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.

Rocky Elsom

Rocky Elsom is the captain of the Australian rugby team.

He's not pretty.  But he's kinda sexy, no?

My first guy was a rugby player, as well as a surfer.  So I find rugby players sexy, even though I know they're prolly homophobes and thickies.  That's called conditioning, peeps.

This usual disclaimer applies.  Not gay, not even happy. 

Labels

This is, wonderful to relate, the 200th post to this blog.   Well, youse people know I like to natter.  Thanks for listening to my rambles and rants.

Just thought I'd mention it.

This blog post made me think.  Always a dicey activity, no?  He's the bloke who started and now runs the Iomfats website.  (Thanks to Rock for reminding me of it).

A quote from the post:

Confession time.

I don't understand bisexuality. I'm homosexual, 30 years into a heterosexual marriage with a very beautiful woman, and we adore each other. We have a full marriage in all senses of the word, but I am homosexual, not even a smidgen bisexual. My wife is a glorious exception-event.  So I truly do not understand bisexuality.

Interesting.  I used also to describe myself as gay and married to a woman I love. I recently realized that I am probably bi, but at the gay end of the spectrum.  I had a kind of epiphany after reading a story by Neil Plakcy which I found very hot.  Now, you can't fool your cock ("so light, even a thought can lift it")   If you get hard, you're being turned on.  (I'm explaining this to virgins, gay, straight or in between, who somehow haven't realized this.  The rest of you know this already, right?)   So why, if you're gay and you can nevertheless get hard with a woman, do you go on calling yourself gay?

I did it because I was primarily gay. And I thought calling yourself bi was a cop-out, dishonest and in fact cowardly.  I thought that the world considered bi better than gay, and there was no way I was going to bottle out like that.  I was gay as fuck, dammit!  True, for a couple of years in my early twenties I only fucked men.  And then I met my lady, at a time when I was pretty pissed off at the cum-and-go culture.  She was so frigging beautiful, so clever and witty and just plain hot that giving up men was easy.  I hadn't found anyone to love, and I wanted to be more than a piece of meat.  I wanted to be loved.  And she loved me and I loved her, and it was wonderful.

Since then I have (at least to the outside world) been heterosexual.  But I still respond to men, to maleness, to male beauty.  I also respond to women and female beauty, but mostly I incline to the male side.  So what am I?  A gay man who got married to a woman (as Tim Trent describes himself), a straight man who went through a gay phase (a fricking long phase, acushla), or a bisexual?  You know what?  Who gives a flying foo-foo valve?  The labels mislead.

If you read Cross Currents you'll get the perspective of a mostly straight man and his relationships with other mostly straight men.  What are these blokes?  Gay?  Straight?  Bi?  Well, it's unimportant.  They are fond of each other.  They have sex with each other.  They also have sex with women.  Sometimes they're not fond of the women they fuck.  Sometimes they are.  The clichés, the labels, are damaging.  If you're gay you've gotta like musicals?  Be good at house decorating?  Wear coordinated clothes?  What a load of cobblers.  If you're straight you can't be tender and caring?  You can't love your best friend?  You can't like classical music or ballet or literature?   What utter, utter tosh.

This piece was posted a couple of months ago in The DB Files, Don Bellew's group:

It was a real-life "Brokeback Mountain" couple that Courier-Post staff
writer Robert Baxter met--though this was when Baxter was a young boy,
long before Annie Proulx wrote the story that filmmaker Ang Lee would
eventually turn into an affecting story of love between two shepherds
in the wilds of Wyoming and the life-long romance that followed.

In his Aug. 27 Courier-Post article, Baxter described meeting the two
cowboys, Bud and Manuel, at age "5, maybe 6," while at a county fair
with his grandmother. Baxter wrote of how the cowboys "looked like
real men. Lean, muscular, with big, calloused hands and strong faces,
tanned by the sun." Bud was a ranch owner; Manuel was his foreman; and
the two men shared a life, Baxter wrote. Indeed, although nobody in
the small California community where the men lived made an issue of
it, "everyone sensed Bud belonged to Manuel," and the pairing, Baxter
recalls, went over "as comfortably as Charlie and Mary or Harry and
Alice." 

