I was born in the early 50s and went through puberty in the
60s (I had my first masturbatory orgasm shortly after the
premiere of the original Star Trek TV show ;-> ), and the
degree of my ignorance surrounding the whole subject of
sex must be inconceivable to somebody growing up in the
age of the World Wide Web (except maybe for Mormons ;-> ).
But even in those days, the ignorance, fear, and shame
might possibly have been less intense for a boy with brothers,
or a boy who got along with his father better than I did, or
who was better-integrated into his cohort of male peers
than I was. Or maybe not. I guess I'll never know.
I can remember when I was 4 or 5, before I had to go to
school, taking an afternoon nap one day next to my mother
in my parents' bedroom in our suburban house. I had
been looking at a kids' picture-book earlier that day,
and even then there were certain images that were
exciting to me in a way that I would now call erotically-
charged. (Finding and eliminating all images that might
have an erotic potential for any kid anywhere would probably
require forbidding altogther the practice of illustrating
childrens' books -- which is I guess what orthodox Muslims believe
anyway: that it's sacrilegeous to depict Allah's creatures!)
So I'd been looking at a book of fairy-tales or something, and it
had pictures of people in medieval-style tight breeches,
with lots of leg -- prominent calves -- and hints
of buttock. And the little five-year-old pervert that
was me got turned on. And later, in bed at naptime,
pulling the covers over my head, I somehow found myself with
my pants down, flipping my soft penis back and forth with an index
finger while thinking about those pictures and staring
at the calf of my own leg. I must have known, even then,
that this was something that had to be done under the
covers and out of sight. And then my mother, wondering what the
hell I was up to, yanked the covers back and saw me _in flagrante_,
and yelled at me "Wait til I tell your father what
you've been doing!" I was terrified, and waited all day
for my father to come home from work and for the other
shoe to drop, and then nothing happened. (I'm sure the
conversation took place, and I can imagine my father's
reaction: "Oh, for crying out loud, he's a **boy**!"
But nobody bothered to defuse the situation **for me**.)
I never connected this incident to the innocent teasing
games that I sometimes played with my parents over the
kitchen table, asking them "Where do babies come from?"
and getting the inevitable answer "You'll find out when
you're older." And repeating the question more
insistently "But I want to know now!" and getting the
same answer until they got tired of the game and yelled
at me to knock it off and go play.
Some years later -- from the music I remember on the
radio I think I must have been 9 (Chubby Checker was singing
"Let's twist again like we did last summer" ;-> ) --
I spent a few weeks during the summer with my country
cousins, daughters of my father's older brother, one
the same age as me and one a couple of years older.
It was the first time I'd spent a substantial period
of time away from home, and I was proud that
I managed it with a minimum of crying at night from
homesickness. My cousins did not live in a suburban development
with endless concrete sidewalks and asphalt streets,
but in a place where there were wild raspberries
to gather, and a creek with minnows and watercress.
I was recruited as part of the housework brigade
too, and under my cousins' direction I managed to
clean a toilet all by myself, which I thought was
pretty cool. But the most memorable experience of
that visit was when my youngest cousin (and we
were both pre-pubescent, remember) was getting
dressed one morning and I caught a glimpse of her
naked groin. And there was nothing there except
a slight vertical fold. I was flabbergasted!
"What's that?" I asked as she hastily covered herself.
"Can I see?" And she deigned to give me another
quick glimpse. This was the cause of a great deal
of hilarity on the part of my cousin -- "You mean
you **don't know** that girls are different from
boys down there?" And the truth was -- no, it had
never occurred to me. For all I knew, a penis
is just a thing to pee through, and I had had
no prior reason to think that girls didn't have
one too. My cousin wasn't cruel about it, but the
startling discovery cast a pall over the rest
of the visit, for me. We went to a lakeside
beach that afternoon, and I remember that the
whole time I worried, with a kind of sick feeling
in the pit of my stomach, that there would be
unpleasant consequences to my discovery -- that
my cousin would tell my uncle and aunt what I had
asked her to show me, or that my own parents
would find out, or **something** bad.
