FOREWORD (51 page)

male love relationships. This continued throughout my first year at university, continually alternating between lesbian and homosexual sex. Normal sex didn’t seem to excite me at all. Although I would always get an erection when I thought about fooling around with another guy, and I often masturbated to this fantasy, as soon as I came, I would consider sex with a guy as being disgusting and wonder how anyone could ever have a male homosexual relationship. However, lesbian relationships continued to impress me. At times, I would think of sex with two girls. I would make it with both of them, and lie back and watch them go at each other.

Thereafter, I met my wife and thus never did get into a homosexual affair. I know if the time had been right, if I had a private place and the right guy had come along, I would have been willing to give it a try. My wife knows of my lesbian fantasies, and I have let it be known to her that I would like to see another girl making it with her. Although she does not seem interested, I have some magazines and printed material on the subject of lesbianism, which she has looked at. At present, I still have some homosexual thoughts, and often put her panty hose on when she is not around, and I am feeling particularly horny. At times I have thought it would have been nice if I had been a girl, for then I could have been a lesbian.

SAM

I am twenty-five years old, heterosexual and single, although my girl friend stays with me and we will probably get married soon. We have both had many lovers, I myself starting at age eleven, when I was literally raped by a girl three years my senior. I am also a musician with a degree in electronics.

Usually my fantasy will begin as I am driving home in my car. I see two girls about my age hitchhiking. Both are very attractive. One has a large chest and the other is rather flat.

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(Don’t get the wrong idea about my use of the word flat.

Large nipples can be the most stimulating of all.) I start to rap with them after I pick them up, and we go up to my apartment to have a drink or smoke a joint. Eventually, the conversation turns to sex and since we are all sitting together on the couch, one or both of the girls start to rub my thigh. Naturally, I return the gesture, and we get into some heavy three-way petting and kissing. We retire to the bedroom, where I help undress the girl with big tits, while the other girl undresses me. The busty girl goes down on me and I remove the other’s blouse and kiss and suck her nipples. I start to remove her pants, but before I can she too goes down to lick my cock and balls. I enjoy very much being sucked and licked, as I also enjoy making love to two women at once.

Both girls suddenly stop and the smaller one expresses a great desire for me to eat her. I am extremely excited, and eating cunt is one of my favorite pastimes, so I remove her pants quickly. Imagine my surprise when I see a well-formed cock where I expected to find a juicy cunt! Since I have had a desire (and most men do) to suck a cock, I go down on him hungrily. Soon I’m rewarded with a mouthful of delicious come. The three of us fuck and suck each other to many orgasms and get together quite often after this first encounter.

I would like to point out that if homosexuality was not looked down upon by society, everyone would be bisexual to a great extent. My only encounter with a man occurred when I was somewhat drunk. I sucked and licked his dick a little, but he did not come in my mouth, although he did suck me off to an orgasm. Usually my girl will save a little come in her mouth when she sucks me off, so I have tasted it and I do find it a pleasing experience. I have also eaten her cunt after intercourse. The combination of tastes is fantastic.

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DAVID

I am twenty-one years old. Like most young boys, I had various homosexual encounters when growing up. Occasionally, I think about them. I fantasize sucking this guy’s penis, a guy I grew up with. His name was Mike. As kids we would have sex together and this was my most recent homosexual affair (maybe ten years ago). It is my only fantasy concerning homosexuality and I don’t use it too often, probably due to a guilt of some sort.

Mike and I were neighbors. He was slightly younger than I (I was around twelve). I recall going over to his house frequently when we could be alone there. First we’d strip naked and masturbate together. We’d suck each other off or play with each other and I’d usually mount his ass (but not penetrate it). We would rub genitals and this would get me very hot. We’d think about fucking some girl in the neighborhood and soon I’d be shooting sperm all over him (he couldn’t ejaculate yet). I’m sure he climaxed anyway because this is something boys do from a very young age, or at least I did (six years old?).

