Who Your Blogger Is . . .


I started this blog to relate some of my experiences in being gay (and married). Though I suppose I've always been gay, born that way -- I didn't know what gay was when I was a kid. In fact the word did not even exist back then in the 1940s and 1950s. You were queer or homosexual, but not gay. Any gay act was described as either "a crime against nature" or "sodomy", especially when it was published in the hometown newspaper, and especially after being convicted of it in the courts. I do remember my father saying to me when I was about six years old, "Stop being a sissy!" Well, he must have recognized who I was. And as a preschooler, I did like dressing up in my mother's clothes and playing with dolls. No, it wasn't GI Joe then, but it well could have been Billy (anatomically correct-cut) or Carlos (anatomically correct-uncut) later on. Carlos is shown here:

Growing up I was curious about where babies came from and the birds and the bees, but my attention was always drawn to men's crotches. What's in there? Watching ballet on TV thrilled me seeing that manhood showing through the tights, as well as those virile male circus performers. Boobs just never turned me on. There were not many places to look, but I enjoyed the Sears, Roebuck catalogs showing men's briefs or better yet, to get a copy of National Geographic and see some natives in some tribe somewhere in the world buck naked! That was all before television and even when TV arrived, the code of standards was so strict and conservative that no woman was ever even pregnant.

Younger than most of my classmates in junior high and high school because I started first grade prematurely at age five, and because puberty arrived late for me, I suffered humiliation and embarrassment in tenth grade physical education in which we first had to take showers and be seen naked. All the other guys had pubic hair, but I looked like I had shaved down there. Their dicks were also bigger than mine. One guy was the son of the Superintendent of Schools, and even though he was only about a year older than me, his dick was very, very long! or at least so I thought then, and I tried not to stare at it! Also, my mother thought I needed more male socialization and made me join the YMCA.
 This was in the 1950s and the first instruction was to learn to swim. Again naked with boys of all ages and older naked male instructors, which looked to be pretty hung to my young eyes.

I was also different from the other guys because I was uncircumcised, and ALL of them were cut. Why was I so different? My dad and my uncle were not circumcised either and I had seen them naked or pissing, and so before I had to strip in school and the Y, I thought all males had foreskins. Was I ever wrong! So not knowing anything other than what I was, I had no idea what the difference means. Was it better for the head of your cock to show or was it better to be hooded? At that time maybe because it was so different and fascinating, I thought those cut cocks looked sexy.

Of course, it was not too long until I started putting that foreskin to good use at about age 14, and at least three times a day. It would never have occurred to me that a guy might need lotion or lube to exact that same wonderful feeling of pleasure that I got using my foreskin, especially around the frenulum. -->

And still does!

As I entered puberty, I was warned that I would have nocturnal emissions, and not to worry about it, because it is normal, and all guys have them. Well, I have NOT had even the first WET DREAM! Why, if all guys have them? Probably in my case there was no "wet" (cum) left over, because I had jacked off from one to three times each day. But I did have sexual dreams, mostly guys, but an occasional gal, and most every morning woke up with a hard-on. As a teenager that morning wood would sometimes get me in trouble, such as when I hiked on the Appalachian Trail, slept in sleeping bags in a "lean-to" in mixed company. Something usually woke us up all about the same time--it was HARD to get out of my sleeping bag without exposing a "tent" of my own.

GROW-ER OR SHOW-ER: Until after I realized that I was gay, I thought all dicks were pretty much the same but coming in all sizes. Whenever I was naked with other guys, whether in the locker room, shower, etc., I was pretty embarrassed that my dick was on the little side compared with all the other men. After I started comparing my dick when it was erect with other erect gay dicks, I was no longer quite so embarrassed. That's because I am a grow-er. My dick is only 2 to 3 inches flaccid, but grows to between 6 to 7 inches erect. Then I began to realize that those big dicks I had so envied flopping around the locker room and showers really got no bigger when they were hard. Instead of hanging down to the floor or "hung," they jumped to attention, but remained the same size. And some of those bigger flaccid dicks seemed to have a harder time trying to point upwards -- mostly they just pointed straight out.

