I wished I had a friend like Anthony back in those days when I was a virgin.
I didn’t get the talk from either my father or my mother they were divorced by the time I hit puberty, which was around 11. I still saw my dad for his visitations but we never had “the talk.” There’s only 2 incidents that I can remember where he even came close to mentioning sex or sex related. The first time, I must’ve been 12 or 13 (this was in the 80s and shorts and swimming trunks were really short for men and boys — I miss those days) and I was swimming at his apartments pool. And because of the constant boners I would pop all day long, randomly, I got used to pointed my dick upward because in jeans and underwear you can hide that boner pretty good since it’s being held flat down and not tenting. I didn’t know you couldn’t do the same in wet, flimsy short-short Ocean Pacific or Lightening Bolts trunks. So he pulled me aside and told me to rearrange myself so that I’m pointing downward and that way my crotch wouldn’t bulge out obscenely. I’m not even well hung!
The second time was when I was trying to convince my mom to order me this illustrated book on Sex or Sexual positions, and she went off and called my dad and told him he needs to come over right now and talk to me because I’m asking all kinds of questions about “erections” and that I went her to buy me this dirty book. So he came down immediately.
I’m thinking finally, I can get some answers or he’ll be too embarrassed to talk about sex and he’ll buy me the book to shut me up. English is a second language to both of my parents, he being born and raised in Vienna Austria and she came from Fukushima, Japan. My dad practically lost his accent except when saying words with a “W” he would slip and make a “Vee” sound, which is how “W” is pronounced in a German. My mom still had an accent though it wasn’t bad, but for Japanese speakers who learn English they cannot pronounce the “L” or “R” correctly because no Japanese word has that sound. So what comes out of their mouths is a hybrid “L” and “R” and when my mom called and told my dad I was asking about “erections,” he thought she was saying “elections,” so he came down thinking he was going to educate me about civics and how democracy works.
And when he saw the book I wanted, he hit the roof and said he wasn’t going to buy me that filth and I shouldn’t be looking at it in the first place — at least not until I became an adult! Needless to say, I got 0 from my parents about Sex Ed. Our high school wasn’t much better even though we had to have our parents sign this paper saying they give permission for their kid to take part in the sex Ed curriculum that was supposed to start. That was bullshit, too. We got two sheets of paper with medical and scientific words and definitions about sexual organs, clinical explanation of intercourse, and that took all of one class period to go over and we never came back to it.
So I had to learn the hard way like most gay guys who came in generations before me: and that involved public toilets at the Hollywood Park racetrack and glory holes.