I knew I was gay when I was 5 years old. Well, I didn’t know it then. I mean, at that age in the early 1960s, I didn’t know that word and didn’t define myself that way or in any way. But at age 5, I was in nursery school, and I clearly recall very early feelings of liking another boy, one boy in my class, Tommy. I very much wanted to be friends with Tommy, just because.
One day the teacher had us all stand in a circle and hold hands with the person on either side. There were a few more boys in the class than girls, so some of the boys would have to hold hands. As the class assembled into a circle, I deliberately moved around next to Tommy so I could hold his hand. That was all. But it wasn’t romantic or anything like that. I just liked Tommy and wanted to hold his hand. It was cool.
Time passes.
I learned what “gay” meant from Mary Tyler Moore. Isn’t that a great line? One Saturday evening in the early 1970s, I was a teenager and my mother and I were watching the show in which “My Brother’s Keeper,” the episode that ends with Valerie Harper’s character explaining she wasn’t going to marry a friend’s brother because he was “gay.”
I didn’t know what that meant, so I turned to my mother and asked her. She paused just briefly, then explained it meant he likes men instead of women.
Gay.
That was all my mother said but it was enough. I understood and since I didn’t ask anything more, we just resumed watching TV (not we talked more about it). It wasn’t until many years later that I came to appreciate that moment with my mother. I have no idea if she was uncomfortable, but she answered my question, plain and simple. And she answered it without trying to color my understanding, like also telling me “gay” was a bad thing. (My mother never failed to provide a direct answer if I asked a question. Apparently not all parents are as willing to be straightforward and honest with their kids).
But now I had a word for it. A word for myself.
Around this same time, as I hit puberty, I realized guys were interesting and girls were not. Perhaps more importantly, I was conscious of my nascent feelings. But even though I was wholly inexperienced, I wasn’t particularly troubled by my feelings but I kept them to myself. I didn’t know anyone else who was gay; out gay role models certainly were not commonplace on TV, in movies, or in any magazines we had around the house.
Time passes.
By the time I got to high school, a few years later, I had become accustomed to thinking of myself as gay however never sharing my thoughts with anyone… definitely “in the closet.” But I didn’t feel alone like others say they felt as they were growing up. It never occurred to me that I was “the only one in the world who felt like that.” I didn’t feel “wrong,” just secretive.
I never considered suicide, running away, or otherwise harming myself. I actually had a fairly happy childhood, with lots of friends, bike riding, exploring the woods in our neighborhood, and all that. No one I grew up with—family, friends, schoolteachers—disparaged others who were gay or otherwise somehow different. (Of course, there was no social media then, filled with contagious, vile rants and lies.) In other words, I wasn’t taught to hate, like the song says, and neither were others around me. I was lucky in that.
And I certainly didn’t hate myself for sneaking looks at other boys in the gym class locker room. I knew, privately, what I liked. On the contrary, it was just about the only thing that made gym class tolerable.
And I managed to find plenty of things to jerk off to. For example, in my senior high school history class, while the teacher explained about civics, I often glanced aside to sneak a peek at my classmate Todd who sat one seat over in the row ahead of me. Or more precisely, to sneak a peek up Todd’s T-shirt sleeve, past his curvy bicep to a fascinating tuft of thick, black hair in his armpit, visible whenever Todd sat arms akimbo which happily was fairly often.
It was also in high school that I somehow became fascinated with beards, in particular, bearded men just a few years older than me―a big brother type, I suppose. I don’t remember what if anything got me started on men’s body hair, however. One day I just woke up and suddenly found bearded men and hairy chests attractive. I longed to gently touch their faces and look into their eyes. There were very few boys, and only one teacher, in high school with beards.
But by senior year a few of the boys had started to shave for real and show some chest hair, like Ralph. Ralph was good-looking anyway and at 17, was one of the few boys in my school to have a short beard AND ALSO a grown-up hairy chest which I got to see regularly, as Ralph and I were in the same gym class. After gym, I usually tried to shower and dress quickly, then hasten two rows of lockers over to a wall mirror mounted on the end of Ralph’s locker row. I generally arrived in time to catch Ralph pulling on his shirt, occasionally arriving in time to catch Ralph still naked and toweling his balls. I had the best combed hair of my life.
