Charlie

+1 Recently, at an AT&T store, I was helped by a young salesman who had the barest hint of an accent. I asked if he were Canadian, and he said he was from Uzbekistan. He had come to the US in his 20s, speaking no English, and had spent a few months at a relation's apartment in San Francisco, watching American television all day long, to learn English. When I probed a bit deeper, it turned out that he already knew three other languages before he came to the US. Most language learning research shows that the earlier one learns another language, and the more languages one knows, the easier it is to master another one. When Serena Williams won the French Open in 2002, she tried to give an acceptance speech in high school French, and it was such a garbled mess that the audience could hardly keep a straight face. When she won again eleven years later, she accepted in fluent, idiomatic French that left them cheering. In the meantime, she had bought an apartment in Paris and lived there for long periods, and had a French tennis coach (and rumored lover). There is no substitute for being immersed in the culture when trying to learn a language as an adult.

My spouse worked for awhile in a professional office in Singapore. Most of the local staff were Chinese Singaporeans. He said that when the staff were conversing among themselves about personal matters, they always spoke Mandarin, but the minute they started to talk with one another about their work, they switched to English.

I wonder what Dante's spoken Italian would sound like to a modern Italian.

I studied Spanish, German, French and Italian in school, but never learned to actually speak any of them. Then I became good friends with someone who spoke all those languages fluently, before he learned English. He is a published writer in English, Spanish and French. How I envied him! So for several years I worked on my German, and became fluent enough to study at the University of Vienna. When I lived in eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, I was surrounded by people who spoke no English, but I was pleased to find that the older ones often spoke enough German for me to converse with them. Like whippedguy, I love to exclaim in 19th century operatic Italian, and I can muddle through enough to get by as a tourist in French and Spanish-speaking countries. But I rarely find anyone in Palm Springs with whom to speak anything but English, except for the occasional foreign tourist or immigrant.

I had no idea how two men had sex--I thought they probably rubbed against one another while kissing--until my first experience when I was 17, when the guy explained that we were supposed to insert our cocks into each other's assholes. I thought it was a bizarre concept, until I tried it.

Ri-i-i-i-ght! (snicker) Even today, when people have much more information about sex, and more incentive to know themselves, teenagers can be confused about their orientation, so it is not unusual to look back to high school or college days many years ago and see classmates whose orientation wasn't obvious, even to themselves, at that time. I still dated girls until I was 21, just in case my gay feelings were a phase that I might grow out of. My best friend was engaged to be married at 24, until he was outed by a witch-hunt in the military. It was a traumatic experience, but it may have saved him much more grief later in life if he had gone through with the wedding.

Nowadays, Gman, everyone over the age of 10 seems to know all about sexual diversity, but back in olden times, it was assumed that everyone was heterosexual except the rare screaming queen. I was aware of only one other person in my high school, and that was because everyone said he was queer; in retrospect, I'm not sure that he was more than sensitive and "artistic." Amazingly, I never suspected my best friend, although as soon as he came out to me in response to me coming out to him, I realized we both had missed a lot of clues. Shortly thereafter, we discovered through someone else in a neighboring town that two of the most popular and attractive guys in the class ahead of ours were boyfriends who were well known in the larger gay community (which we also didn't know existed). So, in a school the size of yours, there were undoubtedly others whom, unfortunately, you just never recognized. Obviously, there are drawbacks to everyone now knowing or suspecting everyone else's sexual orientation from the onset of puberty (like having it bandied about on social media), but it does make it easier to find a like-minded circle of friends much sooner in life. I was fairly quiet and shy in high school, and if I hadn't had the amazing luck to have bonded with the one classmate who could draw me out, I might have stayed in the closet for much longer than I did.