I imagine sucking him off, but I don’t know where he is now. I wonder sometimes if his penis continued developing in size beyond my own proportions and if he still makes it with other guys. I don’t know, but it would be nice to relive some of the good old times with him again. He’s probably married with a couple kids ... as I am.

By age thirteen, Jock (above) has learned that sex is dirty.

But society has not yet taught him that masculine gender identity is fragile; he still dreams of boys and girls in the same fleeting moment. At his age, all things are possible.

How many years does he have before, like the older men in this chapter, he will feel compelled to define and redefine his maleness every time he feels a tug of interest in another man?

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Even the men in these pages who did not feel threatened by their homosexual fantasies nevertheless could not rest until they had assured me that their true preference was woman. Where do these anxieties come from? For once, women cannot be blamed. It is men who are hardest on themselves and each other in this competition to be the most he-male on the block. Oddly enough, fear and avoidance of competition are the very strands that often become woven into homosexual fantasies – the boy’s fear he will never be the man his father was.

The unconscious statement being made to the other man is

“Don’t smash me because you think I’m your rival for the woman. I don’t love her at all. I love you.” If you can’t beat him, join him.

Connard (above) is a fascinating example of this mechanism at work. Like his idol Elvis Presley, Connard is a guitar player and singer. He dresses and wears his hair like the late entertainer, and is proud when people say he looks like Elvis.

Connard knows he has little chance of scaling the heights Elvis did. Does this mean he must admit defeat? No. In making love to Elvis, Connard incorporates his hero, an idealized version of himself. Narcissism here has taken homosexual expression. Elvis is no longer an unbeatable rival. Elvis is Connard, Connard is Elvis.

Having given Freud his due, I still do not feel the issue is resolved. Is unconscious fear of the father of twenty or thirty years ago enough to explain why men’s anxieties over homosexuality never seem able to be put to rest today? Can it be that there is some ongoing process that continues all through life, keeping this fear ever fresh?

Once there was a time when boys were boys, and the other boys gave him everything he needed: camaraderie, physical closeness, reinforcement against women’s petty nagging, the comfort and excitement of esprit de corps. To keep these feelings alive, grown men form groups that exclude women.

The appeal to men of the 100 percent male society is so powerful that even in these egalitarian times, it took the power of Nancy Friday

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the U.S. Constitution for women to have a martini in the Bilt-more Men’s Bar. Men feel they automatically belong, from birth, to some great, unspoken, and universal club the law can’t touch: Drawing themselves up into ranks of solidarity whenever a woman approaches, they lie for each other to their wives without a second thought.
It is this undying call
back to boyhood that is threatening,
the yearning to go back to a time when women did not exist, that keeps each man ever on guard against himself (“Oh, my God, I must be queer!”) and against all other men, too (“That dirty little faggot, I’ll beat his ass!”)

Sometimes homosexual fantasies appeal to Wade (above), at other times they “disgust” him. What is unfailingly satisfying are scenarios about lesbians. There is a kind of role transference here: Watching two women make love, the fantasist can identify with one or the other as the recipient of all the sexual attention. But no anxiety attaches; it is not a man doing it to her/him. It is another woman. Sam (above) puts a similar mechanism to work in his scenario. The fact that one of the girls turns out to be a man allows him to have his homosexual fantasy without guilt. Nevertheless, the thrill is heightened by the fact that everything is taking place in the forbidden, homosexual context.

It is generally thought that women get the best of both worlds when it comes to closeness and affection. In addition to what they can coax out of men, women also have each other. With society’s full approval, women kiss on greeting, walk arm in arm, wash each other’s hair, hold each other while waiting for the jury to say guilty or not, rub suntan oil on each other’s backs. Indeed, one of the revelations to me in researching
My Secret Garden
was the almost universal lack of anxiety with which grown women play with fantasies of sex with other women.

But women record their real sexual lives in terms of men.