During the summer months, I had a job in one of the research labs at the local university and this lab had some great microscopes. One afternoon after everyone else had left for the day, I unzipped my fly, pulled my dick out, and jacked off with a resultant big load. Suddenly I got the idea to put some of my cum on a microscope slide for a closer look. Well, what beauty -- all those little animated swimmers going in all directions seeming in a hurry to get somewhere! Certainly no need to worry if my family jewels were capable of carrying on the family name.


So I got through high school and college ogling all those dicks, but guessed all guys just did that, and all along I was dating girls. For the most part just had a good time without being sexual more than just some kissing and that was pretty bland too. Thought I was in love with a girl because we shared all the same interests and dated her for a couple of years; then decided it was time to get married. I proposed and she accepted and we had the usual pomp and circumstance -- a lovely wedding and reception. We left for our honeymoon just before dark in my car heading north. Found a nice little restaurant for dinner and then soon after a motel for the honeymoon night. Had this motel in mind all along, but had not made reservations; didn't matter as they had plenty of vacancies. Honestly, I was more worried about the upcoming night than where it was to occur. That's because I was a virgin -- yep, 20 years old and had never done it before. In preparation, I had abstained from touching myself for 3 whole days! That's was a mistake because my young sexual apparatus was used to coming daily and was very ready to shoot off! So we got ready for bed and she went into the bathroom to change and in the meantime I put on some new shorty PJs. Well, she came out in three or more layers of negligee, some that I could not even unfasten. Fancy outergarment unbuttoned finally, then bra unsnapped finally, and those panties! Everything very white and frilly with lots of lace and I don't know what all. We were under the covers as I was trying to remove this stuff with her help and my boner had already popped through the opening in my PJs. Lots of fumbling, but we did manage to accomplish the act in the missionary position -- much too quickly due to my heightened pretension buildup with a premature ejaculation almost as soon as I was in. Thankfully, she did not know any better because she too was a virgin -- proven the next morning by the bloody sheets as a result of her broken hymen. She had come from a very strict Baptist background and thus had saved herself for me! That was the beginning of our sexual experiences, and over the years, they did not change a whole lot. My first son was born 16 months later. And yes, though not in a particularly sexual way, I did and still do love her very much.

