Damn Straight

My sexuality and romantic past

Many gay men say that they knew they were different from a very early age. That wasn't me. It took me a long time to come to the realization. The earliest awakening of my sexuality would be when I would watch the Acapulco cliff divers on Wild World of Sports. I was unaware at the time that my infatuation with men in speedo bathing suits had any significance. The only other time I would see something similar was professional wrestling. These big beefy men who threw each other around the ring were also wearing briefs. I didn't realize that my interest in their muscular, exposed bodies went beyond that of my contemporaries.

It wasn't until early adolescence that things became more apparent. My neighbor Mark was a boy scout, and he scored some Playboy magazines on one of their newspaper recycling drives. He and our buddies would pour over the dirty pictures in our secret hideaways. One of the issues had a pictorial that included some mild frontal male nudity. I distinctly recall that I was much more interested in the male bodies than the female. Rather than recognize the attraction for what it was I thought that maybe it was because I was interested in comparing what his body looked like with what mine looked like, or what mine could look like when I was an adult. I mentioned it to my friends and asked if they had any idea why he thought that was about. As I recall they didn't even verbalize a response.

At one point one of them found a magazine that was much more explicit. It was closer to a sex manual than pornography. It depicted couples performing vaginal intercourse. My father had given me the sex talk, but I didn't understand any of it. He took the WASP approach. Rather than just talk to me directly and explain what sex was and how it all worked, he just read directly out of a pamphlet. It was all very clinical. He didn't even put it into context for me. I didn't really get why he was telling me this, let alone what any of it meant. It wasn't until I saw the images in this explicit magazine that I started to understand what sex even was.

This was also the first time that I saw images of erect penises. All of this was so new and eye-opening that it formed a milieu of sexual awakening. I wasn't able to parse out anything specific. We were all seeing the images of the hard dicks. It was seeing them inserted into vaginas that caught all of our attention. I didn't focus on the cocks specifically.

By the time we were a little further along in puberty, some of my young friends and I would occasionally experiment sexually when we would sleep out in a tent in the back yard. It was mostly showing each other our erections, and maybe a little oral genital contact, but we hadn't yet mastered the art of masturbation, and there were never any ejaculations. Eventually they rejected this behavior as abnormal and these activities ceased.

As I grew older I inevitably found myself in the environment where boys actually spent time in the company of girls once in a while. My friends were always talking about who was hot. I seemed to lack the ability to evaluate if a girl was attractive or not. I could basically recognize the features that made a girl pretty, but I never found myself thinking, "Now there's a pretty girl."

I was also becoming somewhat infatuated with certain young men in my classes. At the time I didn't recognize it as anything more than ordinary admiration, but as I look back I realize that it was much more. There was one young man in particular whom I consider to have been my first crush. He was the "tough guy" type. He was on the wrestling team, and he was often getting into trouble, but he was also more intelligent than the typical roughnecks.

I really can't put my finger on the exact time that I realized I was attracted to men rather than to women, but I know that by the latter years of high school that I understood what I was feeling. I was checking out guys in gym class, and I knew full well that this was what I was doing. While my friends were looking at tits and ass, I was looking at pecs and bulges. I got crushes on some of the cute guys, and knew the were crushes, and I allowed myself to have those feelings.

I was not in denial that I was sexually attracted to men, but I was deeply in denial about what it meant. By now it was the late 70's and homosexuality was starting to become more commonplace in pop culture, but it was still scorned. I was not brave enough to be my true self, and bought into the common conception that gay sex was perverted. I could not even consider the notion of living a homosexual life. Nothing else about me was in any way stereotypically gay. I was very masculine and spoke with a tough, deep voice. I was into cars and sports and rock music. I hated fashion, shopping, and dancing. I didn't have a flamboyant or effeminate bone in my body. Everything about me fit very nicely into the heterosexual world except for my pesky attraction to other men. I had every intention of dating girls and "getting laid" just like all my friends did. My goal was to have a wife and kids, keeping my true feelings under wraps the whole time.