My best friend from high school told me about his earliest realization that he was gay. When he was 12, Richard had a local paper delivery route, and once per month he collected his payment from the customers. One of them was a Polish woman with an 18 year old son, Philip, a big, blond athlete. One day when he went to collect his money, the woman wasn't home, and Philip invited him to come in and play around, which turned out to be masturbating one another. From then on, Philip often managed to be home alone when Richard came to collect, and over the next six years the playing around escalated into more homoerotic activity, even including a scene in which Richard tied Philip spreadeagled on a bed and fucked him. Richard liked to go to the movies by himself on Saturday afternoons, and Philip told him that if he sat in a certain place in the theater, older men might approach him and masturbate him or even suck his cock in the dark. Soon Richard's paper delivery money was being spent on movie tickets, and he was associating cowboy movies with orgasms. By the time he graduated from high school, he knew he was gay. Richard never revealed any of this to me until the week we graduated, when we finally came out to one another. He told me that Philip, now 24, was about to get married, and he suggested that I should have a shot at him while he was still available. He arranged for the three of us to go out one night in a car and park in an isolated spot for some fun. Philip turned out to be at least 6'4" with sinewy muscles and silky blond body hair, not handsome but with a harshly masculine face and very butch in demeanor. He was obviously tense about the situation, but there was a hard bulge in his trousers. Richard encouraged me to take Philip's cock out and suck it, and I was stunned: it was the biggest one I had ever seen, and even more than a half century later, I don't think I have ever handled anything bigger. I could barely get my mouth over the head, and I couldn't imagine how Richard at 12 could have done anything with it. No wonder Richard had usually been the top in their activities. Philip got married a few weeks later, and Richard had only one further experience with him; about two years later, when his wife was out of town, Philip called Richard and invited him to come over for some fun. It was a repeat of the bondage and fucking scene. Richard had some poppers with him, and gave them to Philip, who reacted with much wilder abandon that Richard had even seen from him before. But he never heard from him again.

You are right. I remembered Audrey Hepburn, but I was confusing Maclaine with Sandy Dennis's role in The Fox (1967), another movie in which the lesbian had to die in the end. After a half century, my movie memories are not as sharp as my personal memories.

The early 1930s were actually more relaxed and open about homosexuality in plays and movies than they were after WW2. Censorship of the movies only started in the mid-1930s. I remember when the movie version of The Children's Hour was made in 1961, the subject matter was considered so daring that it could only be suggested obliquely, and of course the lesbian character played by Sandy Dennis had to be killed at the end. I took a girlfriend at the time to see it, and I actually had to explain to her what was going on in the plot, because she didn't get it.

I started masturbating regularly when I was about eight years old, but I don't remember what I was thinking about while it happened. However, when I was twelve, I remember thinking about one of my classmates, Ricky Hill, who was more physically mature than the rest of the class, and very cute; I thought about what he looked like when he was naked in the gym locker room. The next summer, I was staying at my grandmother's house, and started reading a crime novel she had in the house, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which has a homosexual character in it. When Philip Marlowe makes a crack to him that suggests the possibility that he might be forced to perform oral sex on Marlowe, I suddenly realized that was what I wanted to do! As a footnote, at my 50th high school reunion, I was engaged in conversation by a bald, grey, dumpy old guy whom I didn't recognize until I glanced at his name tag--it was Ricky Hill.

Have you submitted a review? That is where this info belongs.

When I lived in Philly, I frequently shopped in Whole Foods, and often ate lunch at the very store in which I suspect WilliamM had his encounter with the security guard. Then I moved to an area of southern CA with no Whole Foods, and often lamented that fact. Recently, WF finally opened a store downvalley, so yesterday I eagerly headed there, prepared to do a big shopping. To my great disappointment, they had very few things I wanted that I couldn't get at my local Ralph's, Von's or Albertson's. I came away with much less than I had intended, yet it still cost me $135. Maybe my memory is colored by nostalgia, but I thought they used to carry a lot more interesting and unique prepared items.

I think thickornotatall may have misread your post and did not realize that you were talking about yourself, not WilliamM. I often have trouble keeping track of who is saying what in a long thread.

