The threat of “turning gay”

Patrick from Germany

“Shame is the worst part of human sexually. It’s a normal feeling but really strong, especially as a kid. Everything that you don’t think is totally normal seems really out there and horrible.”

As a kid, I had this big tiger stuffed animal and at some point I realized if I rubbed my crotch on it in a certain way, I got a nice sensation. I starting rubbing on the tiger like this all of the time. Even if I didn’t fully realize what I was doing, I knew it was not something I should tell my parents. I knew there was something wrong or at least not allowed in what I was doing but I am not sure where I got that idea.

I knew I could talk to my brother though and I was so proud of my discovery that I told him and encouraged him to try it. We never did it together or in the same room but he later told me that he tried and thought it was great.

I kept that tiger until I was eighteen but eventually I started to be ashamed of it. Plus, I had used it so much that the fuzz on one side of the tiger was totally flat and rubbed off. At some point, my parents also noticed that the wear of the fur was super uneven. Maybe they just thought I laid on that side a lot.

I first questioned if what I was doing with the tiger was ok when I was eight. Actually, I started to wonder if what I was doing made me gay. I didn’t actually know what being gay meant; I just knew that being gay was something weird or unusual and what I was doing was both of those things. The threat of this possibly turning me gay concerned me, but not enough to make me stop.

A few years later, still using the tiger quite a bit, I started to get a hard-on when I would start this rubbing and not long after that, I ejaculated for the first time. It was at that point that I started to realize this was serious and in the category of sexual interaction. I would get embarrassed when I would think of what I was doing as sexual pleasure instead of just an innocent game or sensation. Again, I got the feeling that I had to stop and so did my brother. I told him he we couldn’t do this anymore because it made us gay and he just went with it, without knowing exactly what being gay was either. I think maybe I still thought it had something to do with touching yourself.

Of course I eventually discovered what being gay actually meant and realized that no, it’s nothing close to what I thought it was.

Figuring out what gayness actually meant turned it from something that I was afraid of to something that I could use. In school, I wasn’t a total loser or anything but I would get made fun of sometimes in the ways that groups of boys tease each other. I figured out early on though that when I got picked on, I could “play gay” and it gave me a way to scare off the kids that were bullying me. I didn’t understand at the time why this scared them but I see now they were just homophobic. From then on, whenever I was bullied, I would play this stereotypical gay caricature and the boys would get weirded out and leave. This was my way out, my way to get rid of them so I wouldn’t be physically attacked anymore.

Another big influence for me was Bravo, a German magazine for teenagers, which rides a thin line between a kids magazine and a porno magazine.

There was a section where kids could write in and ask questions about different topics within health and sexuality and the answers were really clear and educational. Readers could also send in a naked photo of themselves totally natural, no make up or whatever else, along with a short interview answering some questions like: when did you first have sex, when did you start to masturbate and things like that. Reading these gave me my first idea of what sexuality really was and taught me that you don’t have to be a beauty queen to be attractive or loved.

There were some beautiful people who sent their pictures in of course but there were also a lot of non-standard beautiful people. The market for this magazine is kids between twelve and sixteen years old so it’s especially important for people that age to see that and realize, “I am not ugly.”

Since this was before internet porn, being able to see these pictures was also exciting because it was one of the few ways to look at naked people.

Thanks Playtex

Before, I could only steal the underwear and lingerie pages from my parent’s shopping catalogs. Bravo was the first time I could see genitalia and more importantly, people of my own gender and age so I could compare what was happening with our bodies. I was really interested in what was going on with others because one of my testicles is quite a bit lower than the other and while I know now that it is totally normal, as a child I thought that made me disabled.

Another big experience is something that I don’t really know how to define but I think is important in this context because I imagine a lot of people must have similar feelings about things that happened to them as kids.

I have a cousin who is ten years older than me and when this happened he was probably fifteen so in the middle of puberty. We were both kids and didn’t really know what we were doing.

Starting when I was about five years old, we would play this boat game when we saw each other. I would be the sailor and he would be the boat and would rock back and forth while I would try not to fall off. One time while playing, I think by accident, he got a boner and he told me it was a stick to navigate the ship. I took a hold and was moving the ship left and right with it. It’s kind of funny because for sure I wasn’t touching it gently but maybe it was nice for him.

We played the game several times over the years but eventually it stopped I think because he got older and realized what he was doing.

I don’t feel that this was a negative experience that damaged or traumatized me in any way but it’s something that I find to be pretty in between. You shouldn’t do that when you are fifteen but it’s still kind of a gray zone. I wonder if other people had similar things happen to them where it left them wondering where that line is.

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September 8, 2017 TAGS: Bravo, Bravo Magazine, bullying, childhood, Children, gay, Germany, learning about sex, learning about sexuality, masturbation, orgasm, pleasure, sexuality, shame, stories, what is being gay, youth BY: stumbling

Stories

The first kid to discover masturbation

A. from Germany

The showerhead at my parent’s house had a massage function where the water would pulsate and one day, the water hit my penis by accident and I realized it was really nice. I never actually masturbated with the water, it was nice, but not nice enough to keep on doing it. This experience did however, get me curious about what else I could use for this kind of sensation.