My first girlfriend was a young women named Kathy. We were in the same friend group, and we started dating some time during my senior year of high school. I don't recall how we got together, but I believe that she was the instigator. Our relationship did not exactly grow and progress. There were two main reasons for this. One was that I suffered from extreme naiveté, and I had absolutely no clue how initiate sexual activity beyond ordinary necking. The second, which I only understood with hindsight, was that without any real sexual interest in the female body, I lacked the motivation to overcome this naiveté. She broke up with me after only a short while.

I eventually took up with another young woman named Debby, and much to my surprise Kathy was a little jealous. She was mature enough, however, not to get in our way. Debby wound up being slightly more aggressive than Kathy had been. When we would make out she would sometimes reach into my pants and grab my erection. But I was in the same rut I had been in with Kathy. I didn't know how to advance my position, and I lacked the heterosexual motivation to improvise. After a short while we broke up.

It wasn't long after Debby and I broke up that Kathy made moves on me again. We started dating again, but if anything it was worse than it had been before. I would simply never initiate any kind of sexual activity. Once again she broke up with me after not much time. That Spring she surprised all of us by coming out to us as a lesbian. I didn't really appreciate the irony until years later. And what is even more ironic is that she wound up asking me to the prom. I originally had no intentions of going. It wasn't a protest or anything. I just had no interest in it, and I wasn't going go force myself to go because it's expected. When she called me up I was quite surprised. She said that her father (whom she was not out to) threatened that if she didn't ask me that he would call me up and inform me that she wanted to. I said that I would be delighted. She and I wound up having a very nice time as platonic dates.

It was during senior year that I had my first experience with a drama queen. One of my buddies and I were on the stage crew for the community theater production of "Oklahoma." The set designer was an older man who was a local artist. I suppose that everyone in town knew he was gay. Looking back it was blatantly obvious. But things like that still weren't discussed openly at that time. My peers and I certainly didn't talk about such things.

I don't think that the guy particularly took a shine to me, but more than likely he was able to detect that I was a closeted gay boy. He and I spent some one-on-one time together one weekend when my buddy was off on a school trip. It was perfectly innocent. I was just happy to hang out with an adult like it was a normal thing. It made me feel very grown up. When the weekend was over I tried to be very grown up in the way I said goodbye to him, but clumsy inexperienced me said it in a way that sounded like if I saw him again it would be on my terms, not his.

Rather than address what I had said, the guy allowed himself to be hurt by it. The next time I saw him he was rather blunt with me, and he gave me somewhat of a guilt trip. I was unprepared for that from an emotional and maturity standpoint. Being a drama queen he salved his wounds by raking me over the coals rather than just acknowledging my awkwardness and forgiving me. It really tied me in knots knowing that I had hurt someone else. Finally things came to a head where I tearfully pleaded that I never meant to hurt him. He finally accepted my apology, and when he did he asked if he could kiss me. I was so not prepared for that. My immediate response was to just ask him where? He chuckled and said on the cheek. I let him do it. But then I beat a hasty retreat. I never saw much of him after that.

That Summer shortly before I went off to college I came out to a friend named Vince. At the time I didn't consider it "coming out," but for that matter I didn't really consider myself to be gay. During a very deep and personal discussion we were having I confessed to him that I found myself more attracted to men than I did to women. I also told him that I didn't consider this to make me gay. I had no interest in being intimate with a man, and I didn't expect that I ever would. That didn't lessen his shock. But he was very accepting. I recall his exact words to be something like, "I want you to know that this doesn't change how I feel about you." I was actually a bit indignant. I didn't say anything, but my thoughts were, "It better not! I wouldn't have told you if I thought it would have, and if it did then you're not the person I thought you were." That marked the first time I ever clued anyone in to how I was feeling.