I have two sons who were born in 1965 and 1970, and they were both circumcised as soon as they were born! No one asked me for my permission, and I don't think my wife was asked either. If she was, it was probably during an anesthetic stupor. Of course, if my permission had been asked, I would have refused as I already knew the benefits of that foreskin. My wife's first obstetrician was a very conservative Roman Catholic who would not prescribe birth control. He probably also thought that having a foreskin would make masturbation too easy and he certainly wouldn't advocate that; it might lead to blindness or insanity! So we changed to a Jewish OB-GYN. Well, we all know how they feel about circumcision. To be a mensch, you must go through the rite.
The life I lived for the next five years or so was pretty straight as I was busy with my job and my family. Sex with the wife was pretty boring as she always wanted the missionary position, but on rare occasions I would get her to sit on top of me, which was much better for me. I could penetrate deeper and bump into that cervix better. However, I still wanted our sex life to be much more varied. So much I wanted her to suck my dick, but I just knew she would think that perverted. One night I got into the 69 position and went down on her rubbing my tongue gently all around her clitoris. She seemed to like that a lot and gingerly reached over and pulled my dick into her mouth. Ah, success! So we starting do more of our sex that way and it seemed that I very quickly brought her to orgasm, at which time she wanted my cock plunged deep into her cunt. At least that was somewhat more satisfying.
I often enjoyed riding my bicycle after work around the local university or down to the nearby beach on the bay. Well on these long bike rides, I would need to piss. Restrooms were plentiful at both places, and I soon found out they were great for casual sex, especially blow jobs! There is nothing quite so good as horny gay college guys. It would not be just one on one sometimes, but rather a group orgy going on in those tearooms. They also had great glory holes, which was a new discovery for me. My favorite tearoom was in the LRC. When you entered, there was a room with sinks and shelves for books. Then you entered through a squeaky door into the orgy room which consisted of three stalls with glory holes between them. The two stalls on each end had doors, but the door of the middle stall had been removed. Sitting on a john, you faced a wall with four urinals, so the guys if they were pissing would have their backs to you. Of course as soon as they finished pissing, they just stood there looking at the dicks to either side of them; then, reached over and started a hand job. When they got going really good, they would turn and face the stalls and usually the hand jobs turned into blow jobs, sometimes with the guys sitting in the stalls. Oh did I spend many an hour there just addicted to the place.
This anonymous casual gay sex continued through 20 years of marriage. My wife and I had sex less and less frequently until it was about once a month, because I was "too tired or too stressed out." Well, you would be too with all that extra-curricular activity going on. We were growing apart because we had fewer common interests and I was dissatisfied with the city we were living in and wanted to move back to my home state, so after 21 years of marriage, we separated. My being gay never came up, and has not with her to this day. We remained friends and good communicaton between us continued mostly because of our sons, as it has to the present. After being separated for 7 years, we divorced as our sons were grown.
After the separation, I lived in my family's vacant farmhouse with my younger son, who was still in high school. After high school, he left for college, and now I was alone and free to pursue my gayness. I joined a gay outdoor hiking club and went on weekend hikes around my state from the mountains to the seashore. Men from 25 to 50 were members of the club and soon I was becoming friends with men of my own age and in similar circumstances.
My first true gay relationship developed with Craig who lived in another city about 60 miles away. Since we both had professional jobs, we could only spend weekends together either on a hike, at his apartment, or my farmhouse. Like me, he had children, a son and a daughter, and an ex-wife. They all knew about his gay lifestyle and were very unaccepting, even hostile. Craig also had a sister who was a lesbian. Craig and I along with his sister and her partner took a wonderful vacation together in the mountains with white-water rafting being the highlight of the trip. Admittedly, it was difficult to carry on this long-distance relationship, and Craig started seeing a young man who lived near him. It must have been the youth that attracted him, because this guy was not very intellectual and was not capable of sharing abstract and learned ideas, that Craig and I so often shared. It really hurt me that Craig left me, but he remained very true to his new lover. They bought a home and lived happily until Craig got pancreatic cancer. After diagnosis, he lasted only about 3 months, but we had several phone conversations during that time. I went to his funeral and even eulogized him. Only his daughter from his family was there, and she later came up to me and thanked me for my words.
Another one of my hiker friends was Ed and was he a looker -- young and very athletic. In his mid-twenties, he had just finished post-graduate work at the university and had a new job. We both were on the hiker association board, and he would frequently come to my farmhouse to help me get the monthly newsletter out. Several times on overnight weekend hikes, we would share a room, but sadly never share a bed. I would lie on my side awake half the night watching his body as he slept. Our friendship was just that -- we were very close friends, but nothing sexual ever developed. Perhaps he thought of me as a father figure. Indeed after our long discussions, he did come out to his family in Boston. Being an avid mountain biker, he and my son sometimes went on bike rides together. The last I heard he had moved to Seattle.
After living at the farm for about six years, I took a new job down at the coast and moved three hours away. My good friends, a gay couple named Steve and Paul helped me move. After becoming involved with the Metropolitan Community Church, I met a very nice man named Johnny. We would often spend nights together, especially Saturday night. I loved to listen to Pipedreams, a pipe organ program on public radio on Sunday mornings when we woke up, and he would tease me about it. Once he accompanied me to Baltimore, where I had gone on a professional convention. Other weekends he would spend with me at the farm. He was very kind to take care of me when I became sick for a while, especially running errands for me. Our sexual relationship dried up, but he is a good friend to this day. He works to help disadvantaged families and kids. He has a big heart.
My next relationship was with Al, a university professor back at the hometown near my farm. A mutual friend introduced us over the internet and we began emailing.  Al wanted to know my experiences with being married and getting a divorce because he had decided that he needed to get a divorce too.  We lived three hours away from each other, so at first we just got to know each other by email.  Finally, we decided to meet at a local eatery where he lived.  Our conversation went well so I took him up to my farm and showed him around for a couple of hours.  The atmosphere was somewhat sexually charged, but we did not do more than just touch each other.  On the way back while I was driving, he said that he just had to get into my pants and began rubbing my crotch.  With about 15 miles yet to go, I was trying to hold him off and I took him back to his place and he took liberties with me.  Now it was even more sexually charged.  I finally was able to leave, but our emails grew more frequent and more heated.  Thus began a number of months of wonderful weekends together, both at my farm and my home on the coast.  A couple of the weekends were spent at his home, but I was very nervous the whole time and afraid that his wife might return unexpectedly from her out of town visits.  The following summer I became very sick with pulmonary emboli while I was on vacation at the farm, couldn't breathe and called Al.  He took me to the university hospital emergency where they triaged me quickly.  I was very surprised the whole time that the emergency room staff treated him like family and my significant other, keeping him in the loop the whole time.  Hospitalized for the next 10 days to dissolve the clots,  Al and the rest of my family visited numerous times, and some of the visits were simultaneous, so the family members got to meet my good "friend."  Later Al even took my younger son for a whole day visit to the university and showed him around.  They got along great, just as my younger son had been very accepting of both Craig and Ed.  Another time, I had another big family event at the farm cooking a "brunswick stew" and Al was invited.  He was just like another family member and everyone had a great time.  To my surprise, I was never grilled by any of my family members about my relationship with him.  Because of the separation caused by living so far apart, our emails continued throughout our relatonship.  I've thought that they would make a great book if published as an example of how two men can really love each other.  Perhaps I will publish them in this blog some day.  The owner of my ancestral home near my farm is a gay man who has beautifully restored the home.  Steve and his partner Paul have always been so great.  I had always wanted to sleep in the house that my great-great-great-great grandfather had built in 1778.  Steve invited Al and myself to spend the night there together.  It indeed was special. There was a lot more involved with Al and myself than sex, although sex was always present and I loved his hairy body.  Al and I were just on the same plane when it came to conversations about philosophy, the arts, etc.  He was a prominent political history professor at his university.  Then one day I began to notice a change in him, especially toward me.  I confronted him about it, but he denied that there was anything between us.  Turns out though he had met a young fellow, whose body was much more attractive to him than mine.  After all, I had lost the glow of youth, but again as with Craig, this young man was not Al's intellectual equivalent and had no more than a high school education.  So I lost Al and it hurt deeply for months because I thought he was the one, and that we had so much going for us. 
It was while I was with Al that my mother at age 83 figured out that I must be gay.  She surprisingly, to me at least, was very accepting and liked Al immensely.  We took her out for a special 83th birthday dinner. 