Another thing from my senior year came in December 1976, when Newsweek ran an article about Linda’s Pictures, a new book by Linda McCartney. Among Linda’s photos shown in the article was one of an apparently nude, scruffy, hairy-chested Paul. Oh My Fucking God. (Pun intended? You decide.)
I saved that Newsweek page for years, creating a mental collage with sexy Paul, sexy Todd’s history class armpit, and sexy Ralph’s locker room chest.
Time passes.
The autumn after high school I started college in my hometown and lived at home the whole time, which only served to keep me me: I remained closeted. I studied too much (deliberately? I had a 4.0 GPA!) to think about actually trying to go out and find sex with men, let alone a relationship. I had vague ideas that I wanted to be with a man, but I really didn’t have any way forward. I was 100 percent certain I was gay, but I didn’t really know how to make it actionable.
How different would my life had been if I’d gone away to college or during my gap years (for a job to earn more money)? Maybe I would have come out sooner; I don’t know. But I was starting to explore some of the gay-related things around me.
For instance, one day the campus Gay and Lesbian Alliance held a fund-raiser bake sale in the lobby of the school library (I spent a lot of time in the library). I decided to be very bold and come out just enough to buy a gay brownie, fearing that anyone nearby knew, before retreating back into my closet. I didn’t even talk to the guy who sold me the brownie.
Another instance was when I found an ad in the paper by a local artist seeking male models. I had taken a human figure drawing class as a college elective, which included nude female and male models. I don't know what possessed me other than curiosity; perhaps the need to make some, any sort of masculine connection. Thinking I knew how it would go, I called the phone number and later went out to see if the artist was interested in using me. Looking back, I'm surprised I was so brave.
When I arrived, we chatted a few minutes, then he had me undress and lay sprawled on my back, naked, on a low table. He positioned my arms a little, then started doing quick sketches on a large pad of newsprint—so this was legit, however a bit uncomfortable the way he had me twisted around like I'd fallen. However, even though he didn't do anything besides sketch, I began to feel weird, sprawled on my back like that. I'd been naked with boys in the locker room, but never alone with another man. To make it worse, I could feel my dick drooling precum, excited simply by being spread-wide naked before a clothed man deliberately staring at my body.
Embarrassed by my drool, I abruptly decided I wasn't cut out to be a nude model, apologized, and left. He had not said or done anything sexual toward me, but I wasn't ready to be that exposed, figuratively and literally. Now I wish I'd stayed; I might be in a museum somewhere—the next Helga Testorf—I now have no idea who that artist was.
And, one night, I took off from studying and went to a movie. A guy sitting in the theater row in front of me looked back at me several times. After the movie, outside the theater, he came up to me and chatted for a minute, eventually coming around to inviting me up to his place. After a moment's hesitation, my heart pounding, I went with him. I decided, well, am I going to find out what this is all about, or not?
In his apartment, we sat for a while and I think, talked. I was shaking. Eventually I made an attempt to suck on his dick. I didn’t know what else to do. But it was all wrong and I fled―it's not who I am! Although it was a failed encounter, it was the first time I had ever actually tried to act on my sexuality and the first time I ever touched another man sexually in some way.
One day at college, it occurred to me to look up “gay” in the campus library, to see what they might have in the stacks. The section with gay-related books wasn’t very big but I went back occasionally to flip through what they had, never daring to actually check out a book. The one book I returned to over and over was Men Loving Men by Mitch Walker (the 1977 edition with the orange cover), "a gay sex guide" it said. I’m sure I was curious about the sex stuff, but I don’t remember reading much inside the book.
It was the book’s cover photo that I kept returning to. It was a lovely, simple, black-and-white picture of two nude, bearded men facing each other, hip to hip, one shyly touching the other’s hairy chest. Just touching, that was all. Being literally about gay sex, of course, the book had explicit descriptions and photos. But I looked at the cover photo in near disbelief that such a thing could possibly be out there somewhere: to be with a man like the bearded guy in the photo and touch him lovingly. To be near and feel his strength. It wasn’t about sexual lust; it was about attraction and affection. I’m not sure I can explain it better than that, but it was about being with and loving a man.
But it was years before I went over the rainbow for real and began to find it out for myself.
OK, I hope all that explained a bit about how I started and began to understand who I was.
Yet now, you ask, how can I remember what sex I had back then, over a quarter-century ago? Easy: I kept a list. Why, you ask, would I keep a list?