When I went off to college I was a very shy and insecure young man. I didn't make friends easily, but I did meet another freshman in my dorm who was very gregarious and friendly. We'll call him Digger. We hit it off right away. He would eventually become my second drama queen, and take it to a whole new level. I suppose I subconsciously knew that he was gay. He was pretty queeny after all. By now it was 1980, but things like that still weren't discussed openly. It's amazing how much society could turn a blind eye to things that were so obvious. He and I certainly never discussed it. He probably could also tell that I was a closeted gay, but he never went there either. At least not directly.

We quickly became best friends. I was happy to have someone to spend my time with now that I was away from home and on my own. He also introduced me to a group of girls and we formed a tight friend circle. But because Digger and I lived in the dame dorm, we spent a lot of time together just the two of us. At first it was nice, but he quickly became downright clingy. It got to the point that he was in my room first thing in the morning to get me out of bed, and he stayed in my room in the evenings until I kicked him out and shut off the light.

One night I decided to address the situation with him. I tried to have a rational, adult conversation where I told him that I needed a little more space. I expected him to just say he understood and that he would respect my boundaries. Instead he acted like he'd been wounded. He said, "I'll try to come to grips with what you've just told me." I was not prepared for that reaction. I had no idea that he was a full-blown codependent. I don't think I even understood the concept back then.

At that point he only got more clingy, but now in a dramatic way. My reaction was to just push back harder, which only intensified the drama. This escalated until I got to the point where I'd had enough. I essentially had to break up with him. We weren't in a relationship, we were just friends, but that wasn't the way he was acting. So one night I told him I didn't want him hanging around me at all anymore. Of course he freaked out over it. I tried to be rational with him. I explained that the friendship wasn't working for me anymore. I asked him directly, "Do you want me to just go through the motions and pretend we're friends when that's not how I feel anymore?"

His response was to say, "Would you do that for me?" I was gobsmacked. Never in a million years did I expect he would be so deeply in denial, and would cling to such empty gestures. What was even more surprising was how I responded. I should have kicked him out of my room and gone no-contact with him. But that wasn't what I did. I had a momentary lapse of reason where my bad judgement took over. Out of nowhere I thought maybe it would be an interesting exercise to see if I could pull it off. I have no idea what possessed me to consider that kind of absurd notion. But I just shrugged my shoulders and said, "Okay, I'll do it."

From that point on we went back to acting like nothing was wrong. But it was at this point that he chose to tell me that he had cancer. He had contracted it in high school but had been treated. He had been in remission, but now the cancer had returned and he was scared. He asked me to keep it a secret. He didn't want the girls in our friend group to know. But I, being his only confidant, was the one who had to be there for him and console him. He would lie on my bed at night and ask me to hold him as he cried and cried. That went on night after night. It was incredibly uncomfortable for me. All I could think about the whole time was not how to comfort him but how I could get him to go back to his own room so I could go to bed. I felt trapped.

After some time of this I could no longer bear the burden alone, and I forced him to share the information with the girls in our friend group. He was reluctant and unemotional as he told them. They, of course, had great sympathy for him. Over time, however, as we all asked more questions about it, the more things didn't add up. It wasn't long before he had to confess to us all that it had been a big lie. He never had cancer in the first place. He had just used it as a way to keep me from "breaking up" with him again, and to coerce me into lying in bed and holding him all those times.

This was it for all of us. We ostracized him from our group, and none of us had anything to do with him anymore. I was free, but the whole situation was emotionally traumatizing, and sent me into a deep depression. It took me weeks to claw my way back out of that.

Things eventually got back to normal. I still had my friendship with the girls. They were basically my fag hags, although I didn't recognize that this was the true nature of our dynamic . I got somewhat comfortable in my closeted lifestyle. There are guys whom I found attractive, but I would just admire them from afar. I would occasionally point them out to the girls and ask if they thought they were cute. That didn't strike them as unusual.

One night in our sophomore year I was hanging out with just two of the girls, and somehow I got inspired to come out to them. It was the first time since Vince a couple years before that I shared my secret with anyone. They were very touched that I trusted them, and it explained a bit why I was always pointing out the cute guys to them. But it didn't change much of anything. They kept my confidence, and I trundled along all the same.

