My Sexual Education

I haven't had a whole lot of luck in my life.  But I think I've been pretty lucky in at least one thing, my own sexual awakening, if that's the correct term for it.  I can't remember when I learned about sex.  I feel like I've always known.  I can't remember when I realized that I was attracted to men, or ever thinking that was odd.  Growing up, my father never really made any attempt to shield me from R rated movies.  If he knew that I regularly visited his 3 foot high stash of porn magazines, he never let on.  By the time I moved back in with my mother, that ship had long since sailed.

My father had the greatest porn stash know to man, in my humble opinion.  Even today with the internet, I don't think my collection stacks up to his.  My favorite part of his collection was Penthouse, or even better, Penthouse Letters.  I couldn't, or didn't, orgasm yet, so I'd spend hours reading those stories with a rock solid hard-on.  Stories of random hookups between a man and a women, a man and two women, a woman and two men, I loved them all.  I can still remember vividly a story between one woman and two men, where the women decided that she just wanted to sit back and watch.  With the threat of ending the activity, she forced the men to continue without her.

Later, in my early teen years, I got a chance to visit that porn stash again.  I'd already moved in with my mom at the time, so my chances were limited to summer vacations.  He kept his collection fresh, so there was always something new to find.  I remember one warm summer afternoon, I was home alone flipping through his magazines.  I came across one that was a little different.  It felt thicker, more sturdy, but it was thinner than the others.  I pulled it out to look at it.  The pages were thicker, and much glossier, than the others..  There was no text, just a lot of high quality pictures of sex.  Of sex between two men. Through pictures, it played out a story where two young jock types met up in a locker room after a game, sucked each others cocks in a 69 position on the locker room bunch.  Then one guy ultimately fucked the other from behind, pounding him into the lockers.  This magazine became my new favorite.   But I never even gave it a second thought as to why it was in my Dad's porn stash.  Maybe I just assumed it belonged to his wife?  Maybe I just didn't think that it was odd to want to look at pictures of men having sex?  I just don't know.  If he were alive today, I would definitely ask him.

Should I come out as gay?  Honestly, that was not a question that got a lot of thought.  Sure, I sometimes thought that I was gay.  The pendulum swung that way.  By the time I was in High School, I was able to freely admit to myself that I had had crushes on other boys.  But I had crushes on girls too.  I reread some old journal entries from my freshman year.  One month I talked about a good friend of mine, how much I liked her, how much I really wanted to ask her out on an actual "date", which might ultimately lead to kissing her.  In another entry not much later I wrote in great length about a boy in my class.  By this point, I knew I was different, no doubt about that.  I knew enough not to go telling other people.  I never worried what my family might think.  We were no strangers to homosexuality.  I had a couple members in my family who were gay, and they happened to be the ones that were most liked.  They had more going for themselves than most every other member of my family.  I didn't want to come out as gay, because I was still attracted to women.  Bisexual was a term I knew, but not widely accepted.

But my point is that regardless of what I wanted others to know, I never had any issues being open and honest with myself.  And because I was attracted to women, as well as men, I never felt like I was living a lie.  I never struggled with my own identity.  I never worried about being accepted.  Through my swings, I would sometimes worry about making the right choices, but I was always comforted by knowing that my choices would be supported.  My own shyness kept me from experiencing everything I wanted to experience, not shame or denial.

TwoLives wrote about the Divided Bisexual Man in his blog.  He characterizes two types of bisexuals.  Those who can love and have sex with men and women freely.  And those who love women but crave sex with men.  I am, of course, paraphrasing and probably deserve correcting.  But I'm not sure if I really fit into either of these groups.  I can enjoy sex with women and, now I know, men.  I am in love with a woman.  But have had crushes and can see myself loving a man.  That would put in the first group.  But, my attractions to men and women are not equal, but it is fluid and changes over time.  I am thankful that I seem to be able to avoid some of the pitfalls of being in the second group.