A Pretty Boy is Like a Melody

I was freakishly oblivious to sex when I was a kid. I remember back then reading in some learned journal, say, Reader's Digest, that the average teenager thought about sex every seven minutes. Odd and silly that seemed to me.

Oh I had sexual fantasies, started masturbating when someone told me about it. Don't really remember much about it. Didn't connect it with my ordinary life. At all. Sure sounds unhealthy doesn't it? But it seems to have been a blessing. I never experienced adolescent sexual anguish. I know about it only because I've read about it (Robert Crumb). And if I'd decided I was gay I'd have told people. My daddy would've found out and he'd have taken my home life to a lower ring of Hell. He might have put me in a nut house to be 'cured.'

I do remember being attracted to a couple of girls in high school. And a couple of women on TV: Barbara Bain and Diana Rigg. Digging down into my memories I realized I'd been strongly attracted to a few guys. All blonde cuties. Recalling them sometimes evokes a hot flash no female ever has.

I'd been fantasizing about guys. But the only reason I know this is a friend told me that I'd once said to her that I couldn't fantasize about girls without including a guy. And it still didn't occur to me. What a retard. Actually it was just that same sex attraction wasn't anything I'd ever heard of.

One day I was hanging out with a close friend. When his housemate came home, one of the two best friends I've ever had, someone I'd known since I was ten, the two of them kissed. This was how they'd decided to come out to me.

I thought about it for a couple of days. Then came the unexpected insight. I said to myself, what do you know, you're gay. Sexual guilt is as alien to me as buying Ethan Allen Furniture of watching Ophra. I was delighted to be outside the norm (my capacity to identify with the majority of mankind has always been faulty).

There was a hitch. I was fat. Dieting quickly fixed that. There was another hitch. I was in Savannah, Georgia in 1972. I was acquainted with a few gay people. But I didn't like any of them. There was the Puerto Rican junkie, Frank, who learning that I was gay shook his penis at me in invitation. Not my idea of romance. 

He was a pleasant but scummy sort. At least if you weren't his wife. He beat her when she didn't steal enough money from work to pay for his fix. He stayed with some folks I knew. After he and his wife left the people they stayed with wondered what the awful smell was. Turned out Mr. & Mrs. Frank had left their babies' shit-laden diapers hidden in the couch. Frank like fat women. "Its like fucking bacon, man."

So I left home and went to the Big City. The nearest one, Atlanta.

Thankfully plenty of guys that I thought good-looking reciprocated the sentiment. There were a couple of misfires. I tip my hat to my young self that this didn't destroy my confidence. I went through pleasantly hedonistic period. The adolescence I'd missed at the normal age was compressed into a couple of years. I couldn't keep my eyes of pretty boys.

I had a crush on the first guy I slept with. And he'd be my friend for many years. Another guy I fell for too quickly. But it ended easily and equally quickly. And there was the guy who was "mad, bad and dangerous to know."

Good clean fun in the period between Stonewall and AIDS.