By my junior year I transferred to Potsdam College and pledged the fraternity. I was always closeted so it was nothing new to me to keep that part of my life hidden. But this gave me my first experience with gay-dar. One of my pledge brothers quit half-way through. That was very unusual. Typically guys would either quit in the first week or two or see it through to the end. But he chose to leave and there was no bringing him back.

I didn't exactly crush on this guy, even though he was in ROTC and was nicely put together and had a cute military buzz cut. I also never really suspected that he might be gay, but I just had an inexplicable feeling about him. After I completed the program and was able to wear the fraternity letters, I bumped into him in one of the college bars one night. When he saw me festooned in the fraternity regalia he lamented the fact that he didn't stick with it. He was also very, very drunk.

By the end of the night he had gotten even more drunk, to the point I wasn't sure he'd be able to make it back to his dorm room okay. I walked him home, and all the while he was going on and on about how nice I was to still be friends with him, and to take care of him like this. We got to his room. He opened the door, but before he went in he stood there looking into my eyes. "You're such a great guy, Toaph," he said to me. "You're such a great guy, but I'm not allowed to kiss you."

This was my confirmation. I had been right about him. I should have said, "The hell you're not!" I should have grabbed him and kissed him, fallen back into his bed with him, and had ruckus gay sex with him all night. But I wasn't ready for that. I wasn't ready to embrace my own sexuality, let alone express it. I still bought into the notion that gay sex was wrong and perverted. I just put him to bed, closed the door, and went back to my own room.

The next morning I couldn't stop thinking about it. I still wasn't sure I was ready to explore that side of myself, but this guy would be the perfect one to help me navigate it. I mustered up the courage to go to his room and check on him. He had no recollection of it. He was so drunk he had been totally blacked out. He didn't even remember me walking him home, let alone making a pass at me. I decided to drop it. I never saw much of him after that. But to this day I wonder how differently my life would have turned out if I had thrown caution to the wind that one night and gone to bed with him. He and I could have become boyfriends, and I could have avoided all the subsequent years of searching fruitlessly for a mate. Alas, it wasn't meant to be.

With that behind me I got back to pretending I was heterosexual. I didn't need to work too hard to stay in the closet. I presented as very masculine, and no one suspected I might be hiding a secret. The problem was that I put pressure on myself to get a girlfriend. That was what fraternity guys did. They got girlfriends and got laid.

The following Fall I started dating a girl. Her name was Chris, and her nickname was Toad. People used to kid us because our names were Chris and Chris, and our nicknames were Toaph and Toad. She was not a particularly attractive young woman, but this didn't really matter to me. While I buckled to the societal pressures to date women, I wasn't going to buy into the conventional ideals of female beauty.

Chris and I got along rather well, but it was obvious that things weren't working out. It was failing this time not so much because I didn't advance the relationship sexually (even though it's true that I didn't), but because basically preferred the company of my brothers to her, and I never spent a lot of time with her. I also knew in my heart of hearts that I was living a lie. I knew that I was pressuring myself into something that I didn't really want, that no good would eventually come from the relationship, and that ultimately it was very unfair to her. I broke up with her shortly after we returned from Christmas break. It was somewhat of a blow to her self-esteem, and although I didn't explain to her the true reason why I was breaking up, I now dearly wish I had.

After this experience I started experiencing some emotional difficulties. I began to dread the fact that I was not heterosexual. While I took great pride in being different from other people in terms of style, I very much wanted to be like everyone else in this respect. I wanted to get married and have 2.5 children just like other people did. What probably bothered me most of all was that I understood perfectly well why my relationship with Chris didn't work out, and yet I was undaunted in my intentions to continue trying to force myself to make it work with someone else. I knew that I was pursuing a course of action that was doomed to fail, but I felt completely powerless to do anything different. I simply could not accept the idea of living a homosexual lifestyle.

There was one time when I almost did get laid. There was a girl in one of the sororities that I had a good friendship with. One night out in the bars she started flirting with me. We went back to her room to have sex. When we got there I wasn't sure how to get her out of her clothes, but I didn't need to worry because as I lay on the bed she took her own clothes off and came to bed in a sheer nighty. That made things easy.