I don't think I connected this discovery about female
anatomy with another incident I remember, which
may have taken place earlier or later, I don't
know. There was a boy -- a rough-and-tumble
"red-blooded" boy named Gerry G. who was two grades
ahead of me and who lived across the street.
Sometimes -- presumably in earlier grades -- I would tag
along with him and a group of neighborhood kids on the walk
to school in the morning -- the local elementary
school was on the main road with the churches
and shopping center that ran through the middle
of the suburban development we lived in.
And one day Gerry was being "a man" by telling his pals
an off-color story. I found this kind of thing
threatening -- not because I was a prude, necessarily,
but because I knew it was stuff that adults wouldn't
like ("transgressive," a pomo theorist would say ;-> )
and I was innately afraid of where that kind of
thing might lead. so anyway, he was spinning this kids'
pornographic tale of sitting in class and seeing up a teacher's
skirt under her desk and catching a glimpse of
her "pussy". I had no idea what "pussy" meant,
but I was struck by the way Gerry salivated around
the word, as if he had a mouthful of fresh chewing
gum.
And then there was the time that I, completely inadvertently
and innocently, put my foot through the hornet's nest of
sex in a way that got the neighbors up in arms.
When I was 10 or 11, give or take, I started getting
kids' illustrated science books as gifts (wonderful books, like
the kids' version of the Time/Life coffee-table book
_The World We Live In_, or _The Wonders of Life on Earth_).
Anyway, one of them was called _The Human Body_
(in fact, it was exactly this book:
http://img0.etsystatic.com/000/0/5888370/il_fullxfull.287287604.jpgAmazing, how you can reconstruct your past from the Web nowadays. ;-> )
So at that stage, while I knew a bit more about "where babies
come from" -- I knew there was a sperm, and an egg, and a
zygote, and a blastula, and a gastrula, and all the stages
of fetal development -- I was nevertheless still completely
ignorant about the role of the vagina, and the penis that gets erect,
and penetration, thrusting, orgasm, and ejaculation.
The "fun stuff". ;-> I think I had a theory for
a while that "catching a sperm" was
something like catching a cold -- that if people lived
close together a sperm could be transmitted like a virus.
Or maybe you had to kiss somebody. Or sleep in the same bed.
I didn't think it through very clearly. I don't think I even
knew the "scientific" word "penis" at that time -- I'll
spare you the ridiculous word my mother used for the
organ. (Hm... did she make it up, or did it come from
some tradition or other? I should try to find out one of
these days.) I still can't bring myself to tell anyone that odd
word my mother used. (I actually heard it used as a personal
name on a TV show once, so maybe it's a real word with a real
history); but it nevertheless wasn't as bad as the name used by
my other (male) cousins' mother -- "Tinker Bell". Can you imagine
seeing Peter Pan (or anything with a Disney intro containing the
trademark green-skirted fairy) without turning beet-red after
an entire childhood spent thinking of your penis as your
"Tinker Bell"? (I can guess the etymology -- "Tinker"
from "tinkle" as in "urinate"; "Bell" possibly because
the glans looks like an inverted bell, cf. "[ding] dong".)
I didn't learn the "manly" street word "cock"
until I was much older -- school kids used the word "dick"
(which oddly enough, still has the most erotic charge for me),
and the myriad other words I learned much later.
"Cock" and "dick" still seem to be the ones heard most
often in porn dialog.
Anyway, so at the time I had acquired this kids' book
about the human body, there was a little girl who used
to come over to my house named Debbie B. I think
she was a year or two younger than me, and lived a
few houses down from us. The family had a slightly
foreign air -- I think the father may have been
ex-military, and the mother was French. They had
a big old black Citroën, with running boards (the car
was non-functional, I think, a never-completed restoration
project) parked in the street in front
of their house. Little Debbie spoke with a bit of
an accent, but I don't think she actually knew
much French -- she once told me that "bateau" means "boat",
but she didn't know too many other words. I presume
the family was Catholic.
