Julian from the United States
My early sexual experience was mostly just a lot of longing.
I grew up in the 80’s, the time of cable and cable scramblers. My dad knew our cable guy so we got every channel including HBO, Showtime and Playboy. I was obsessed with the Playboy Channel and wanted to watch it every chance I could.
It was all soft core, you would never see a penis or penetration, which I wanted to see but I also just liked the female figure and was happy with that. There was one porn star I really liked, Jeanna Fine, she had these really big tits and short black hair.
I wanted to watch Playboy all of the time but it wasn’t that easy. I’m an only child and my parents liked to stay around the house so I didn’t have many opportunities to watch at home. I did have a best friend who was a year older than me and super cool. As a kid it is already super cool to hang out with someone older but this kid was particularly cool. One of the reasons I liked hanging out with him was his parents were really active and would go out so we could stay home and watch Playboy, which was the best.
His family had this big party when I was eight or nine with both kids and adults. At a certain point, all of the adults left and it was just me and all of these older kids. One of the boys asked, “What now? What do we do?”
I was like, “hello… of course we are going to watch Playboy.”
One of the guys said, “no, we are going to play cards” and they left the room. I had this flash of enlightenment of like oh, I totally understand what just happened. They didn’t want to watch Playboy because the young kid suggested it and it was socially unacceptable to do what the young kid proposed. I thought they were all so dumb because they are playing cards and I am watching the Playboy Channel, which is the best thing ever. So I ended up watching by myself and the rest of them went to play cards. I even remember the film airing that night. It was like some kind of naturistic thing that felt very 70’s.
That was the moment I had this realization that social pressure will make you throw yourself on your own sword and make you do what is actually not in your best interest.
Which is watching Playboy channel, obviously.
That experience was actually very formative for me, not just in terms of sexuality but how I try to live my life.
Mostly my sexual experiences were just getting really desperate. Fantasizing about girls I knew or sneaking around the house hoping to find my dad’s porn stash. He had one CD of porn and that was it. I was super disappointed that there wasn’t more.
With porn you always want more.
Fantasizing about the girls in my school became a big thing. I was a very good pupil but I would fantasize situations like “if so and so would have sex with me during the SATs but it meant I would have to bomb the test, would I accept that?”
Yeah, I totally would because it would be amazing.
Even though I was obsessed with watching Playboy I don’t ever remember having an erection. I was aware of the concept of masturbation but I never tried until I was fourteen.
Then I became obsessed.
I would masturbate a lot looking at stuff on the computer but my mom would always be in the kitchen or something so every time I heard her coming, I would have to stop. Which kind of sucks for your early sexual health. It gets you to a stage of having to come as quickly as possible, which later has to be unlearned.
I was also obsessed with Pamela Anderson. I would sit and using this primitive MS Paint program, not even Photoshop, try to draw her clothes off. Like actually draw her body onto her swimming suit or clothes.
I thought it would be awesome if Pamela Anderson was my mom so I could sleep in the same bed as her. I wouldn’t have sex with her or anything but if I had a super hot mom I could at least cuddle with her and it would be amazing.
There was also a brief time my parents thought I was gay I think, which is fair because a lot of people today still think that I am gay. I think it’s just because I’m effeminate and I didn’t have girlfriends.
My dad’s favorite game for a while was to speculate on what event or specific thing sparked my possible gayness. We would trace back to earlier and earlier experiencing trying to see if it was my “fault” or my moms. When I was sixteen, a friend of mine and I wore dresses to a performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, though it wasn’t until my mid twenties that I actually consciously did full on drag.
My parents then thought maybe it was because when I was ten,they signed me up with the opera so for a few years, I was singing professionally and surrounded by a lot of gay men. They would put us in these costumes and we would work together closely so I was really comfortable with gay people from very early on.
Then the blame got shifted back onto my dad because apparently he showed me the Rocky Horror Picture Show before I even remember. Apparently I was obsessed with the scene when Meatloaf drove the motorcycle into the castle. Once I watched the movie again as an adult, I expected that scene to be awesome but it was quite disappointing actually. Just someone going into the castle walls.
The final blame ended up finally going to my mom though because before I was born, my parents didn’t want to know if I was a boy or a girl so my mom bought me gender neutral green and yellow baby blankets.
I think our understanding of what makes a person gay or not has probably come a long way since the 80’s.
