Cos from Germany
I grew up in my own little bubble. My parents were quite liberal compared to the rest of the small, Catholic, German village I grew up in. Whenever I would go to friends’ houses, I always noticed things were much different. It was a little peek into how other people lived.
I regularly went to church, but I was never forced to go. It was this moral thing of I should go. At the time, I didn’t feel like church was a significant part of my upbringing but in retrospect, I can see it really was.
One of the first things I remember about my sex education was in 2nd grade, we got this book in school. It was all about the body and sexuality but it was still very connected to shame. I remember this intense feeling all over the schoolyard, everyone chasing the person who had the book, asking to look at it. I think my mom tried to have the talk with me as well, but it was easier to talk with my peers who were going through the same thing. We were excited about these new feelings and were able to explore it together without the embarrassment.
My very first sexual or sensual relationships were with friends when I was young. It was partly just curiosity. It was a very exciting thing but I also remember feeling extremely guilty about it. We were hiding under a blanket; why would we be hiding if what we were doing wasn’t shameful? One time my sister came into the room, not intentionally, and caught us. I was just like, ‘oh my god this is the worst thing, she is going to tell our parents!’ It’s interesting because I didn’t remember exactly what we were doing, but it was somehow more intimate than usual, and it was also with a girl, so I knew that wasn’t good. Maybe I already felt a little bit of queerness and was picking up on that people around me thought it wasn’t ok.
I also thought a lot about the idea that God is always watching you. He knows everything you think and do. When I first started exploring masturbation, I was so ashamed. I thought this was the worst thing and God hates me and he will punish me. Now when I think about it, it was actually quite bad. I knew I should stop, but it was always that thing of ‘ok, I’ll stop tomorrow.’ I remember especially with girls, it was this taboo thing. It took us years to admit openly that we also masturbated and that that was ok. For a long time, we would just pretend that girls didn’t do that. I think actually a lot of girls didn’t masturbate because they were so afraid of the stigma.
Funny enough, I talked more about masturbation with the boys in my class than the girls. I was terrified they would tell my girlfriends though. It was nice because they were so much more open. There was a lot of recognition and appreciation and also somewhat admiration because I was a girl who wanted to talk about these things.
What I really missed, what I later got, was seeing diversity of genitals and bodies. For a long time, I didn’t know that inside lips of the vulva could be bigger than the outside lips. I thought that God was punishing me for masturbating and maybe if I stopped, they would change. It took me a long time to even recognize that I was having these thoughts, and even longer to come to terms with them. It wasn’t until I heard an older woman in her fifties or sixties talking about it that I realized I wasn’t the only one. Sadly, even at her age, she thought the same thing. I am so happy now to be around and aware of such diversity.
One of the things that is probably the most unique about my story is how even from a young age, I had ideas about polyamory. I think for me it was something that made so much sense when learning about relationships. I don’t know where it came from at all though. You don’t see it much in the world, especially at that time. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I saw a documentary about a gay triad. I was fascinated. I had no idea how I could ever make that happen for my life but I knew I wanted it. That’s part of the reason I am so out and want to make things more visible for non-monogamy.
Because I grew up in a small town, it was more conservative but it was also more protected. I had a lot of time between when I started learning about these things and when I was ready to act. That helped a lot with not making me feel pushed, I could explore things a lot at my own pace. I remember one of the videos we were shown in sex ed class said, ‘your body is getting ready for reproducing but you decide on your own when you are ready for that.’
In the end, I think what really helped me get over any shame and uncertainty was that my mom has always been this center of unconditional love for me. I always knew I was loved and accepted growing up, and that helps a lot when you are dealing with conflicting messages from society. Also not being explicitly shamed about things was an important factor. There was almost never a direct, ‘hey we don’t talk about that.’ It was always these indirect vibes, which are much easier to break through.
When I went to high school, I was still the odd kid. The girls in my class all started to wear makeup, to care about how they looked and dressed, to have celebrity crushes, to care about if the boys liked them.
I started to voice this. I became a real teenage 
What if I never found anyone who would marry me? I would end up a sad, single woman with eleven cats that everyone laughed at. I worried a lot, but I never told anyone. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Maybe one day I would meet a boy I would fall in love with. But the idea always felt odd to me. Boys were stupid and childish; the thought of kissing one disgusted me. I didn’t really want to be with a boy, but I had to be, right?