For a while after that I was very lonely, so I began reading the male-male ads in The Advocate classifieds. To my surprise there was an ad placed there by someone near my farm.  His name is Billy and he is 28 years younger than myself  -- actually half my age.  Now, I was beginning to understand why my former lovers were leaving me for younger men.  He has an incredible cut cock, which became aroused very easily with just a kiss or my touch on his jeans.  He wore tighty-white briefs that could not restrain his erection very well, and when I pulled them down, his cock slapped his abdomen.  His erect dick is the hardest, and pointed higher than any dick I have ever seen.  Whenever I pulled it straight out to suck on it, and it slipped out of my lips, it hit his tummy again!  Best of all after a long night of blowjobs, was to cuddle in bed.  Whenever I awoke during the night, I would gently rub his shaft and dickhead and it would soon be erect again without him ever waking up.  I could play with him that way for hours wondering what he was dreaming about.  After work, he would come to feed his dogs, and when I was in residence, he would come in to feed me.  Billy was somewhat shy, did not have a lot of self-esteem, and we would talk for hours while I would try to build his self-esteem.  Sometimes we would go out to dinner at local restaurants and to movies, but more often just stayed in at the farmhouse.  After several years, I began to realize that we were using each other.  For him, it was a place to keep his dogs, enjoy the outdoor experience of walking the farm.  For me, it was companionship and sex when I was at the farm.  More and move often, he would bring along his mother when he came to feed the dogs.  Or he could not spend the entire night with me, because he had to go home to mother.  So I decided to break off the relationship and asked him to remove his dogs from my farm. That was five years ago. I still wonder how he is doing . . . I have not had a relationship since then. 


