My First Time

I've already talked about the guy I fell in love with, long ago.  He gave me my first blowjob, and I reciprocated (so to speak).  It seemed obvious to me that I was gay: after all, I'd fallen in love with and had sex with another man.  A victim of the tightly confining logic of either-or, I was convinced that I couldn't possibly be bisexual.  You had to be one or the other, gay or straight.  You couldn't -- Heaven forfend! -- find both sexes attractive and desirable.  It took me a while to get over this nonsense.

But since I was (I believed) a homo, I felt that I had better learn how to be a proper homo.  I didn't much care for the clichéd image of a homo prevalent in films and books and general culture of the time, though even here, I felt the need to stand up for the right to be me.  I took up ballet, and made a point of telling everyone about it!  However . . . .  everyone knew that homos only made love by having anal sex.  My first guy and I hadn't done that, and so, after he dumped me, I decided, as I was embracing the whole gay identity thing, that I'd better find out what it was all about.  When I look back on the me of forty years ago, I'm kinda touched by my militant enthusiasm.  I was emphatically gay; I saw nothing wrong with it; it seemed to me that society and religion had got it all wrong; and that to pretend I was anything other than gay was dishonest, immoral, shabby and cowardly.

With this exemplary moral fervour, I set out to lose my virginity.  I was staying in a flat in a high-rise in Cape Town's Gardens suburb at the time (having moved out of the decrepit old house I was sharing with my guy) and I'd seen a guy around, who spent a lot of time eyeballing me.  He was not the sort of man I'd normally go for, old, very queeny, skinny, and balding with a comb-over.  But when needs must  . . .  In those days, I still had a lot of residual homophobia, convinced that real gays ought to be as macho and male as straights.  The multiple subtleties and tribes of gaydom were unknown to me, which wasn't really surprising since I didn't know any gay men, and wasn't a part of the gay "scene".  So I rather despised him.  I've learnt to be more accepting since.  Poor old bugger.  I noticed him a couple of years later wistfully (knowing he didn't stand a chance) eyeing a group of handsome young men.  I pretended not to know him.  The casual cruelties of youth.

Anyway, he ogled me and I made with the nods and becks and wreathèd smiles and we ended up in his flat, and one thing led to another and I finally found out what it was like to bottom.  A big flat blah.  It didn't hurt, it just felt a bit weird.  The earth didn't move for me: in fact the guy fell asleep after he'd come inside me (no condoms in those pre-AIDS days) and I had to bring myself to orgasm.  It hardly seemed worth the trouble.

The next day was my graduation ceremony, and I sat in the great hall and at lunch after with my parents revelling in the fact that now I was a real homo.  Good grief!  Was I ever that young?  It seems so.