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Don’t you want to kiss him or something?” I didn’t. He was nice and all, but kissing him. Yuck. That thought still didn’t feel right. Kissing was icky.
At the same time, I started to have feelings for my best friend. I spent almost a year in denial and kept telling myself everyone loved sleeping in their friend’s arms, everyone would share a bed on a school trip with their best friend, everyone felt all warm and soft and giddy about their best friend. But I noticed I didn’t feel like that about all my other wonderful friends, and most importantly, I have never felt this about a boy. I was convinced I could never feel this for a boy. All girls looked so beautiful and sweet and soft and lovely and I never thought any boy was more than mediocre-looking. Actually, I was even a bit afraid of boys, the thought of one actually liking me filled me with disgust and fear.
We worked so hard trying to separate all of them. My parents were traveling so a friend of my parents was looking after us. After school my sister and I spread out all of these wet pages all over the whole room. We just found it so interesting, looking from page to page. Then this friend of my parents came home and we said, “Oh we found something! Come and have a look!” We were so proud. In the first moment she was interested, oh what did you find? But her facial expression quickly changed to disgust and she said, “Oh no, you have to throw it away!” I thought why? It wasn’t sexual to us, it was just interesting to see all of these pictures. Still, I just threw it away and we never talked about it again. I don’t think she mentioned it to my parents either.
Then one friend gave it to another friend and then it was just gone. I felt so stupid, for five minutes you are the cool guy because you can say here is this magazine but then it’s gone.
I was also very proud that by thirteen years old, I was one of the first kids in my school to download porn off of the internet. My dad is a programmer so we had internet at home way before everyone else. This was around 1996 when the internet was very slow. I would download individual images onto a disk, a floppy disk, which had 3.2 megabytes. I had one other friend who had access to the internet so we would trade disks, each of which probably had only five pictures.
This time around it was much better though, I would use things like pens. I would try all sorts of things since, of course, I was too young to buy anything proper. I had a biology kit and there was a glass test tube in there so I used that for a long time. Which in retrospect… Oh god… I even left it in the shower once and it was still there a day later. My parents never really interfered with that at all.
I have no idea how I thought about gay or straight but looking back, it was never a big deal to me. I was never worried if I was gay or straight. To me, being gay wasn’t something negative or something that mattered all that much. There was sex with whoever was hot and there were hot people of any sex. I didn’t care so much what their configuration was. I think this says a lot about my parents, they were really an island of liberalism in a conservative society.
My parents also played a bit with non-monogamy but I didn’t realize that until I was much older. They met another couple down at the nude beaches and were dating them for a long time. We would see this other couple quite often, one year we even went up to their place in Northern France. We knew them and really liked them; they had kids around our age as well. All in all, there are extremely positive memories of these holidays and of these people.
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.
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.
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.
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?
ough, when I was probably six, we were looking in the dumpsters and found a bunch of porn magazines. I took one or two upstairs and put them in my Nintendo box. A week or two later, there were more, a lot more. It was packed with magazines, like hundreds of magazines. Some were soft-core, the kind that you could buy at every grocery store where it’s just naked bodies and some funny, kind of sexy “girl next door” stories.Then others had hard-core porn, like BDSM magazines. There were fetish, gangbangs, full on things. I remember at that time I was confused that people would do that, just why? Is this sex? Why are there five people in her body? I don’t get it. Is this how you make babies? What is the point of all of this? Of course not being able to talk to my mom about things like this, my friends and I just came up with our own theories. We were still very childish, laughing about it, ”haha I saw her nipple, oh look, he does this and that to her.
There was a constant stream of new magazines, hundreds every month. Every day we would look in the dumpsters and every week or two there would be a new batch of them. This dude must have had a massive fetish. I always imagined the magazines came from an old pervy man who would be really angry if he found out I was stealing his magazines. I thought he had to put them there because he was embarrassed himself and didn’t want anyone to know he had them. I remember being afraid of this person; some kind of dangerous old porn man.
questions to anyone who would actually have answers because it was still forbidden stuff that only adults were allowed to look at. But I realized I was very fond of certain 
I would stay up the night before looking through them all, picking out the best pictures in every magazine. I remember being really organized with post-its and everything. Then I would lay them out in a nice way and we would charge a cover for people to see the “peep show.” I would lay out all of these magazines organized really well and open to the best pages. We had to make groups at the end because there were so many people that wanted to come. We charged one 
