Worst of all, though, the shame attached to the memories of those first times marred how I would approach sex for years. I realize I fell into that old gay adage of placing my feelings on a person who, for whatever reason, was never going to invest them back in me. I believe it was just sex, or at least that’s what I have tell myself now to avoid slipping into a memory induced k-hole. I think, when I look back now and occasionally find myself tumbling through his Facebook page, that he wasn’t. I never learned whether the boy I lost my virginity to was struggling with his sexuality. I’m not sure whether I really fell for the guy or not, but I do know that at the end of it he was just using me to get off. And while at the beginning I felt like I had the upper hand in the situation-I was the one who was out and comfortable in my sexuality, right?-after each time we met became more secretive and more dirty, I began to feel secretive, dirty, and most of all shameful. We’d meet surreptitiously in dark and make out in the cold British weather on a park bench before venturing back to his place to have sex. I didn’t tell him that I’d never had sex with someone before instead, saturated with vodka and inflated by nerves, I was swept up in the motions.įor the next year, we’d hook-up on and off, usually at 3 a.m.
All I know is that one moment we were talking and the next minute, well. The minutiae of exactly how things developed from us being together in that room to us having slightly unsuccessful sex in a bathroom in a different corridor have since escaped me. He was clearly intoxicated, but it was a party after all and who was I, quite drunk myself, to judge. It was late (or early, depending on your outlook on the world) when I was joined by the boy who was living in the room next to mine, way back on the other side of the building. I can remember, although I'd had some drinks, sitting alone in my friend’s room on a single bed, the mattress overly springy and with a coarse plastic coating, attempting to stream a song over our dorm’s spotty Internet connection. The whole thing went down near the end of my freshman year at a party, at which people from the whole dorm floor were drunk and celebrating, carelessly streaming in and out of each other’s rooms, following the various different pop songs until one room took their fancy. I was at college, living in dorms, and the experience-aside from the usual horrifying awkwardness and somewhat spontaneity of the occasion-was completely and utterly unremarkable aside from one thing: the guy I slept with identified as straight. With a swish and a smile, he sashayed away.I was 19 when I first had full-on sex with another man. "You know, it just makes my dick limp," he lamented. "Why do you still shave? Chest hair is so sexy!" His friend's cheery smile turned into something of a frown. My boyfriend - a lover of hair and bears - couldn't help but express his frustration. Jason was probably 30 or so, white, with bleached blonde hair that was receding, a collared shirt that was strewn open to reveal his shaved, orange chest, and lines on his face that betrayed his love of tanning beds. What happens to twinks when they grow up? I found myself wondering this out loud to my boyfriend this past weekend after we ran into an old friend of his, Jason, at the bar. Pile on a two-and-a-half year abusive relationship, and somehow I found myself an almost-30-something who avoided mirrors to not have to look at what I had become. After graduating college and growing up a smidge, those 29-inch jeans stopped fitting. four nights a week, it turns out, is the cardio equivalent of running a marathon every week. My friends and I would roll up to the local dance hall three or four nights a week, polyester and glitter trailing behind us, dropping it like it was hot and cage-dancing the night away.
I was basically a gay anime character a-la- Dragonball-Z, and I fucking loved it. Blonde highlighted spiky hair to the heavens. Having begun my training so young, by the time I was actually legally able to drink I had cultivated quite the twink aesthetic. I was rebellious, angsty, but also damned crafty: I forged a fake membership card to the local disco by scanning my provisional driver's license, editing the birth date, and laminating the edited print-out opposite a downloaded JPEG of the club's logo from the their website. Tired of being the punchline of my hetero peers' jokes, I desperately searched for a community to call my own. I started going to gay bars when I was 15.