I had become something of a know-it-all science
nerd by then, and I remember one
conversation that took place in our back yard
where my parents had installed a swing-set and
sliding board. We were using the sliding board,
and I asked Debbie if she knew why the grass was
green. And she said "Because God made it that way."
And I said "No, it's because it has chlorophyll
in it." So in that spirit, one day she had
come over, and we were hanging out in the carport,
and I brought out _The Human Body_ and showed it
to her. I don't remember particularly dwelling
on the chapter about human reproduction (which in any
case **starts** with the fertilized egg and
leaves out the scurrilous preliminaries -- although,
come to think, there may be **very** oblique
allusion to them in a single sentence along the lines of
"after a man and a woman have embraced") -- but that's
the part that stuck with little Debbie, apparently
(and not so surprisingly, in retrospect). So
she went home and started asking her parents questions.
And her parents were not at all amused. Her father
marched up to our door (I was not a witness to
that scene, fortunately) to express his displeasure
and demand that my parents reveal to him everything
that I had been telling his daughter. So
then (after Mr. B had departed -- I never had to face
Debbie's parents directly) **my** parents (who were none
too enlightened themselves) gave **me** the third degree.
Debbie had apparently used the phrase "kiss and swell
up", and so my parents wanted to know what **I**
knew about this "kiss and swell up" stuff, and what
I had said about it to little Debbie. Fortunately, it didn't
take me long to realize that all this must have something to
do with the book I had recently shown her, so I
got out the book and showed the relevant chapter
to my parents (which got me off
the hook as far as any serious blame or punishment
from my own parents was concerned, but didn't spare
me the emotional fallout from what was to follow),
and my mother (brave woman, I suppose, but not
quite brave or enlightened enough) took the book
and marched down to the Bs' house, only to have
the door unceremoniously slammed in her face. And
that was the end of all our interaction with the Bs --
Debbie and I were forbidden to play with or speak to
each other, I was forbidden to go near the Bs' house
(I was even reluctant to walk or ride my bicycle
past their place for years afterward), the Bs would
no longer speak to my parents, and apparently there was
plenty of juicy gossip exchanged with and by the other
neighbors. I suppose it's something of a credit to my parents
that they didn't take the book away from me (I never
actually thought of that until just now). But quite a
few years later, during some kind of tiff between me and
my mother, she glared at me and said "**You're** the reason I can't
hold my head up in this neighborhood." I assumed at the time
that she was dragging up the Debbie B. incident, and
maybe she was, but it's also possible that I had
acquired the air of a queer kid by then. (I never
came out to my parents, but I know they had their
dark suspicions.)
That same book popped up unexpectedly many, many years later.
I was channel surfing one day (on the TV, which I almost never
watch anymore in these days of the Web), and I came
across a rerun of _The Wonder Years_ (which I didn't watch
regularly, but I knew what it was about). I think
it was in fact an episode in which Kevin is dreading
having "the talk" with his father, and there was a
scene in which Fred Savage as Kevin Arnold is lying on the
living-room sofa with The Book (**my** book!)
propped open on his stomach. I got quite a kick out
of seeing that book again, on TV no less!
Speaking of the "air of queerness" that must have
caused concern and disappointment for my parents,
particularly by the time I'd reached adolescence, the
first memory I have of crossing some kind of gender-role
boundary is a very early one. I think I may have been
only 3. It was Christmas Eve, and I was getting
some Christmas presents early, and one of them was
somewhat odd -- it was a kid-size toy clothes iron,
maybe a third the scale of the real thing, painted red.
My father didn't like the present, and he said
"Santa Claus must have left that at the wrong house.
Little boys don't play with things like that."
And he made a move to snatch it away from me ("Let's give this
back to Santa so he can take it to the right house.")
and of course I didn't like getting
a present only to have it taken away the next minute.
So I started to cry, and wanted to keep the iron.
