Now that I'm in my thirties, I'm better able to understand the motives behind my actions. In a small sense, I was attempting to strike out into the world - to lash out at the ubiquitous "They" who were always trying to keep me down. A hippie without a cause; a yuppie without a Beemer.
For the large part, however, my outward appearance and overall behavior was a reaction to the fact that I was simply too terrified to openly admit to certain truths about myself which had become self-evident - I liked boys. And not just boys..."men."
My understanding of my sexuality did not come in the form of a single revelation. There was no single event that heralded my sexual awakening; rather, a series of progressive events that led me to an eventual conclusion. All of these were just single parts of a larger whole, no one thing more important than another, but each new understanding built upon the information gleaned from prior experience.
These hints of my bourgeoning sexual inclinations began to make themselves manifest over the years, each of which inexorably pointed toward the truth - I was into men.
Step One: There Will Be Bloodsport
I first noticed that I was attracted to other men when I was seven. My father had just begun his second teaching job at a small high school in southern West Virginia. A farming community that had once thrived as a shipping town, Buffalo's resources had long since dried up, or burned up, as was the case with the former four-story shopping center whose charred ruins towered ominously in the field next to the school, a haunting reminder of better times.
While certainly not the most attentive parent, my father was an excellent teacher, although his methods were undoubtedly unorthodox. Several lessons included the viewing of the film Bloodsport, though why, I'll never know. But, it was this film that led me to the realization that I liked not only men, but muscular, MANLY men.
My memories of Bloodsport contain virtually no plot details other than the scenes onto which I'd glommed like a remora. I remember something about a girl...perhaps there was a big fight. The scenes that were important to me were all towards the beginning of the film:
Jean-Claude Van Damme in the middle of a forest, training with his master, getting wet, sweaty, and shirtless in the process. He is bound and has his legs splayed open to force him into what seems to be a painful split. He goes to a bar in very tight jeans, gets into a fight, and drops into a full split to punch someone in the nuts.
I would watch these scenes over and over, seeing what I believed to be the "ultimate in man" being tortured and abused, entirely unaware that what I believed to be a passing interest in some very cool scenes was actually my brain sending covert messages that I was not only into muscular, flexible men, but also something of a sadomasochist as I wanted to do and have done to me the very same tortures.
It is back to this film that I trace my adult interests in bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism. For without it, I might never have come to these realizations of my own interests. That the movie is awful never was an issue for me, as the only reason I ever watched it was to see those training scenes in the forest, hoping...praying that someday, someone would do that to me.
Step Two: Swiss Cheese Porn in a Penthouse World
The second clue came about when I began the rite of passage most young boys take at some point in their pre-adolescence - I found my father's porn stash.
Every boy I knew discovered his father's titillating treasure trove. Like pigs hunting truffles, we would sneak into their rooms and sniff out the porn...at the time, however, I didn't expect to actually locate photos of things that quite so closely resembled mushrooms. We scavenged their magazines, never knowing why certain pages were stuck together while others flipped over with ease.
After we had found the objects of our pre-teen desires, we would gather together in an all-male conclave to share our bounty, saying what we were societally programmed to say, myself more often than the others. They mostly stayed silent during our perusal, occasionally commenting on one or another model's body, while I made certain to let everyone know that I was a "normal" boy.
"She has great tits," I'd offhandedly comment, unwittingly paying more attention to the prodigious penis upon which the model's gaze was so intently fixed.
While the other boys' fathers had the run-of-the-mill porn - Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler - my father's tastes were decidedly more risqué. He favored porn of the hardcore European variety, most notably Private Magazine. While my friends' magazines had photos of blonde, busty models who occasionally encountered a penis in their sex misadventures (only some of which appeared to be connected to the rare presence of the occasional hairy midsection), the women in Private couldn't even seem to go to the café without stumbling upon not one, but several penises, each of them attached to a fully grown, fully visible man.