I took my clothes off too and got ready to stumble my way through what was to come. But she stopped me. All she said was, "I thought I'd be ready for you." At the time I totally didn't understand what that meant. In fact I puzzled over it for a long time. It was entirely inexplicable to me why she would suddenly pull back. Years later with hindsight I think she took one look at my fat dick and knew it would never fit inside her. But at the time I was left wondering.

With nothing better to do I went to go down on her. She again stopped me saying, "Only if you want to." My response was, "I don't mind if you don't." She let me go on, and I put my face in her pussy and went to town. That was the point when I basically concluded that I was bisexual. I realized that if I'm naked with another person and we're engaging in any kind of sexual activity, it would arouse me, I would be able to perform, and I would be into it.

That situation wound up becoming idiosyncratic. I went back to being friends with that girl and never pursued anything romantic with her. I also went back to crushing on the straight guys I would encounter, in and out of the fraternity, and otherwise keeping my sexuality deep undercover.

I didn't so much put pressure on myself to find a girlfriend and get laid, but I was thinking more about someone who would make a good wife so that we could have kids and live a conventional family life. I knew that once I was out of college my opportunities to meet eligible girls would drop off precipitously, so I needed to try to land a mate before I graduated. It was a different kind of pressure I was putting on myself. It didn't tie me in knots emotionally the way it had just a year or two earlier. But it was still pressure.

There was one girl named Kim that I thought would be a good match for me. She was "just one of the guys." She was very independent and strong willed, and also very intelligent and capable. She didn't bat an eye over our male buffoonery. And another quality that was important for me, she was a good driver. Everything pointed to her as a great candidate. The problem was she didn't want anything to do with me romantically. "I don't like you like that," she said. I was in the friend zone.

She graduated a year before me. My final year in school I kept trying to find a girl I could make a life with after graduation, but it didn't happen. There was one girl who kind of caught my attention, but I didn't catch hers, and I don't think she would have been a good match anyway. In fact I probably dodged a bullet there. So I wound up graduating alone.

After I graduated and moved down to Washington DC I had my first taste of being open about my sexuality. The friend who was in grad school wound up coming out to me. I'm pretty sure he knew all along that I was gay, but he had been closeted too so I didn't know. Having said that, it really wasn't that big of a surprise.

For the first time in my life I could speak openly about my sexuality, and just be myself without having to hide anything. It was quite liberating. The problem was I still wasn't ready to act on it. I wasn't going to get gay with this guy, that was clear from the start. We were both already in the friend zone. But I wasn't ready to get gay with anyone else, either. That was a big step for me. I had yet to overcome society's condemnation of gay sex. Despite my attraction to men, the thought of sexual activity was not yet something I could consider.

This friend took me to gay strip clubs and gay bars. I never would have had the courage to go to those places myself. The strip clubs were safe enough because everyone understood the dynamic, but in the gay bars I had to deal with the fact that other guys would come on to me. I didn't know where it would lead, and it freaked me out. Unable to embrace it, I instead ran away from it. It became too scary, and I stopped going to those kinds of places.

This was the next instance where I wonder how differently my life would have turned out if I had been more comfortable with myself, and more willing to explore that kind of life. If I hadn't been so paranoid about everything, I could have cultivated a whole social life down there. Washington DC had a thriving gay community. My life could have taken a very different direction, both socially and professionally. But alas, it too was not meant to be. I gave up on life in the big city and moved back home.

I would have thought that at this point I would crawl deeper into the closet, but the truth was I slowly inched my way out. Once I started working in Syracuse my social life continued to be centered around my fraternity. Despite the fact that I had graduated, I still traveled up there constantly to return to that environment, and my only real friends in the area were other graduates. I started coming out to trusted individuals on occasion. But rather than sharing something about myself it was more a plea for acceptance. It was always very emotional and self-deprecating, and it was always in the context of it being a secret they had to keep.

