it. As I’ve also said before, Oleene and the “moral” evangelical hypocrites at Vandalia Christian School are two of the main factors in my transformation from Bible-toting child to atheist adult. Suffice to say, none of these folks provided me with a model that was in any way “Christlike” nor something I could imagine dedicating my life to.

The point here, though, is that she just seemed to blend in with the neighborhood, and I don’t think anyone ever really exposed her or called her on her bullshit (except maybe me, when I hit my rebellious years). She was an evil, hateful person who wrapped her nastiness in a cute wrapper of Christian belief and Southern sweetness. And she’s not alone. In fact, there are a lot of her around. And they, like Tony Hovater, need to be exposed. The Times may not have done so in the best way possible. Someone should.

Reading is good

For the record, by “reading” I mean “reading more than just the inflammatory headline and then sharing it to display your sense of moral outrage and to ‘prove’ your point.”

I came along at a particularly lucky time in American history. Despite the fact that i grew up in a small-to-medium city in a moderate-to-conservative region, I always had access to good reading material and usually took advantage of that fact. It’s what helped me survive my teen years and make it to my senior year in high school (1982), which was the point where I realized for the first time that I could successfully invent the person I wanted to be and that I deserved better than the losers I’d been hanging around with up to that point. By the semester I graduated, I’d finally seen that it was OK to be smart and to have friends who were smart too.

A decade or so later, when Borders and Barnes & Noble became major retail forces, to criticize the way these chain bookstores were destroying local, independent stores. I was very conflicted about this because I remembered growing up in a place that didn’t really even have viable independent stores that sold the kind of books i wanted to be reading. Most of the independent stores around here were either religious in nature or were of the “books and stationery” variety, which meant that they sold primarily inconsequential and uncontroversial titles.

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(Waldenbooks, Thomas Hawk, CC BY-NC 2.0)

In fact, it was the Waldenbooks branch at the mall where I found books about cities and about subcultures, and (gasp) books and magazines that told me it was OK to be the homosexual I was…ahem…practicing to be. Without the big chain store and its broader perspective, there’s no telling how long I would have had to wait to read messages that challenged the everyday bullshit of the early Reagan-era South. It’s all well and good to criticize the chain bookstores when you live in a big city located in a region with options. The chain were the only option here at the time, and I’d argue that stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble were extremely important in providing this function for the generation who came along in the pre-Internet 1990s.

Of course, the library was important as well. In the early 1980s, the Greensboro Public Library had a surprisingly large collection of titles from among the “gay liberation” classics of the early 1970s. When I look back at them now, I find a lot of this stuff sort of cringeworthy (though many of these books presented a much more open-minded and diverse notion of what a gay person could be than much pf the “gay culture” crap that followed) but it was precisely what I needed to be reading at the time. It goes without saying where this love for the library took me, although it was a rather long and circuitous route.

Reading (and realizing that doing so was a good thing) was also what prompted me to seek out used book stores like the original Browsery, which was on the second floor of a dumpy building near UNCG and only seemed to be open at night, and newsstands like the International in Charlotte, tucked away in the back of a mall hidden in an apartment complex off Providence Road. It was harder to find the things you needed then, but it was not impossible…assuming you cared enough to bother.

I’m sort of babbling and don’t really have much of a point here, I guess, other than to reiterate that I was luckier than a lot of people my age and older who grew up in less urban and bookish areas. My parents did not read a lot of books but did read a lot of everything else, so they were good role models. Being in a sort of college town (though not a college-dominated town) also helped. Having access, though, and the desire to seek things out, was the key.

There’s a lot of access now too, which is amazing and wonderful, but I wish there were more propensity to filter out the crap and be selective in a world with a major signal-to-noise deficit.

Ushering out the old

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This very nice girl was my New Year’s Eve date thirty-five years ago when I was a senior in high school. She holds the distinction of being the last date I had as a heterosexual impersonator.

I don’t think her heart was in it any more than mine was, really, as evidenced by the fact that the minor traffic accident we had earlier (not my fault and not alcohol-related) was the biggest excitement of the evening.