These men, rather than being cropped out of the photos to redirect focus to the model, often served as the unwitting stars of the show, the images showing less of what the women could do with a cock and more of what several cocks could do to her. Couples, three ways, and gangbangs; every hole was filled, often with dicks to spare as the models were double penetrated in their lower extremities with an additional cock in her mouth and one or two held in hand and masturbated to keep them involved in the scene. The men in Private weren't accoutrements to dazed-eyed bimbos; they were aggressively active in giving each model what for, and they did so with gusto.
Only once during one of these gatherings did I ever make an innocent misstep when I joked, "Cock. The Other White Meat," playing upon the then-popular pork commercials flooding the airwaves, only to be gently rebuked by one of my older male friends: "Well, what if the guy's black?" To that question, I had no rejoinder other than to posit, "Dark meat?"
American pornography was, until recently, unique in the Western world only for its puritanical blandness. Sex was doled out in minuscule nibbles, whereas Private porn was a Bacchanalian feast. These European sometimes-beauties weren't just naked on the page in tasteful poses; rather, they were splayed open and brutalized not by just one, but several men, all with voracious sexual appetites. Every orifice was transformed into a gaping maw by the unabashed men, all of whom were entirely comfortable not only having sex in front of a camera, but with doing so while being close to and even physically touching the other fully naked and erect men as they ravaged the overwhelmed models whose bodies wer often lost among a sea of naked manflesh. Each woman was eventually subjected to what Private called, "the ultimate fuck," as she was penetrated by numerous gigantic cocks at the same time, even, occasionally, accommodating more than one such organ in a single opening.
It was likely this aspect of Private magazine that turned me on the most. In my friends' porn, the women were front and center, whereas in my father's European offerings, the men oftentimes received equal, if not more time on the page than their female counterparts. I developed a penchant for a few models - Frank Major, Nacho Vidal, George Uhl, Csoky Ice - these were the men whose bodies (and dicks) stuck with me long after the magazines had been returned to the bottom of the sock drawer, the top shelf of the closet, or between the boxspring and the mattress. To this day, these are the men for whom I still carry a sexual torch.
We were, my friends and I, discovering our budding sexuality. They were discovering breasts and vaginas; I was discovering my desire to be in the place of those female models getting reamed by the giant phalluses of my favorite male models. Oddly enough, I never sexualized my male friends as we looked over our skin magazines; they weren't old enough for my tastes. They were boys, and all I wanted was to be ravaged by men.
After my all too brief sojourns into the world of hardcore Euro porn, I would return the magazines to my father's collection. I did not, however, return them entirely intact. Whenever I found a photo of a man or a penis to which I felt an attraction, I would run to find our orange-handled scissors and proceed to carefully cut out that portion of the page, leaving his magazines riddled with holes where once stood proudly erect penises waiting to gain entry to whichever orifice was nearest.
This had a rather disconcerting effect on the magazines, leaving big breasted babes openmouthed and gazing hungrily not at glistening male sex organs, but through oddly penis-shaped windows opening onto the pages beneath. The lone female in a five-person gangbang was no longer surrounded by lusty men, left to fend for her own disembodied torso, the sole remnant of torrid action once so brightly displayed upon the page.
What my father must have thought whenever he would return to these magazines in search of a masturbatory aid I can only guess. He would eventually stumble upon Private's errant men whose likenesses had been so crudely excised from their pages. The had all been lovingly glued onto pieces of poster board in a collage of tumescent masculinity kept poorly hidden between my twin-sized bed and the wall. But, by that point, I had already moved onto my next odyssey of self-discovery.
Step Three: Under Where the Bulges Show
After my introduction to pornography, I moved in with my mother, leaving me without consistent access to Private. In order to fill the void left behind in my father's porn stash, I ended up turning to the next best thing: the Undergear catalogue.
In the early-to-mid-90s, the American man, in print at least, was coming to celebrate not only his body, but his sexual nature, as well. Michael Jordan became famous for a Hanes commercial in which he glibly answered the question on all women's (and several men's) minds, "Boxers or briefs," with a sexily uttered, "Jockstrap."
The Undergear catalogue helped to changed that dialogue, making any answer to that simple question, "Boxers or briefs," far more complex. Men were being sexualized in glossy print in much the way women were in the Victoria's Secret catalog, though the poses were undeniably more "masculine." Not surprisingly, my favor model in these catalogues bore a decidedly masculine name: Steve Manley.