This was all baby steps to fully coming out. I was getting more and more ready, but the problem was I still didn't know any other gay men, and I had no real way of meeting any. I was afraid to go into gay bars, so that wasn't really an option. The local rags did have personal ads, but back in the days before the internet it was a very inefficient process. I met up with one or two guys back then, but they were never to my liking, and it was a waste of time.

The only thing I did that was overtly gay during that time was to attend a screening of "Torch Song Trilogy." It wasn't a big deal, really. I was just going to see a movie. But it wasn't in the conventional movie theaters. It was a one-night-only special showing in the vintage theater downtown, and it was a conspicuously gay movie. It was a big step for me to walk into the theater with head held high, not caring who saw me, or what they might think. In a way it was a turning point.

It was around that time that I had another big turning point. My high school friend Vince was getting married. He not only invited me to the wedding, but asked me to sing in a small ensemble that would perform a short piece during the ceremony. He told me that the guy coordinating the music, a college friend of his named Bill, was gay. He thought I might like to meet him.

Bill was a little stereotypically gay, but he and I did kind of hit it off, and we flirted with each other a little. The night before the wedding we had the opportunity to get it on. This was the first time that I let my guard down, overcame the social stigma, and just let myself enjoy sexual activity with another man without any guilt. All we really did was swap blowjobs. We didn't have the space or privacy to do much more than that, but I wasn't really interested in doing any butt stuff anyway. That just didn't appeal to me. But I enjoyed sucking cock. I enjoyed it a great deal. And based on Bill's comments, I seemed to be a natural at it. This marked a breakthrough in my life where I let go of any inhibitions and was ready to engage in sexual activity with other men.

By now I was feeling more ready to come out of the closet, but I wasn't sure how to proceed. I wasn't going to make some big announcement to all my friends, coworkers, and fraternity brothers. And even if I did, that wouldn't lead me to meeting any more gay men. I was still paranoid about hanging out in gay bars. I just wan't sure how to navigate this journey.

A big part of it was my move to Ithaca. I knew it to be a very progressive town and it would be a safe place to explore this kind of life, so the plan was to just start living as an openly gay man once I got there. As if to confirm this decision, Cornell University they announced that they were officially adding sexual orientation to their non-discrimination policy just a few months after I started working there. I had nothing holding me back.

Still, I was somewhat closeted in the office. I had developed a nice circle of friends with a bunch of coworkers who were all the same age. We socialized a lot, but my sexuality just wasn't the kind of thing that came up in casual conversation. It wasn't so much that I was hiding that part of myself as much as it just wasn't pertinent.

I was still ambling about, ready emotionally to live as openly gay, but unsure how to put that into effect. There just wasn't anywhere to meet gay men outside of the one gay bar in town. I was still paranoid about that, but I finally mustered up the courage to go in. I was surprised when they didn't all descend upon me the moment I walked in the door. It was just a bar like any other. But I still wasn't sure how to go about making friends in there. I was terrible about going up to people I didn't know, and not a lot of guys were coming up to me.

Then one night I met a black guy named Adrian. He was a little smitten with me. After a brief dalliance we quickly realized that we worked better as friends. But he was very popular and knew practically everyone in the club. It was after getting to know him that I started really meeting people and making friends. This was when I first started really engaging with the gay community. I finally felt like I had arrived.

Ironically it was during this time that I started having more straight sex. I was kind of leading a dual life. In Ithaca I was openly gay, but on my frequent trips back up to Potsdam I was still a straight fraternity boy. I wasn't still closeted up there, exactly. A number of select individuals knew the truth. But I hadn't really figured out how to make the announcement, so it wasn't yet common knowledge.

Maybe it was because I was more comfortable with myself, but whatever the case I started having more luck hooking up with the college girls I was meeting. My strategy was to flirt with the fat chicks. From my perspective I didn't care that they weren't skinny little Barbie dolls because I wasn't fundamentally attracted to the female form anyway, and for their part they were happy to get the attention. It didn't happen a lot, but from time to time I was having good old fashioned vaginal intercourse.