One of the big problems with such a discussion is the definition of "college," which covers as multifarious a range of possibilities as "dog" does. A community college in the rural South, a large state university in the Midwest, and a prestigious private college in the Northeast can be as different as a Rottweiler, a Whippet and a Pekinese. Different colleges are good and bad for different purposes. If you want to work for Bain Capital, a major DC law firm, or become a research physicist, you go to an Ivy or Stanford, MIT or maybe a top state university like Michigan, you don't go to Cal State Fullerton or Oklahoma Baptist U; it also helps if your parents are doctors or corporate executives. If you want a decent middle class job, you have many more choices, but there are still numerous routes to get there, from a solid state university or second tier private college, to starting in a community college and eventually transferring to a four year school. There are also good jobs to be had with a two year technical degree. If you are a really bright and creative type, and can accept insecurity, you may not need to graduate from any kind of college. Most of the criticism of "college" or "university" education these days is based on examination of a very small slice of higher education, generally the most prestigious schools, the same kinds that the authors of those books and articles went to themselves. Yes, the faculty at the top schools--both private and public--lean strongly to the left, and are paid a lot of money, and often do little actual teaching of undergraduates; that job is left to TAs. But the majority of private colleges and state schools--even the flagship state universities--still have ideologically middle-of-the-road faculty who make less money than they could in private industry or even government bureaucracies, and a high percentage of the undergraduate teaching at the public colleges is done by part-time faculty who eke out a living by teaching several courses at a time at different schools. I have known plenty of these "adjunct instructors," who are lucky to make $30,000/year. The large increases in the cost of a college education are often driven by the proliferation of administrative non-teaching employees, and the obscene salaries and benefits paid to the top officers at many schools and education systems, like the three tiers of the state higher education apparatus in California. The excuse used for paying so much for the presidents, deans, CFOs, etc., is that it is necessary to attract "qualified" people to run things, as though their main qualification is the desire to make as much money as possible. I could go on and on about this subject, but I don't want to sit here typing all night and raising my blood pressure.

When I was young, the assumption was that a college education would expose you to ideas and information, allow you to discover what you wanted to do with your life, help you to become a mature adult, and if all that happened, you would find some way to support yourself. Now the assumption seems to be that the purpose of college is to provide you with a ticket for a well-paid job in finance, government, business, technology, or medicine, from the moment you graduate until you retire. I find that very depressing.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw the thread title, since my very first boyfriend was a Gino in New Jersey. Unfortunately, he didn't look anything like this one.

Water closet is the standard British term for the room we Americans usually refer to as the toilet or the bathroom (even when it doesn't have a bath in it), generally shortened to simply the WC, which is how it is labeled almost everywhere in Europe for the aid of English speakers.

Probably a reference to card games in which spades is the highest value suit.

That was the one.

When the Selectric came out, I found it as unnerving to use as I now find typing on an iPad. I learned to type on my grandfather's 1920 manual Underwood, which I now wish I had saved instead of getting rid of it when I got my first portable (!!) Hermes manual.

I think it is interesting that almost everyone still refers to "dialing" a number, even though almost no one has a phone with a dial on it any longer, and the sound on a landline phone that lets one know that one can punch in a number is still called a "dial tone."

I was 17 when I came out, and many of the men I had sex with in my late teens and early twenties were in their 30s and 40s; one of my regulars was almost 60. It was mainly because I was always horny, and they were the guys who were available, and had their own place to do it. However, as I got into my 20s, I had my own place, and I began to look for peers closer to my own age for relationships, which became more important than just sex. I continued to make gay friends who were sometimes much older than I was, but my first partner was 3 years older and my eventual spouse was 7 years older, not exactly gerontophilia. I think the number of young gays who are permanently attracted to much older men is pretty small, but I suspect many successful professional escorts are genuinely attracted to older men.

I would be happy to pay a much higher gas tax, if I trusted that it would be used for infrastructure repair.

I just paid $3.06 for regular at my usual station in Palm Springs, the lowest I have paid there in years.