Leaning against a spartan kitchen countertop in thigh-length open robes, the models would appear relaxed, yet taut, in their spandex-cotton blend microbriefs sipping lazily on a cup of coffee or drinking from cartons of fat-free milk. Buddies fresh from their post-workout showers complimented one another in the locker room on their fetching multi-colored, square-cut boxer briefs, sharing jovial punches in the arm as they wore their towels not wrapped around their waists, but slung over their shoulders as if to say, "Hey there, guys...I'm completely comfortable with both my masculinity and my body, and I don't really mind if you take a look at my designer undergarments. In fact...I'm counting on it."
The disappointing lack of nudity aside, Undergear catalogues served as an object lesson for me that men could often be even sexier when they were only partially naked. I grew fond of seeing these scantily clad, beautifully muscled men with their manscaped bodies sometimes waxed bare - denuded of all body hair. I never knew how they achieved such unparalleled perfection, but it was something not to which I aspired, but to which I wanted desperately to dedicate myself. I wanted to worship these men as I was certain only I could do.
For the first time, I didn't have to try and mentally erase the bodies of those pesky women in order to "see" the men - there were none there to obscure from my view of that delicious male pulchritude. I was finally able to understand that I had never been interested in what the men were doing with those women, but simply with the men, themselves.
It was with these clothed models that I learned how to use my sexual imagination. I stopped simply projecting myself onto the pre-rendered gangbang photographs, and instead began to imagine myself at the whims and wily ways of these nearly naked men as they did unspeakable things to me in order to reach their own selfish Nirvana. In these fantasies, I was always the recipient of their machinations...never the aggressor.
It was around this time that I developed a habit I still have yet to break - hours-long bathroom sessions.
Unlike my father's house, my mother's had two bathrooms, giving me my own in which to secret myself for hours at a time either alone or with my step-cousin to whom I found myself naughtily attracted. Despite my unspoken longings, there were no incestuous romps in that steamy bathroom. Most often, we would literally exercise, attempting to achieve the well-sculpted bodies like those we saw in the Undergear catalogue, or practice holding our breath under the water in the tub until forced to the top for air.
In my step-cousin I found a real live object to whom I could attach my sexual daydreams. It was never upon myself that I envisioned the underwear in Undergear - I was invariably kept naked and waiting for orders from the Men in these fantasies. My step-cousin, not being related by blood, became the perfect target for my prurient fantasies.
I would imagine him scantily clad in what amounted to little more than a cock sock, his penis at which I had so often snuck clandestine glances during our mutual self-masturbation sessions on his waterbed separated from me by only the thinnest of skintight, almost transparent fabric, as he stood above me demanding that I look up at him with the respect, awe, and adoration that he, as a Man, and his cock deserved. Much to my pre-teen chagrin, however, those fantasies never came to pass.
My private bathroom sessions could stretch on for hours at a time, leaving my mother and stepfather to wonder, "Just what the hell is he doing in there?" My mother, I think, knew what was up. They both did, probably. The crunches and pushups I performed in our dual bathroom workout sessions were continued when I was by myself, sans clothing, always under the strict orders I imagined were being barked at me by any of the many manly models of whose bodies I so lovingly fantasized.
My most vivid fantasies involved me being subjugated to the will of one or several of these men. I was always the object of sexual domination, a willing focus of their physical and verbal abuse, never once believing that these desires were outside the realm of heteronormative acceptability. No one ever told me that I shouldn't be fantasizing about men, and so I never felt that what I was doing was wrong in any way. It seemed a natural fit for me to be the submissive partner in my sexual imagination, and so I grew to accept that this was what I wanted for myself, accepting the fact that I, unlike my straight peers, was uninterested in pursuing the opposite sex.
Step Four: The Prime of Mr. Jean's Booty
When I was in the sixth grade, my stepfather purchased a weight set in an effort to get back into shape. Before you wander into Incestland again, no, I did not fantasize about my stepfather.
