Young old gay stories
Dad died when I was six. The rabbi who lived in the apartment below took over for him. I’m sure he wanted to do Mom. They packed us off to an evil Hasidic summer camp where everyone made fun of us because we didn’t know their crazy prayers. My brother was four. We would secretly meet in the woods, hug each other and sob. We couldn’t realize why our father died and our mother sent us to this terrible place. I learned to hate all religion and still do.
Mom was a dark-haired, curvaceous looker, juicy, and in her prime. She liked sex but decided that all men had to pay for it. The butcher brought steaks; the florist, flowers; the bagel man left fresh hot steaming bagels by our door every morning for months. Leon, the ice cream man left ice cream. My younger brother and I were fast dispatched to earn the stuff into the house, so they couldn’t observe Mom. And not to forget Abe, the jeweler, who brought, well, jewels. They all tried to get inside. Some did. When Mom met the human who brought it all, she married him.
We lived in Borough Park, in Brooklyn. Until I ran away, I thought everyone in the world was either Jewish or Italian. I was intimidated by all the dark, Brooklyn-rough I
Nathan’s story: I was 12 years old and had just kissed my first boy
“I was fresh when I came out, I was 12 years old and had just kissed my first boy. I came out as bi but then suddenly confused interest in girls because I wanted to experiment with boys a lot more. I side-lined women and ended up thinking I was gay. And maybe I wasgay for that period of time.
Over the past couple of years I have been feeling more attraction to girls and, as that’s developed, I’ve ended up considering myself pansexual because I like both or anything – I don’t realize if I like it until I see it! Even now people make me feel favor ‘you are this’, ‘you are that’ [but] it’s like you’ve not had ice cream for the first time and you don’t know you like it until you’ve tried it.”
Thoughts, feelings and preferences may change over time but that doesn’t build any of them any less valid. There is nothing incorrect experiencing sexuality in a fluid way that changes and fluctuates over time. Challenges arise because society has been conditioned to prioritise binary choices and the notions of ‘how it should be&rsqu
When I woke up that Saturday morning, little did I know that something I was hiding from view from others was about to have the key put in the ignition and set me off on a journey that was to become the existence I was born with.
It was a Saturday morning favor any other Saturday morning. I always got up first because I’m an early bird.
After breakfast, I’d sit down and watch Multi-Coloured Swap Shop – a children’s TV show on Saturday morning.
The fact that I was 17 years old didn’t put me off from watching it. I loved watching it. It got my weekend off to a matchless start.
Just after midday, I always went into town to buy an array of snacks for myself for the evening. I still preferred to consume Saturday evenings indoors watching television love I did on Saturday mornings.
My parents thought it rare for a male child my age to want to reside in on a Saturday evening. At the time, I thought they knew nothing about why I did not want to leave out. Years later, I discovered my mother had already suspected I was gay.
Whereas boys my age were going out to guzzle alcohol and dine girls, my Saturday evening treat was the snacks (including a small trifle
On the verge of my 37th birthday I mark a little over a year of partnership with a man 26 years my senior.
This is not a new phenomenon for me—coupling with older men. It is a liking that kept me in the closet until I felt I was defended enough to express it at 23. I had never been with another man sexually before then. In fact, I had only ever been with women my age. That’s what was expected of me, if not the celibate single or religious life, in the conservative, working-class Catholic household in which I was raised.
It was in this environment that I was taught to hold the body in suspicion and to avoid sex. Masturbation, I was told, is a mortal sin. “Impure thoughts” were grounds for confession. By fifteen, in the throes of pubescent sexual urgency, I broke down and committed the ultimate transgression for a Catholic boy that age: Not only did I masturbate for the first period, I did so to a picture of another man. I was terrified. My sexual fantasies were all about pro-wrestlers and movie stars with chiseled jaws and hirsute bodies. I went to confession sometimes multiple times per week at that stage of my life, living in constant fear of this layered secret and