Recently, using today's technology of social networking that is Facebook, I found a high school friend that I had last seen at our graduation some 49 years ago.  There actually had been three of us best mates in high school and he had kept up communication with the third member of our group. We were all just the best of friends not involving any kind of sex. Both of them had gone off to the Viet Nam war, while I hadn't.  The first guy had married just before going to Viet Nam, returned and had a son and daughter, and worked at the same institution for his entire life until retirement.  Very happily married, but soon I found out that he was bi-sexual.  The other fellow returned from the war and settled in New York City and never married, because he is gay.  While I was in high school, it never occurred to me that either one of them might be attracted to men, but I wonder now if that is why we were attracted to each other.  I did not know what "gay" was then, and I am not sure they did either.  The New York city fellow retired and moved back to his home state.  Recently, the three of us were able to reunite in person and renew old acquaintances.  It has been like we were never really apart, though it has been 50 years!  I think I like where the future is going, now that I am retired and have the time to explore new paths, and write this blog. 

An update:  The New York City gay guy, I will refer to as "Bears."  Following our October meeting, we became closer using email to exchange our experiences and feelings. In January I spent a couple of nights at his home. We shared a day going to the beach and going to an oyster bar. Then in March, we spent a week together at my farm. We even spent a day visiting all the places of our childhood together. Then we realized just have much we have in common and became closer still.  Bears and I continue to spend time with each other regularly at my farm, my beach house, and his small town home.  After all these years, we never grow tired of each other, and spend much of time laughing at shared experiences.
You can leave a comment here or email me at uncutplus@gmail.com.

TMI QUESTIONS: 'Tis the Season - Winter Vacation

'TIS THE SEASON - WINTER VACATION
1. What is your favorite winter clothing item or outfit?  My leather jacket.

2. Do you have plans for a winter vacation? When and where? My next vacation is planned for the end of winter in late March in Lewes, Delaware

3. Do you have a climate preference? Where I live in NC, we have the best of all seasons, but my favorites are Spring and Fall!

4. What do you like to do on your winter vacations? I like to find a nice cozy fire in a fireplace and read a good book.

5. Do you unpack your suitcase or live out of it? Are there any items you never unpack?  Always live out of my suitcase, because I was conditioned to always traveling when I was consulting.  Back then, I would even wash my clothes and repack them in the suitcase continuing to live out of it while I was home as well!

6. Essentials for an extra "fun" weekend? Would you take them through airport security?  No, because I embarrass too easily.

BONUS

Last, Best, Worst or most fun vacation sex. Details. Details, Details.  Best vacation sex was with my then lover, Craig, when we spent time at a time-share in Gatlinburg, TN.  His lesbian sister and her lover were also there.  Lots of fun, fun, fun including Dollywood.

Morning Wood Explained

ORGASMS Explained

Against Gay Marriage? Consider This!


How Heterosexuals Serve in the Military!

Be very careful, men !


They May Sell Superglue, as well!

TMI QUESTIONS

STOP AND COUNT
1. the # of homes you have lived in the: Longest? Best? Worst?
     Childhood home = 20 years
     Coral Gables, FL = 17 years
     Family farm = 7 years
     Wilmington NC = 20 years
     I have fond memories of all my homes.
2. the # of cars you had: the best?

     I have owned 13 vehicles.  My mother owned a 1960 Ford Starliner which I loved!  After that, I had an Austin Healey 3000.  I very much liked my 1980 T-Bird, my 1990 Honda Accord, and my 1995 Volvo.  The worst car I ever owned was a Ford Granada, which could not get out of its own way.
3. the approximate # of sexual encounters you have had.
    Many, too many: would need an abacus as I don't have enough fingers & toes.
4. the # of siblings you have. Your #?
     I was an only child until my adopted brother (actually, my cousin) came to live with us.
5. the # of careers you have had: Best? Worst?
     Retired now, I have only had one healthcare professional career, but 6 different employers over the years in Florida and NC.
6. the # of music albums you have. (all formats combined)
     ??? 200 plus.  Not to mention about 300 movies and hundred of books.
7. the # of operations you have had.
     Three, but all minor: T&A, muscle biopsy, and broken wrist.  I have had much more serious hospitalizations for chronic diseases.

Bonus
the # of significant others you have been in love with.
     Five men + one woman.