In addition to his purchase of the weight set, he began to bring home exercise magazines, two of which in particular best held my interest: Men's Workout and Exercise for Men Only. Both of these magazines, which now appear to be out of print, presented muscular men not as marble statues upon which garments had been delicately sewn, but as the living, breathing, and visceral epitome of "male."
They glistened with the sweat brought forth by their physical endeavors, which served only to enhance and draw attention to the finely chiseled musculature of their bodies. Stomachs were not simply firm, they looked like a secondary set of ribs that had been mistakenly placed just below the first. Every sinew, every striation of their muscles were perfectly lit to provide the (mostly gay) readers with the best vantage point from which to view the fruits their magnificent handiwork.
Not only were these men sweaty, athletic, and gorgeous, they managed to complete their rigorous workouts in garments that only barely rose to the classification of "clothing." Spandex shorts; box-cut briefs; posing straps; the men performed every exercise wearing next to nothing, which, when caught in still photographs can be absolutely breathtaking. A good photographer could make the exercises look simple; a great photographer could do the same, but did so in a way that ensured every muscle group required to engage the motion was perfectly highlighted and contoured.
As if the pictographies weren't scintillating enough, the back pages of these magazines contained advertisements for soft-core gay, bisexual, and muscle porn, each ad clearly targeting the magazines' large gay readership. The bisexual porn was tossed in (always in the grainiest black and white low-resolution images imaginable) in an effort to address the handful of straight readers who might be heteroflexible enough to venture into the wilds of man-on-man sex. Alongside these videos were stills for muscle worship porn, a genre in which male models oil up their bodies to flex and pose for the camera in exotic or erotic settings, occasionally with a "private" video of those models brave enough to bare it all and finish by pleasuring themselves to a frothy finish.
In addition to these adverts, various "professional" services were listed in what masqueraded as a "Personals Section" - the pre-online version of Craigslist. Listings for "Masseurs," "House Boys," "Maid Services," and "Personal Trainers" littered the pages with poorly worded offerings, each one a thinly veiled euphemism for "Sex Worker." Or "Escorts," should you prefer the term.
As time went by, a pattern was quickly established: Rick would bring a copy of the newest issue home from the Ingles grocery store that was a short walk from our house, take them downstairs, read them for their supposed intended purpose, and I would sneak down into the basement after they went to bed and secret away his brand new "fitness" magazine, and abscond with my freshly purloined not-porno to my bedroom where I would then enjoy the triple thrill of finding something taboo sexually arousing, attempting to masturbate quietly so as not to awake my sleeping parents in the room across the hall, and with having successfully stolen (or so I thought) Rick's inspirational and educational literature for my own prurient purposes.
After I was forcibly ejected from middle school in the eighth grade, I was sent to live, again, with my father, and with that move ended my steady supply of exercise magazines. Whereas I had an allowance at my mother's with which to purchase each new issue of Men's Workout, at my father's, money was unspeakably tight, largely due to our shared inability to manage what little money we had.
Plato once wrote in The Republic, Book II, "...and yet a true creator is necessity, which is the mother of our invention." Guided by this proverb, I returned to my former process of removing from magazines the images of men to whom I was attracted. Without the aid of scissors, I was left to tear out entire pages in order to get what I want, trying desperately to hide my misdeeds from any watchful security cameras or store cops routing out shoplifters.
I would not-so-slyly slide the object of my desire underneath my shirt, tucking it securely beneath the waistband of my jeans, and make my way to the nearest store men's room, lock myself inside one of the filthy bathroom stalls, and paw my way sweatily through the magazine with shaking hands in search of the desired photos. Whenever I located a photo set that got my dick hard, I would attempt to carefully and quietly remove the page, tearing it from its binding and folding it into a much more manageable square that could more easily be concealed in the pocket of my oversized jeans or jacket. I would then take these stolen pages home and hide them in that perennial hiding place: between the mattress and the box spring.
I would spend much of my time in high school, and even now as an adult, sequestered behind the closed door to my room, and as a Freshman, I would spend those hours poring over my ill-gotten gains, furiously stroking myself to orgasm as I imagined these oiled musclegods using their prodigious pecs and bulging biceps to force me into delicious sexual servitude, unconcerned with my pleasure; using me to gratify his own desires.