(See more here)

Where do these manly gay blokes fit into the stereotypes?  It's all so much more complicated than the gay-haters believe.  In the end, we're people.  Sometimes we love people of the same gender, sometimes we love people of the other gender.  Sometimes we have sex with our own gender.  Or not.  And it doesn't follow that the love and sex necessarily have anything to do with each other.  It's more complicated than that.  And the labels ("You're so gay", "What a fruit", "He's a homo") are dangerous.  For everybody.  For the gays, who grow to hate themselves, for the straights who grow afraid to show affection to another man.  Some people are 100% gay (whatever that means)  Others 100% straight (define, please!)  And others, many many others, are somewhere on the line between, though we may call ourselves gay or straight or bi.  My invented term is "gay-shaded".  But even that is an unhappy descriptor.  Judge not lest ye be judged, everyone.   Set aside your preconceptions and prejudices.  It's much more nuanced and muddled than you thought.  Than I thought.

First Love

My first love was a surfer, with shoulders from here to here, a waist of just 26 inches, pecs to die for, and one of the most beautiful faces I've ever seen. Insecure, uncomfortable with men, gangly, geeky and plain, I fell head over heels for him when he showed some interest and kindness to me.

A local supermarket chain, Coles, has been using a 'celebrity chef', Curtis Stone, (whom I'd never heard of, but then I never watch television) to sell cheap but tasty meals. When I saw his pic up on a 2 metre high poster at the supermarket, my first thought was, holy fuck, it's _______. Only of course, it couldn't be. He and I were together over 35 years ago. And even though he's left scars on my heart and soul, he will also have got old like me, with grey in his hair and skin which has lost its elasticity. He will also find it harder to get up each morning and paradoxically harder also to sleep properly. But Curtis Stone looks so much like him that for a moment there I was once again 22 and deeply, passionately, hopelessly in love.

On closer inspection, he doesn't look exactly like my guy. But it's really, really close. My guy's hair was curly, but pretty much this colour, and he was tanned a golden brown because he was a surfer.

You never forget your first love, and I have to say mine left a shadow over my life for many, many years after we parted. I'm glad now that I have my lady. She's a much better person than he was. He would never have been a real partner, like she is. But _____ is still the first person I loved deeply.

And so, despite all the water under the bridge, it was disconcerting in the extreme to see 'my guy' large as life at the supermarket.

[Just for the record, I'm sure Curtis Stone is as screaming a hetero as you could hope to find anywhere.  Just because he appears in this blog, and looks like my guy, does not mean that I think he's gay or even 'happy']

Surfing

I used to love surfing. There's something unique and special about being on a board slicing through the glassy underside of a breaking wave. My first board was an eleven footer. These days they're shorter. I remember my first 7 foot board, bought for me second hand by my friends for my 21st birthday. I'm still in touch with two of them, one alas is dead and I've lost touch with the other.

I loved surfing for the sport, for the fresh smell of the sea, for the freedom, for the perfection of cool water on a hot day. Really. OK, I was also in love with -- let's call him Josh -- who was a extraordinarily beautiful bloke. Josh was a surfer too, intelligent, loved poetry and dope, and himself. All that self-directed admiration left little love over for me.

I don't surf any more. We live too far from the sea, and anyways, the water here's so cold you have to wear a wetsuit and that's just not the same as doing it in your fantastic baggies (alias boardshorts.) Here are two pics of very different surfies, one in fantastic baggies, the other in swim briefs (Aussiebums, I'd say). Of course, the surfies were another reason to go surfing. With all the paddling, surfing naturally gives you huge shoulders and arms and pectorals -- as you can see in these photos. You don't need to do weights work if you surf, and somehow the bodies created by surfing look better than those scuplted by weights.

I never admitted my attraction to surfers to myself. Ah, the poison of the closet.