Whatever went on in those adolescent sleep-overs wasn’t sex.

In fact, my research tells me that young women have relatively little lesbian play with each other, it is mostly hugging Men In Love

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and kissing – maternal stuff – that they exchange. As such, it carries both the good and bad emotions connected with mother: warmth, but intimacy always undercut by the threat of loss.

One of the great attractions of erotic horseplay between boys is its independence. Intimacy without strings or threat of loss. How could you not “love” such a person? Now wonder men’s recounting of this early fooling around is so often lengthy and without regret. David (above) has always remembered sex with another boy. “It would be nice to relive some of the good old times with him again,” David says, and adds, “He’s probably married with a couple kids ... as I am.” In the seven years since I published
My Secret Garden
, no one has criticized me by saying I had suggested that women were latent lesbians. Will I get off as easily if I suggest that men have at least the memory of having once had something fundamentally closer, more comforting, more exciting and intimate than women ever had?

EVERETT

I work at a little hotel as night security. I’m also a policeman in the daytime. When the hotel is closed, the restaurant has one young Mexican boy, eighteen years old, who looks like John Travolta and is built like a medium Mr. America.

He does the porter work in the restaurant, cleaning the kitchen and store, and doesn’t speak much English. So me and the night clerk take time and teach him. Naturally, we tell him who comes in to fuck, and about the hookers. He gets a kick out of all this.

Now I’m forty-five, three kids, and have always thought I was straight. One night this kid comes in and has to clean the stove hoods while standing on the stove. It was summer, he had his shirt off and white see-through slacks, and
The Most
Perfect Small Round Firm Ass I Ever Saw.
I was standing behind him and I was as hard as a rock. He turns around and Nancy Friday

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says, “Hi, Amigo,” I said hi, but couldn’t get my eyes off that ass. Then he said, “Hey, what is the matter, you no talk tonight, no feel good?” I threw him off and said yes. He kept talking while working, and I just agree with what he says, not really interested, but I still had my eye on his ass. Then he picks up, he catches me looking at his ass and he smiles. I get nervous and say I got to go check the lobby. I was so horny I wanted to jerk off right away, but the waitress was still in the restaurant. When she left, the young Mexican called me over to the stove to ask me something. Somehow his pants were down where I could see the crack of his ass. And he was really moving his ass, in a really sexy movement. I went to the coffee counter side (where the waitress calls in orders). I could see and talk to him but he could only see my head. I just had the feeling he was seducing me. I was hotter than hell and as I watched his movements I pulled out my dick and came off.

I must have sighed a little when I came because he stopped moving and smiled and I said, “I gotta go, I’ll see you,” and he said, “Anytime.”

I’m a married man with several kids. It’s very upsetting to me to find that when I masturbate now I think of this guy.

Does it mean I’m homosexual? I hope not. I wouldn’t know how to think of myself.

TEX

I’m twenty-three, male, and I work a blue-collar job and I’m also a full-time student. I started college in 1971 and dropped out in 1973 due to my then heroin addiction. I stayed strung out extensively for two more years, until I entered a closed therapeutic community voluntarily for a period of one year. I’ve been out of the program for six months. The program is centered on getting the individual in touch with his feelings and emotions, how they are acted out in both fantasy and reality, and how to alter these actions into something Men In Love

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productive. Well, my particular case, my “reasons,” for my drug addiction were twofold – (1) sexual inadequacy and (2) intellectual incompetency in college, as I was trying to become a doctor. Anyway, my sexual inadequacy was explored and here is where my trip of fantasies begins.

I did not experience orgasm until August 1971, when I

“happened” to masturbate one night out of the blue. I did not have sex until April 1972, with a woman – the only reason then was she walked up to me at school and said quite bluntly, “I want to fuck you!” As I stood there shocked, looking at this beautiful woman, I could hardly refuse. So my sex life began. It was skimpy until the last six months since I’ve been out of the program. These are some of the fantasies which have held me together: