What is Love?
On Male Sex & Sexuality
We listened to Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer,” over and over again on a plastic, red and yellow Fisher-Price record player. It was my first sleepover. We were first-grade classmates. I don’t remember his name. Jacob, maybe. Perhaps Adam. I remember what he looked like: big, brown eyes, sandy hair, skin a shade darker than mine.
Then we got bored.
It began with a game of “house.” I don’t remember who suggested it. I remember, in that moment, passively acquiescing, either to his or my own idea. I don’t recall which role I took, of “mommy” or “daddy,” or “husband” or “wife,” but roles we certainly played. Somehow we ended up naked, doing what we perceived a did in a house, when alone, or when we children had gone to bed. I don’t think I initiated this, for I don’t think I had any conscious concept then for what naked bodies could do. Looking back, I cannot account for how my friend would have known, either, unless he had walked in on his parents, yet it is clear we played a very old and unconscious game, one imbedded in the very fibers of our beings.
Alas, the boy’s mother came upstairs, found us rubbing each other’s backs and pretending to kiss, more like rubbing our noses together, and we were scolded and I was sent home. I remember the silence of the drive, my parents did not speak to me, then or ever, about the incident. No one helped me to process it, and I don’t recall ever seeing that boy again. I question whether it really happened, or if I’d dreamt it.
In the end I know it happened, for as my mother drove me home that night, I remember feeling shameful and guilty — feelings that have never abated. I had clearly done something wrong, something punishable by the shaming force of silence. I have no idea what my mother and father thought, how they felt, or what their intentions were regarding what happened, what it all might have meant for me. I was like a child punished at school by being forced into the corner, with no real understanding of why.
I could only think and feel that there was something unutterably wrong with me.
I remember feeling physically attracted to a person early in life. I suppose you could say this is the way the gods and goddesses made me. I can’t say for certain what I felt for my kindergarten teacher was sexual attraction, but I do remember a deeper feeling and desire for her physical body, her presence, her touch. I still remember her features, her lipstick, her scent. I remember wanting her, everyday, to kiss me. I know I thought I was in love with her, but I also know, now, that physical attraction, sexual desire, and love, are not the same things.
Besides my kindergarten teacher, there were certainly girls I liked when I was young. Cindy and Annette come to mind. Then there was the media all around me, at my house or my friends’ houses, like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, or even the sex scenes in movies like The Terminator, between Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn, or between Woody Harrelson and Rosie Perez in White Men Can’t Jump. I remember wanting to know what that felt like, to have a woman’s body grinding and writhing on top of me, my fingers fondling the hard nipples of a full breast, not to mention what I imagined my elementary-school self could do with the women in Sir-Mix-A lot’s “Baby Got Back.”
But these girls and women seemed unreal and inaccessible to me, not in the ways the media portrayed and continues to portray them. It wasn’t nearly as easy with the girls as it was with the boys. This was all before Pride Month was celebrated nationally, before libraries and stores in the shopping malls had LGBTQIA+ friendly displays. Had I known about bi-sexuality then, had someone told me I was not a shameful, guilty sinner, as my mother’s Jehovah Witness congregation most certainly agreed, maybe I wouldn’t have taken the path I did: of porn-fueled-hyper-heterosexuality, of sexual objectification, of lust and a lack of sexual intimacy, of guilt and shame. And I am now beginning to understand these two encounters and their aftermaths as, ultimately, the catalysts for what has led me down the path of unhealthy sexual behaviors, and, most importantly, confused and unfulfilled sexual identity and human connectivity.
It perhaps should have come as no great shock that a similar scene to my failed first sleepover would play out a few years later, this time with more severe consequences for me. A neighborhood boy up the street a few houses, Brandon, who was also in the fourth grade, propositioned me, asked one summer day if he could see and touch my penis. He wanted to “play with my ding-a-ling,” he had said. I have no idea what I was thinking, or, more importantly, how I was feeling, for I had no one to safely confide in, no one to talk to. Everyone in my family was busy with their own lives, their own internal and eternal dramas. I don’t know if I even remember, let alone replayed, what happened when I was six. I do remember knowing enough not to tell anyone, I had learned about silence, and I also remember taking a day to think about the request before saying yes. I don’t know why I said yes, perhaps out of loneliness, or curiosity, or boredom. Or, most likely, a mixture of all three.
So, I suggested we meet in the cluttered garden shed in my backyard. I pulled down my athletic shorts and he reached and touched the tip, then pulled out his. I couldn’t help but notice how small his was compared to me, how different and strange his looked, how strange his hands felt on me. And just as I reached out for him, his fingers still fondling and exploring me, my older brother, a nemesis, really, one who bullied and tormented me mercilessly, slid open the rusted garden shed door with a horrific grinding screech, and saw the whole affair.
“Hey everybody! Johnny and Brandon are in here playing with each other’s peckers! They’re touching each other’s dicks!” He shouted and ran off, immediately sharing the news with the entire neighborhood: my other older siblings, the older neighborhood boys and girls they were friends with, and their parents, like some town crier of old, selling the day’s hottest and juiciest news.
The guilt and shame radiated in me like the heat of that summer sun bearing down on the metal garden shed. And, once again, no one spoke to me about the incident. But, this time, I heard what was said about me, the whispers (thank the universe it was summer and there was no school), and, again, I don’t recall ever seeing Brandon again.
So, I buried and forgot, and in the 6th grade my family moved from Texas to New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment and male machismo, and I started at a new school. It was a terribly rough and horrible transition from the start. I was bullied for being white, for being blonde, for being from Texas. But, things got better when popular and pretty Alexis first wrote me a note and started to take an interest in me. She, an already full-bodied young female, physically developed and mature, who attracted much older males from the small town’s high school (now that I make this point, it astounds me that no one thought these age differences to be problematic, for no one said anything, and it seemed to be encouraged, perhaps written off as life in a small town.) Anyhow, Alexis would write me a note, saying, “meet me by the water fountain,” and she would leave. I would wait a few moments and then ask to go to the restroom. Once in the hallway, we would make out passionately for a few minutes, hungrily rub each other’s bodies, then go back to class. These sessions filled me with such joy and pleasure that I couldn’t wait for more. I am certain I became addicted to them, to the feeling, yet I was convinced that I was in love with her. But nothing else would happen, despite my hungry desires for more. So when, predictably, she grew tired of me, of my immature needy clinginess, and I lost out to the older, more mature boys, I first contemplated and attempted suicide.
From there, through puberty and adolescence, it was Playboy and Hustler magazine and the soft-core porn my father watched on Showtime and Cinemax, or the hardcore porn of my brother’s friends, like Bonnie & Clyde’s Wild Ride. I remember the first time I saw an up-close photo of a woman’s vagina in Penthouse, some stills of a “lesbian” scene (for I know, now, woman-on-woman scenes in porn are far from the sex actual lesbians, or anyone, really, for that matter, actually have), and immediately felt like the vagina was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. But that’s exactly all the image was — a thing — detached from the actual woman whom the labia and clitoris belonged. It was the same for every other part of every body in the magazine, all severed from the real human beings being sexually objectified for my sexual gratification. And given my previous experiences, I deluded myself that any penises I saw weren’t there, or, worse, fell into the fantastical trap designed by the porn producers, that the penises involved were mine. And when my first real sexual experience with a female came two years later, nervous, clueless, and numb, I couldn’t get an erection. Word spread all around the school that I “couldn’t get it up,” and from there, the guilt and shame festered and rooted even further within me. All this emotional and spiritual destructiveness for the extremely fleeting release and escape of the orgasm.
I will spare the reader further details of my depravity, for they are depressing, devastating, and outright embarrassing. I already feel rather vulnerable and uneasy with putting all this down on the page. But, looking back, as I try to de-program myself from these traumas and darkness, only now do I realize the full impact of all I lost, all I was forced to forfeit. I was a child who was simply exploring my sexual organs, playing with sexuality and sexual identity, with others just like me, and no one ever discussed these things with us. And it is because of all this silence, shame, and guilt, most of us, generation after generation—have never learned, never known—the magical beauty of our minds and bodies, or how to use them as conduits for the expression of sexually intimate love.
It is of no comfort that I am not alone. What do we as a nation think happens when our youth receive no sex education (or an extremely poor one) save what they learn from media, as I did, initially, from Linda Hamilton and Rosie Perez. Or, worse, from Pornhub? What do we expect to happen when the average age in which boys become exposed to hardcore pornography is now age 13 (some say 11), and getting younger? What do we expect when generations of young males, those who aren’t too anxiety-ridden or technology-addicted, to even speak to someone else, think sex must involve the extreme depravity they see in mainstream hardcore pornography?
We get exactly what we see today, particularly on the internet and social media. We get the normalization of sexual brutality and rape culture. We get homo and transphobia (see the “no homo” and the viral Tik Tok, “I’m super-straight” meme). We get the mainstreaming of pornography, child-sex trafficking, and the continued degradation and depravity of the complete human being. We get males who can’t naturally get erections, and the subsequent capitalization of male sex performance enhancement. We get females, who, like my mother, don’t understand their bodies, who never, or rarely, have orgasms, who think their sexual existence revolves around male pleasure at their own minimization. And we get a sad, lonely, loveless existence, devoid of any real or meaningful intimacy or connection.
Actually, I must correct this record, because it is not true that I have never learned to love. For I am now in love with a woman who understands and accepts me, totally and completely, for who I am. But it isn’t easy for her, for she has a deeper desire for sexual intimacy beyond physical sexual intercourse, beyond orgasms. She wants a higher spiritual connection through a truly connected mental, spiritual, and physical intimacy, one connected to our natural world and worlds beyond, realms unseen. And she wants to make actual love, to perform tantric or ecstatic love-making, or what she calls “soul merging.” And I am learning and trying, but it is difficult — for the brainwashing a male goes through in this country and world is immeasurably strong. She knows about my past, the porn, about my repressed bi-sexual identity. I have no desire to explore that part of my sexuality anymore, for I have no desire for an open relationship, either. I desire her: mind, body, soul. She is my beloved, and I hers.
And I also take heart in knowing I once loved a young man. I will name him André, for we both loved André 3000 from Outkast. He, a beautiful soul-spirit, tried to woo me, and I almost gave myself to him, yet I resisted, ultimately succumbed to my programming, socialization, and fear, rather than surrendering to my heart. But, I truly loved André as a human being. And I know he loved me.
It has taken me 40 years to get here, and I can’t help but wonder what traumas we have wrought upon ourselves, to each other, to the world — and why? What have we learned or gained through all this guilt, shame, and toxic masculinity? All in the name of a lust and longing we have perilously mistaken for love.
