It was sort of weird as a teenager, or even younger—-I sort of found everyone attractive so I was not so much of confused as surprised at the abundance. I lost my virginity with a girl, Kim when I was 11, she was 12 and then my most significant fooling around with a boy, Walter at 14. Before and after both of them I had crushes and parochial school had cotillions and dances and I was on a boy’s swim team in middle school and high school. Between 8 and 10 I used to play kissyface with a handsome young boy, the handsomest in class, he was mixed with dazzling green eyes. I was a latchkey kid so we would go to my house and roll around making out but never actual sex.
Through that time I remember seeing cable movies with Vanity, Apollonia, and Jayne Kennedy.
You can see that I had a type though ironically Kim looked more like Lupita N.
I think what happened with Kim was about proximity and experience. Our mothers were best friends and Kim wasn’t a virgin and sexually aggressive in all of our playdates with touching and kissing until a sleepover turned into full blown sex——with her 7 year old brother watching us from across the room. The experience itself was fine, not distasteful but I wasn’t in love with her. I understood all of the mechanics and we did a lot, beyond making out, penetration and oral. But as I would mature sexually, I discovered enjoying more “advanced” sex. I remember she was all about the acrobatics but not being good at it.
Then in high school nerdy, coke bottle thick glasses wearing Walter and I ended up making out under a porch of a house in New Jersey. He too was rather inexperienced though interested and assertive but it was more touching and feeling and frottage——mainly because he was hung like a missile silo—-probably to date, the largest penis I’ve ever seen, and I wasn’t interested in being penetrated by him. But what came from that and my mother’s brief marriage and my stepfather’s handsome teenage son (he looked like a teen Will Smith) and his girlfriend, and our “group” friendliness, mutual crushation, was I discovered my imagination.
Being more of a thinker and having read lots of books, eventually making my way through my grandmother’s cabinet which included Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins (who’s books taught me all about oral sex)—-I learned how to combine my imagination with intent and anatomy and how to imagine folk naked, men naked. Many children who eventually move out of exclusive heterosexuality and along the LGBTSGL spectrum tend to live some of their teens in sort of an asexual way—-which I did in the periods between these hetero and homo explorations. Even with Kim and her bestie, Theadorsha—-who came over one evening and we fell into a three way—I was still sexually—-not obtuse, not uninterested, nor uninitiated, but not as obsessed with it as my peers.
I think because one, all my questions were answered, I had ample experience and I’d even been sexually abused by my cousins when I was younger. The sexual abuse though didn’t launch me into a wild sexuality or confused one, as it does some—-it sort of pushed me to be conscious of my sexuality—-what was choice, interest, consensual.)
I remember seeing the original Miami Vice episodes and crushing on both Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas and then through the power of imagination able to picture them both naked, diving into a pool. ( I was on the swim team after all.) But then that imagery turned into like a fantasy and then a recurring dream.
I know it seems sort of banal but I was also writing tawdry soap operas in fiction, watching soap operas and mostly dodging horny teenagers. In middle and high school, two friends who played role playing games had some sort of weird experimental sex game going. We would as a group or me with each of them, cut school, wait until our parents left for work then go play D&D and Marvel roleplaying games for hours at my house.
Peter, who was nicknamed in school BJ—-because he loved giving blowjobs to so many boys——spent so much time trying to seduce me, as he had the other boys. I remember he was pasty skinned, buck toothed and somehow talked his mother into letting him get a black and orange mohawk, at 14.
Marcello, who was big and Latino, I thought was cuter but he ate his feelings so he went from stocky to chubby in spite of being 6′4.
I bring them up because Peter had often seduced Marcello and told me about it and his other conquests in attempts to seduce me. Oddly I never came out to Peter because he was so not just aggressive with boys but trying to seduce teachers, picking men up off the street, doing full bottoming with adult men. He was too extreme. Ironically years later working for an LGBTSGL non-profit, I came across him in some literature, he was HIV+. Some of my fore sighting fear was that he was too advanced, too indiscriminate. I guess I was discriminate.
Not a prude or conservative but always conscious of my safety (that’s one of the consciousness factors being sexually abused taught me—-to ask myself, even now, past the situation or someone’s feelings Do I want to do this? And be able to hear a clean Yes or No. I learned also two other self-check ins—-one from Oprah—-”Doubt means don’t” and from Patti Stanger—-Does my pecker like him/her and want to fuck them? The pecker never lies.) I use these check ins to this day when out on dates, meeting people, sizing folk up for attraction.
I had a huge crush on Bruce Willis (until I dated a few Pisces lol)
Its weird how there were so many sexual opportunities in my teens that I didn’t engage in because it seemed so juvenile, waiting until my early 20s to go on what can only be called a Star Trek level of exploration of all kinds of planets and universes for the two to three years from high school until 21 when I went off to college (deeply explaining why I was sort of on a hiatus in college, really only dating and hooking up with men 10 years older than me)——I lived off campus, and a couple of female students so I had a lot of freedom.
I’ve always had this thing about liking not the slutty folk but liking the calm, relaxed, hey let’s have some mutual fun as friends folk. Anxiety around sex or having to convince someone has never been my groove. Also weirdly, which is why there aren’t many on my celebrity crush list—-I don’t have many celebrity crushes——because I don’t know them as people. I only see them faking a role/identity so it’s hard for me to be attracted to the “them” of their identity—-even when they’re not acting.
I know weird right?
I can find them perhaps aesthetically attractive to a point but I find lots of folk attractive in that way whom I have only a musing sexual interest in.
In my teens and 20s my mother owned a modeling agency—-lots of pretty people in their teens through 40s, often using my bedroom or hallway to change into lingerie and such——she held rehearsals at our large apartment—-so I sort of became inured to two things—-beauty/handsomeness and overt sexuality. I’ve dated, been sexual with lots of beautiful folk, mainly because I’m less fawning of them—-they hate that (and the ones who don’t run from them!)—-and I had never thought about it as picking out attractive, pretty people with confidence until a friend talked about his specifically picking unattractive, overweight, homely looking men to compensate for his being under 5 feet tall. It was sort of like a balancing game to him because he looked slightly odd and had a couple of physical extremes in his body, so he would pursue other “oddities/extremes”.
Which of course made me think, because even some of my friends and students were/are very attractive people, but I can’t say I pick them socially due to attractiveness but I’m easier/less fawning to be around.
A few men have been professional models, actors, even escorts—-a few were breathtaking (again, I never told them this——they had already heard it a million times) and that lack of fawning on their celebrity, good looks or charisma seemed to make me more engageable.
It’s wonderfully weird to consider and dissect one thing—-celebrity crushes—-and come to a realization in the writing about beauty interests. I think that detachment is why I don’t have more celebrity “crushes”.
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