I began the practice after one of my earliest lovers told me that he kept a list of all the men he ever had sex with. Being somewhat nerdy, I therefore decided I’d keep a list too, just to see how it went. This was in 1991 and I had started having sex in 1986, but by 1991 I was starting to actively seek sex with men, confidently and on a regular basis. But if I hadn’t started the list then, there’s no way I could have re-created the list even a few years later―not to boast.
On the other hand, I stopped adding to the list after roughly ten years and put the list in a drawer. Shortly after that, I re-found my list and reading through the names, realized I could still remember pretty well the circumstances surrounding each encounter.
So, mostly for the fun of it, I began with the first name on the list, typing whatever I could remember, and continued through the next few dozen before I left off. Then about twenty more years later, I re-found my typed notes and decided to try to polish them (as in, turn the notes into complete sentences) and see what I had. I wondered if parts of my story might have been ineffable, but then just decided to put the eff in effable. And here we are.
I should explain one more thing. By “sex” I mean two or more people sharing physical intimacy and genitals, usually naked but not always, and at least one person has an orgasm somehow. In other words, for this, I’m not defining “sex” as a penis penetrating someone else’s body. You don’t have to agree but at least please remember this is what I mean.
By the way, how I came to think about or have “sex” was due largely to the growing awareness of safe-sex practices in those first decades of HIV and AIDS, for example, mutual masturbation. (Public health and sex education works, bitches!) I did occasionally try anal sex with a condom, but I was usually not interested in fucking or being fucked. For me it’s more about togetherness and touching, like I saw the guys in the Men Loving Men cover photo. There are so many ways to enjoy intimacy without fucking—who says gay men may only define “sex” the same as straight men—like just running your hands along the body of a beautiful man, letting him lie back and enjoy it as you enjoy it.
Therefore, Notches documents my burgeoning sexuality, recounting how I met (and did) my first sexual encounters, but also occasionally about not having sex at all (despite trying). There’s no emotional denouement or other satisfying closure (that might warrant a movie treatment, darn it).
And while this can be categorized as a coming-out story of sorts, it is limited mostly to the sex I had. Not included is much about the other, perhaps more important ways I came out. For example, I came out at work and it was an affirming, good-humored experience and for once, I felt like a real person, accepted for myself. (Straight coworkers asked gentle, interested questions like whether I had gone to the recent DC pride parade they saw on the news. I countered by saying I had gone, yes; but more importantly, had they gone?)
In fact, most aspects of my coming-out were entirely non-fabulous and for me, it is also still going on in some ways. I mean, every day I (we all) have to endure the bigotry and evil infecting country in the name of a Christ they don’t even know. It’s not just hate from people who mire themselves in ignorance and prejudice (I have a problem calling deliberate ignorance a “choice,” did I say?) but also from elected officials who pander to and patronize the presumed values of those they claim to represent… if you can call hating your neighbor a value; did Jesus? Is it any wonder some people hesitate to come out, ever, trapped among such people? (And don’t get me started on the hypocrits who like to yell about certain parts of the Old Testament for some, while ignoring other parts for themselves—how about a nice pork shoulder for dinner to celebrate your new tattoo? Don’t get it? You’re welcome!)
Anyway, there are lots of really good books out there, for parents and friends as well as for you, about coming out, gay sex, self-realization, and so on; and all you need do is search online (and because of that, I didn’t attempt a bibliography though I did add a brief glossary of terms I used). I will add that several men I know read and found great meaning for themselves in Paul Monette’s book, Becoming A Man.
But please note: I am NOT urging anyone to come out or otherwise change in any way, but I do suggest you find out for yourself, and not just go along with what others tell you—especially those too dumb to realize they’ve been fooled by a devil that hath assumed the pleasing shapes of hate and ignorance. You are not alone (see the "Help" page), and you may consider your choices for what’s best for you, especially in the long run, and not just what others tell you they want.
Lastly, and as I said in the front disclaimer, all the names and many places are changed (well, all but one, but I’m entirely hopeful he’ll see it). Most of these details I have never before spelled out to anyone. If you think you might recognize me, yourself, or a friend, it’s probably not me, not you, and not them, so don’t even bother attempting to triangulate.
If some details are uneven or uninteresting, it’s because it’s all I can remember now, or there was nothing else worth telling. Or it’s because I’m a crappy writer and I don’t know what I’m doing.
It is what it is.
There will be a new Notch post every Thursday morning!