And my father got mad. And that really spoiled the
whole Christmas-eve scene (and must have had a significant emotional
impact for the memory to have stuck with me from such an early age).
In recent years, I've formulated a hypothesis as to where
that iron might have come from. Electric steam irons were
more common appliances in those days than they are now,
and of course they're also hazardous for little kids to be
around. I suspect that my kindly grandmother had had to make
me cry by chasing me away from her ironing board,
for safety's sake, and made up for it by getting me the
little iron of my own for Christmas. It's not like I had any
particularly strong desire to play with it, though
I kept it for many years.
Another incident must have happened around the time I was
10 or 11, and was entirely innocent (if a little clueless)
on my part, but must have caused my parents a fair amount of
angst. I was sitting on the living-room couch early
one evening in front of the TV, and my mother and father
were in the kitchen. Either my father had just come home
and we were just about to have supper, or we had just finished
supper and my parents were having their evening drinks,
leaving me a brief time alone with the TV before they took
over the living room. And I asked (I have no memory of what may
have prompted my question -- I may have asked out of sheer mischievousness,
but I don't know why it would have occurred to me in the first
place. Maybe it was something I'd just seen on TV.)
"Hey -- if a man and a woman can get married, why can't a man and a
man or a woman and a woman get married?". And my parents
were **not** amused. "They just can't, and that's the end of
**that** subject. We don't ever want to hear any more about it,
and what the hell's the matter with you anyway, asking a
question like that?" I realized instantly, just from the
tone of the replies, that I'd gone where no kid ought to go,
and I kept a very low profile for the rest of the evening,
and my parents were distinctly on edge with me.
A couple of years later an attempted father-son bonding (ahem ;-> )
experience went sour. My father decided to go see the
newly-released movie _Goldfinger_. My parents seldom went to the
movies, and they weren't usually amenable to movie suggestions
from **me** -- I'd wanted to see the George Pal _The Time
Machine_ a few years earlier, but never got to go (I had to get
the condensed version from a neighbor kid; some kids were skilled
at retelling movies and TV episodes in those days) -- so
it must have been entirely my father's idea. And I can
(now) guess why -- it had the reputation of hovering right on
the edge of being a "blue" movie (a fact my father would have
heard bruited around at work). So my mother stayed home,
and my father took me to see James Bond. I had no reason to refuse the
invitation, and in fact I enjoyed the film a great deal --
as an **action** movie (I was blown away seeing that Lincoln
Continental crushed into a little cube with the gangster
inside it). The "blue" parts (Honor Blackman introducing
herself by saying "I'm Pussy Galore." and Sean Connery muttering
"I must be dreaming.") went completely over my head. I didn't
remember those parts, and I had no memory of the burst of
giggling that must have erupted in the theater at the
name "Pussy Galore". (I still didn't know what "pussy"
meant, apart from an affectionate word for "pet cat".)
So when we got home, we all sat down at the kitchen table,
and my mother and father had drinks. And my mother asked,
with a bit of a leer, if I'd enjoyed the movie. And I said
yes, and she said "I've heard it's a bit **racy** for a
kid your age." And then my father (who must have been
just a bit buzzed by this time) demanded "Is there anything
you didn't understand about the movie? Huh? Is there
anything you want me to **explain** to you? Huh?
Is there? IS THERE?". And I couldn't figure out where
the manifest hostility was coming from, and said
"No. No." and sort of backed away from the table.
And my father bore down on me, and repeated his
question "Is there anything you want me to **explain**
to you?", not letting up until my mother, sensing that
something ugly was happening, raised her voice to my father
and said "Jim! That's **enough**! Leave him alone." And I was
dismissed to skulk away somewhere out of sight. I
can now guess what was going on. This was going to
be my father's opportunity to have "the talk".
He was going to tell me all about "pussy", and my
mother was probably in on it too. But his little fag of
a son was too scared and clueless (too much of a
"pussy" himself ;-> ) to cooperate in the fun.
And so my father got mad. It was very weird and
disturbing.