My parents had a massage device that looked a bit like an iron and it had different covers that you could use to make it feel different. The function that I liked the most felt like a hand rubbing back and forth really fast. At one point while using it, I put it on my crotch and realized it was way better than the showerhead. That primed me in a lot of ways; even today I prefer masturbating with a flat hand on my penis like the massager did. It’s super quirky and I found the fact that I masturbated differently than other people really shameful for a long time. As a guy, you are supposed to jerk off in a certain way.

I was using the massager a lot, probably more than my parents were, and since it was kept in my parents’ room, I used it in there a lot of the time. At one point, it even got so hot that the side of it burned and turned browned a little bit. I probably took off a few years of life expectancy on that thing but on the other hand, I put it to good use.

For most of the time that I was doing this, I wasn’t very careful about my mom seeing what I was doing with the massager because I thought she had no idea what I was doing. I was convinced I was the first person to discover masturbation, because I am so smart right?

Obviously she eventually figured out what I was doing and the massager got locked away in the drawer. I don’t think it was because my parents were against their kid masturbating, but were against their kid masturbating with their back massager. Eventually I found the key to the drawer though and continued to use it.

I was using the massager so much at one point that I eventually I made it into a challenge to see how fast I could get myself off. My personal record was ten seconds. It’s kind of funny because these days, I’m really hard to get to orgasm, at least with other people. The other thing is what I experienced pre-puberty, I would not call an orgasm. I just put the massager on my crotch and it got nicer and nicer and at some point, it instantly became too intense and unpleasant and I knew it was time to put it away. A couple of times I tried to push through the weird sensation to see what would happen and it would just continue to be unpleasant. It was not like an adult orgasm, not an explosion.

As a kid I was also pretty morbid and thought a lot about what happens after you die, maybe because my grandma died when I was six or seven. I thought if I died, I needed to share this discovery. I imagined myself falling from a building and at the last minute shouting,

“Do you know what you can do with your penis!?”

In the last minutes before dying, I thought I have to at least shout a testament or something. There are a few things that need to be said before I go.

Along that thread of things I misunderstood in life, I totally pitied girls because they didn’t have a penis, therefore, they couldn’t masturbate right? It’s just not there those poor things! Also, no penis means nothing to pee out of, so I thought girls just had a cloacae like birds, where pee and poop come out of the same orifice. Obviously I was slightly confused to eventually find out otherwise.

Once I got a little bit older, around the time of puberty, I decided it would probably be fun to shove things up my butt while I was masturbating. I was a smart kid, but not the smartest about my choices of what to use; so I used a tampon. An unwrapped one, without lube. In other words, it didn’t get very far. Later on I discovered candles are really great. I used them a lot and put them in a plastic bag under my bed when I was done. I never disposed of them but one day, the bag was gone

I’m not sure I want to know what exactly my parents thought was going on when they found the bag.

Learning about Sex

I come from a very conservative and religious part of Germany. There are still differences between former East and West Germany and one of these differences is that in the West, religion is subtly everywhere. There was a cross in every classroom, or if not every, at least in most. You never notice it though, it’s just decoration, I was never really bothered by them. It’s completely natural and you don’t think about it much until you speak with people from Eastern Germany and they are like, what in the fuck are you talking about?

In the West, every child gets assigned either Protestant or Catholic at birth and that classification is on your official government records. There are exceptions, but in my class of around thirty kids, there was only one boy who did not have a designation thrust upon him by his parents. Then once you are in school, religion is a mandatory subject. All of the kids get separated, Protestants in one room and Catholics in another, and every year from something like third grade until tenth, you take a religion class.

It’s also a stereotype, but it was also true for my school, that the religion teachers are pretty cool guys. They were fun and never told us masturbation was a bad or anything like that. It was mostly just learning about the Bible, other world religions and cults. One of our lessons was even on Scientology as a cult, which was a cool lesson. Surprisingly, religion and sex don’t have any crossover in my brain.

There was also a bit of information about sex and sexuality in “Bravo,” a German magazine for teens, but I always hated the magazine because it was pop culture and I was always into counter culture.

In school, people told me they admired me about my “no fucks given,” attitude; but at the same time, I was only avoiding people because I was afraid they were going to hate me anyway, so I wasn’t really above things, I was just never really into peer groups. You do your thing and I’ll be over here being lonely.

Even though I hated this magazine, I was really grateful for these three pages of letters to the Sex Ed team. There were all kinds of questions and stories about all different kinds of sexual topics that were made to be super straight forward. These stories and bits of information really changed how I felt about what I was doing.

It was this really stereotypical message about how “it’s totally normal,” but I really enjoyed getting that message and I think it was important in how I grew to view my own sexuality.