At one point I actually got a girlfriend. Her name was Carla, she was in a sorority, and she had recently broken up with one of my fraternity brothers. We got to hooking up one night, but she stopped me and said she wasn't going to do a one-night stand. If we went further we were going to become boyfriend and girlfriend. Maybe it was the beer. Maybe it was my hormones. Either way, I shrugged my shoulders and said why not. So we actually engaged in a relationship. It was long-distance because she was still in school in Potsdam and I was down in Ithaca, but she basically became my every-other-weekend girlfriend.

Then came the time I also got a boyfriend. I went out to the Ithaca gay bar in the VW van I was driving at the time. A guy named Josh was outside taking a break from the dance floor when he saw me pull in. He complimented me on my vehicle, and asked if I wanted to smoke a joint in it. We got good and high and then went back into the bar where we talked for the rest of the night. It was amazing how much we had in common.

We started seeing each other. It was the first time that I had a guy I could get with whenever I wanted. He was decent looking with a fit trim body. The only thing was that he was covered in hair head to toe, and his dick was about the size of my pinky finger. The sex wasn't great, but just having a firm male body to caress and stroke was enough.

This allowed me to objectively compare the experience with the straight sex I was having with Carla. There was no comparison. I liked men. Sex with women worked on a functional level in that I would get an erection and be able to perform, but sex with a man was what I truly desired. I confessed to Carla the true nature of my being and we dissolved the relationship. She took it well and remained friends. In fact she was a loyal fag hag for years.

The relationship with Josh didn't last long. He left the area shortly after we met, but I had already come to the realization that he and I were not as well suited as it appeared that first night when we seemed to have so much in common. But it gave me a taste for what it was like to be involved with another man, and I liked it.

I muttered around for a while having random hookups with guys who didn't really suit me, until one day I met someone who was a good fit. A couple of coworkers who knew I was gay told me about a guy who was on their volleyball league whom they suspected was also gay. The plan was that I would come out to a game, and if I connected with the guy then fine, and if not then no harm done. Volleyball was the one sport I could actually play at a reasonable level, so I felt comfortable getting out on the court.

I showed up and we started playing, but there was no sign of the other guy. But then I saw him walking towards us from across the field. He was a dark-skinned black guy. I wasn't expecting that. But he was cute as a button and very fit. He joined the game on the other team, and he and I started giving each other glances as we played. Then at one point I took a dive and got a huge chunk of dirt in my eye. I thought this was my chance. I walked up to the guy, saying, "Do I have something in my eye?" He came right over. I truly did have something in my eye, but the convenient excuse for us to stare into each other's eyes was like out of a bad movie. My coworkers thought it was as cheesy as fuck, and still tease me about it to this day. The thing was it worked like a charm. I clearly connected with this guy.

After the game I offered the guy a ride home. His name was Dee. We stopped off for ice cream on the way and got to know each other. He was quite a bit younger than me. I had barely turned 30, but he was fresh out of college. But we still clicked. He had the kind of sense of humor where I could get him laughing very easily. We laughed and laughed as we ate our ice cream. We both felt very comfortable with each other.

We quickly fell into a relationship. Technically my first boyfriend was that guy Josh, but that hardly counted. Dee and I were truly boyfriends in every sense of the word. We spent lots of time together and shared intimacy on a regular basis. I was much more attracted to him than Josh. Dee's dark skin was smooth and hairless, and he had a big black cock that was a lot of fun to play with. We were very well matched, and had a lot of fun together, always laughing it up. Being with him made me realize how important humor was to me in a relationship.

Unfortunately we were not well paired in other ways. He could be rather immature, and had some peculiar tendencies. He would not introduce me to any of his friends. Whenever we were out he was always looking over his shoulder, and he had to sit with his back to the wall so that he could keep an eye out around his surroundings. I teased him that it was like dating someone in the witness protection program. He also didn't drive, so I had to pick him up and drop him off and do all the driving wherever we went or whatever we did.

