I have known from a very young age, since long before puberty, that I had a very strong interest in naked men. The first time I noticed it was while watching the 1981 comedy-horror classic, An American Werewolf in London. The movie rips your heart out at the end and then throws a cheery song in your face, like, get over it, pal, we’re having fun here. But during that first transformation, wherein David Naughton is completely nude, I first noticed the naked male body.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way it made me feel. I didn’t like that I wanted to keep looking. I told myself that I wanted to keep staring at him because he was weird looking, not because of the low down tickle that it gave me. I didn’t like how I kept thinking about it long after the image was no longer visible.
“Naked men look weird,” I remember proclaiming, probably to my brother, but I’m not certain. I was really talking to myself. It was important that I believed that. It was weird. That’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Cause of how damned weird it was.
Then, I remember, not too many years later, my brother had obtained some Hustler magazines. He showed them to me. The naked women were very exciting to me. Very pretty girls with everything showing. Then, in one of them, the multi-page center spread was of a four-way. Two women, two men. And there they were: Penises. Two of them, as different as night and day. One was thick and stout, nestled in curly blond hair, a beautiful cream colored tube capped with soft pink. The other was long, also thick, but less so, dark hair, olive skin. I liked them both, very much. I forgot there were women in the picture. Oh, but they were there. Those lucky bitches.
I also really did enjoy the female form. And I had crushes on girls, lots of them. I will spare you all those details. I had a bad habit of falling head over heels in love with girls who either literally did not know I existed, or who did like me, but didn’t like like me. I had plenty of posters on my walls of scantily clad women. Images of Madonna, Samantha Fox, scream queen Linnea Quigley, Paula Abdul, a North American Guide to Boobs, displaying varieties ranging from “mosquito bites” to “watermelons,” even the classic redneck favorite, Hot Soapy Girl On A Red Corvette, adorned my bedroom walls and ceiling, finding a home among the myriad movie posters, mostly horror, and helped fill in every square inch of boring painted drywall with exciting, stimulating imagery. Because that was acceptable. That was normal, encouraged even, for boys to have such interests. I didn’t get made fun of for having hot chicks and violence on my wall.
I did not plaster my wall with men I was attracted to. That would not have been a normal or acceptable thing to do. Most people have a certain concept of what a gay man is. Growing up, I learned that a gay man was some kind of fruit. A gay man was light in the loafers. A gay man was a sissy. That’s how they were portrayed in the media and talked about in society. Gay jokes weren’t crafted to incite people to laugh with homosexuals, but to laugh at them. Look how funny! A man who likes things women like! A man who talks like women talk! Well, I wasn’t that. Sure, I wasn’t athletic, didn’t care to be, and some of my favorite movies were musicals. But I didn’t prance around and flap my hands about and lisp like some goddamned fairy, so, I wasn’t gay, obviously.
Society encourages straight behavior, even more so when I was young and impressionable than today. I was lucky that I had an attraction to women, because it was much easier to focus on that and write off my other desires as mere fantasy. Sure, I liked looking at pictures of naked men. Yeah, I liked sneaking peeks at other guys in the locker room. But everyone had sexual fantasies, mere curiosities that they would never actually try or experience in real life. I researched it at the library. There’s a whole section there on abnormal sexual behavior that children can just walk into and study, if they’re so inclined. But I learned that it was perfectly normal to have sexual fantasies about things that one would never actually try.
So, I wasn’t gay after all. Man that was a relief! Because I heard the way guys talked about gay men, when they were sure there were none around. I heard the jokes that were nothing but a very thin veil for the contempt fueling them. Assurances to each other that if a gay man ever hit on them they’d get punched right out. Constant reinforcements that being gay wasn’t okay. That it was sick, disgusting, immoral, against nature, against God. That the fruits who pranced around acting like women chose to behave that way, and they had no valid contribution to society and were going straight to hell.
I didn’t share these opinions. I didn’t know if there was a God, but if so, I couldn’t imagine he’d care one way or the other. But I was sure glad I wasn’t one of them, regardless. I mean, I did like girls, after all, and there was nothing at all wrong with a little private fantasy, no matter how hard I prayed for it to go away. But living in a society that villainized your very existence couldn’t be easy.