Step Five: Gladiators Pitted Against a Starving Prostate
This, of course, was a half-truth - I was no more attracted to any woman than most of my male peers were attracted to one another - and by the time high school rolled around, I had pretty much accepted the fact that had taken me seven long years to figure out:
I liked guys.
Over the course of the next several years, I would stumble upon and abandon various other masturbatory stimulants. On television, it was professional wrestling. While other teenage males watched it for the violence, I watched it for the muscles. I would watch each episode with dick clutched firmly in hand as the nearly naked men paraded about the ring, pummeling one another to a pulp in the process.
Pro wrestling is, for most straight men, an outlet through which they safely express aggression. For me, such programs afforded me the opportunity to revel in that aggression, giving rise to a host of feelings I'd not encountered since my early Bloodsport period. Instead of women being brutalized in the Euro porn in which I so aspired to star, the WWF (now WWE) brought me images of fully grown, overly muscled men being all but sodomized on the stage, staged though it was, and all this to the deafening din of cheers from the overstimulated masses.
Groups of us would gather at friends' houses to cheer alongside those fans lucky enough to have seats to the matches. They waxed rhapsodic about their favorite wrestlers, each of whom they held in unimpeachable esteem, while I sat basking in the glow of the testosterone-fueled violence flickering on their big screen televisions.
It was this way with every sport. The men whom my friends viewed as role models and idols, I saw as the objects of my unexpressed desires. Football players, wrestlers, and strongmen; each of these men provided me with yet another image to store away in my spank bank.
Step Six: From Chrysalis to Boned Up Butterfly
As the age of the computer continued to mature, so did my tastes in erotic stimulation. The rise of the Internet provided perverts such as myself access not to a wealth of information (although it occasionally may have served that purpose), but with a much more immediate way to seek out stimulative material. It was during my Senior year in high school that I was introduced to the Nifty Archives, a compendium of self-published erotic fiction, each story conveniently sorted into subcategories from Authoritarian to Athletics; Incest to Military.
Each genre opened for me a whole new world of smut. A naturally avid reader, I would allow myself to be transported into each story, regardless of how good or bad the writing may have been, and in each new scenario, I discovered a new facet of my sexuality with which I had not been previously acquainted. Each story allowed me to become someone else, and more importantly helped me to realize that I was not alone in my forbidden desires.
As the Internet improved, I gained access to videos that had never before been perused by my eyes. I had largely grown up in a straight porn world, and the revelation that pornography also game in the gay male variety stoked the fires of my teenage passion.
Like many gay men who came of age in the 1990s, Ken Ryker represented one of the most definitive examples of masculinity. A gay-for-pay bisexual actor, Ken was versatile in his sexuality, if not in his sexual tendencies. Sports fetish, bondage, and bisexual scenes - Ryker could do it all, and often did, earning him a place in the fond memories of the gay porn community.
I watched (and masturbated) as he shoved his gigantic member forcibly into even the tightest of assholes, all the while thinking, "Please, let it be me. Please, let me be the one he wants to fuck."
Whether unshaven or freshly shorn, Ken's appeal was nearly universal, and for me, he was almost always the star of my sexual fantasies. With every story I read on the Nifty Archives, when I placed myself in the role of the bottom, he would be the man I imagined as the top. For every time I was violated at the hands of the university football team's star quarterback, bound, gagged, and fucked by the unforgiving Master, or forced to submit to the straight man's desire to service him while he pleasured his girlfriend, Ryker was there every step of the way.
Adventures in Forbidden Romance
In the process of exploring my sexual desires as a pre-teen, teenager, young adult, and as a man, a certain pattern becomes clear - I like men...and not just any men; men who are bigger, stronger, and more dominant than I. My willingness to submit to the right man have led me down several sexual avenues, and while I have yet to be successful in making my dream a more permanent reality beyond the occasional one-night romp at Fort Troff, I still have hope that, some day, somebody's going to make me want to turn around and let them make me cry.