Things continued to go well until they didn't. One of my fraternity brothers was getting married, and the ceremony would be in the Potsdam area. I brought Dee as my date. We arrived Friday evening and I brought him to the Fraternity house. This served to finally out myself to the fraternity. I had been dropping enough hints that everyone pretty well knew, but when I walked in with Dee then it was finally, fully out in the open.

The problem was that when Dee saw me in my natural environment he freaked out. He didn't drink, and he was opposed to any kind of drug use. When he saw me buy a bag of weed from one of my brothers, his jaw dropped. That basically burst the bubble. He barely spoke to me the rest of the weekend, which made it pretty awkward being at the wedding together. We left the reception early to go back home. It was a very long drive in silence the whole way.

I tried to patch things up, but it was over. We kind of tried to keep the relationship going, but it was never the same. He kept pulling back and I kept pursuing him. But eventually I came to my senses and let him go. That was the end of that. It was a learning experience for me in a lot of ways. I learned that I liked being in a relationship with another guy, but I also learned how to spot the warning signs. Dee and I were compatible in a lot of ways, but incompatible in the ways that mattered. I learned that any future relationship(s) would need to be rooted in more similar interests.

The good news was that I was finally out to my fraternity, which continued to be a big part of my life. Everyone accepted it, but at first they walked on egg shells over it. That was not what I wanted. One of the appeals of fraternity life to me was that we all gave each other shit for everything. Nothing was off limits. We teased the short guy for being short, the fat guy for being fat, and the nerdy guy for being nerdy. This always kept everything out in the open and made us all equal. I tried to explain to them that this was no different, but they were all trying to be politically correct and sensitive to my situation. It took a long time to get them to understand they could tease me for it like everyone teased everyone else for everything, but once they got it they really got it. They loved to make jokes and give me a good ribbing, and I loved it too. It became a hoot. It was then that I truly felt accepted.

The final step in my coming out process was to make it known at work. That was more complicated because this was a social matter in a professional setting. I wasn't going to send out an interdepartmental memo announcing it or anything. So I started dropping hints. It began by putting a pink triangle pin on a baseball cap I work to work, and putting it prominently on the coat rack where everyone could see. Those who got it would get it, and those who didn't wouldn't.

Unfortunately the first one who got it was another closeted gay man in the office. He and I had somewhat of a tenuous working relationship. He was incredibly intelligent, and he was very talented at the work we did, but he had a rather prickly personality. He had high standards and was prone to complaining. I will call him Marvin, because he was like Marvin the robot in the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy books. I, by contrast, was on an emotional high. I was finally able to be myself in every aspect of my life, and I was uncompromisingly happy. I used to smile so much that sometimes it would make my face hurt.

Marvin couldn't believe that I would be so open about my sexuality in the workplace, but it inspired him to do the same. One day he invited me to go out for a beer after work. I wasn't really sure why. I didn't understand that he just wanted to get to know me socially. He was so gruff in his professional capacity, always complaining and criticizing others, that I always had my guard up around him. I was very guarded while we had our beers. It was quite uncomfortable.

Marvin started making other invitations. He would ask me over to his house for pizza. I was still uncertain what this was all about, and it continued to be very uncomfortable for me. Finally I realized he was interested in me romantically. This totally freaked me out. He was not my type physically. Not at all. He was portly and bald and wore a mustache. I just didn't find appealing on any level. His temperament was the opposite of what I wanted in a partner. He was about as far from what I was attracted to as you can get. What was worse was that he was in a position of seniority over me in our department. The whole situation was completely inappropriate.

I had to let him know that I was not interested, and that our relationship would be strictly professional from that point on. He had no choice but to accept that. Things in the office went back to normal, but it really did a number on me. I didn't have the emotional resources to deal with a situation like that. Whereas before I was always happy and smiling, now I was in a deep funk. It took me a long time to climb back out of that. I never really did get back to where I had been before.

This brings me to where I was when this website came online. There is much more to the story, but all the details are documented in the other essays that can be found here.

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