TMI Question: Who You Gonna Call?

TMI QUESTIONS: WHO YOU GONNA CALL?

WHO YOU GONNA CALL?
1. What kind of smart phone do you have?
     Palm (HP) Veer 4G with WebOS that unfortunately HP abandoned,
     so I am in no man's land without many apps and no updates.

2. Necessity, accessory or my right arm?
     Necessity, because it is my only phone.  
     Got rid of the landline 6 years ago.

3. Top three favorite apps?
     Weather.com, calendar and angry birds.

4. How much do you use your smart phone for calling, texting 
    and data (email, games, movies)?
    There is only one person that I text with, but we text back and forth
    a lot because he does not like talking on the phone.  All my calling 
    and receiving calls is on this phone.  Whenever, I am away from 
    my desktop computer, I use the Veer for email.  Angry Birds is the 
    only game I play on this phone, but I have a two old Palm phones l
    lying around that I keep charged for playing solitaire.  One of them 
    stays in the bathroom for when I have to sit a spell.

5. Phone sex? Sextxting? Hookup apps?
     Not really.  Occasionally my emails get raunchy with my boyfriend.

6. Has your smart phone replaced your camera?
     Yes, unless I am planning on some serious photography 
     and then I bring along my Nikon.  The phone is great for 
     spontaneous pix and video which you had not really planned on.  
     Haven't had to video a tornado yet!

Bonus

   It's 3 am. You're in trouble. What's the trouble and who do you call?
      So far haven't had to, but if it were serious like car trouble, 
      it would be my son because he is near by.  However, anything else
      would be with my boyfriend.  I do call him round midnight.

Update - January 2013

Last month, I upgraded from the Veer as I was having 
problems with the battery staying charged.  It might last for 
one conversation.  My two year contract was up and ready 
for renewal, so I decided to upgrade to an Android model as 
I don't particularly like Apple products.  After a lot of research, 
I chose to go with the Samsung Galaxy Note II.  

So I went from the smallest model with a small screen to a giant 
display!  The Android OS (jelly bean) is incredible.  The battery 
life just goes on and on.  I find myself using my desktop computer 
much less these days instead opting for the "phone."  So far, I am 
extremely pleased.  And no, it is not too large in my opinion, but 
then I have large hands.  Most of the time I use bluetooth 
headphones or speaker phone, so do not hold it up to my ear 
that much.

Are nipples your erogenous zone?

Using foreskin, no lube needed!

Circumcision & the American Association of Pediatrics

Recently, the American Association of Pediatrics has released a new opinion on the position on circumcision.  Many of us who have read it do not agree with this position that seems to favor male infant circumcision.  Much of it appears to be related to hygiene and comparisons with Africa.  Better comparisons would have been made to Europe where circumcision is much less often performed than in the USA.

For an excellent post that is well researched and well written and unbiased, please see The Masks We Wear.  Aek is just finishing medical school and about to get his MD license; he is very interested in pediatrics, and may decide on it for his specialty.  He is also very interested in infectious diseases.

"Treatise on a Cultural Truth"

Let's Work-out!

Smooth back & forth motion!

Dalton Trumbo's Masturbatory Epistle to His Son








Excerpts from letter performed by Nathan Lane
Full letter follows:



Masturbation - A Letter From Dalton Trumbo To His Son
Los Angeles, California
November 8, 1958
To Christopher Trumbo 
My dear son:
I have at hand your most recent letter addressed, I believe, both to your mother and to me. That portion which I assume was designed to capture my attention has. I refer to your addled account of an exchange between you and Mike [Butler] relative to mensal checks from home. You may be sure I shall give it much thought.
You also inform us you haven't made holiday travel reservations because you haven't the money to pay for them. Artful fellow! Do you truly think me so stupid as to send the fare directly to you, who'd only squander it in high living and end up stranded on Christmas Eve begging poor-man's pudding in some snow-swept Bowery breadline?
The procedure is this: go at once to an airline office and make round-trip reservations (not deluxe, not a milk-run either). Do it immediately, for the seasonal rush is already at hand. Notify me of the airline, flight number, date and hour of arrival and within twenty-four hours a check made over to the airline will be delivered into your greedy fist. Take it to the seller and the deal is consummated without laying you open to temptation.
I am sending you two books I think appropriate for a young man spending five-sevenths of his time in the monkish precincts of John Jay Hall. The first is Education of a Poker Player, by Henry 0. Yardley. Read it in secret, hide it whenever you leave quarters, and you'll be rewarded with many unfair but legal advantages over friend and enemy alike, not to mention that occasional acquaintance who has everything including money.
The second book I think you should share with your young companions. It is Sex Without Guilt, by a man who will take his place in history as the greatest humanitarian since Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Ellis, Ph.D. This good man has written what might be called a manual for masturbators. That is to say, in one slim volume he has clarified the basic theory of the thing, and then, in simple layman's language, got right down to rules and techniques. This in itself is a grand accomplishment; but what most compels my admiration is the zest, the sheer enthusiasm which Dr. Ellis has brought to his subject. The result (mailed in plain wrapper under separate cover) is one of those fortuitous events in which the right man collides with the right idea at precisely the right time. It makes a very big bang indeed.
It is Dr. Ellis' idea to spring masturbation from the bedroom's crepusculine gloom, where for endless generations it has lain a saprogenic curse on millions of little lechers, and turn it loose in the parlor where it rightfully belongs. This chap doesn't find anything wrong with it at all: indoors or out, he ranks it right up there with ping-pong, gin rummy and "Maverick" as a time-honored, health-giving, red-blooded patriotic pastime.
What Ellis wants to do - and by gad he does it, too! - is remove that gnawing sense of guilt so characteristic of the act, the awful tension of it, the leering, searing, sneering fear of it. (Oh Phalloform, dread Phallio / Let never me deride / My onanistic, irresistic, post-pubescent bride!) Once all that unhealthy brooding is dissolved, nothing remains of a former vice but unadulterated fun. And that's what Ellis is after. He doesn't want American youth to go about guilt-twitching like a pack of inbred Chihuahuas for nothing more serious than a raging appetite for fescenninity. He doesn't want those golden hours of childhood festered over with concern about the imminent putrefaction of genitalia. He wants young people not to give a damn! He wants them to relax. He wants, in short, a world of happy masturbators.
This whole new approach - this fresh wind blowing under the sheets, so to speak - this large-hearted appeal for cheerful self-pollution, invokes perhaps a deeper response in my heart than in most. For I (sneaky, timorous, incontinent little beast with my Paphian obsessions) was never wholesomely at home with my penile problem, nor ever found real happiness in working it out - all because of that maggoty, mountainous pustule of needless guilt that throbbed like an abscess in my young boy's heart.
On warm summer nights while exuberant girl-hunting contemporaries scampered in and out of the brush beneath high western stars, I, dedicated fool, lay swooning in my bed with no companion save the lewd and smirking demons of my bottomless guilt. Cowering there in seminal darkness, liquescent with self-loathing, attentive only to the stealthy rise and Krafft-Ebbing of my dark scrotumnal blood, fearful as a lechwe yet firmer of purpose than any rutting buffalo, I celebrated the rites of Shuah's son with sullen resignation. Poor little chap on a summer's night, morosely masturbating . . . !
There were lads in Grand Junction, Colorado (most of whom became civil servants or evangelistic clergymen) who strode the sunlit streets of that never-to-be-forgotten town like fierce young gods, lean and supple, tall and strong, pace brisk, shoulders well thrust back, frank of face, forthright of smile, clear of eye, innocent of heart, clean of mind. But I was not one of them.
Oh no, not I. Not your poor father.
When I appeared in public, toad-blinking against the unwonted and revelatory blaze of day, I conveyed the immediate impression of ambulant filth - of obscenity, so to speak, in transit. I lurched through those years like some demented crab, shoulders at a goatish hunch, eyes a-scum with fantasies of defloration, my acneous skin (hot with crimson shames) exuding from every greasy pore that sour effluvia which marks imagined love. My sweaty nippers - ah, cursed, cursed paws! - I carried thrust to the very bottom of my trouser pockets, in which humid and forbidden depths they secretly envaginated that marvelous little pendant I knew must drop from its frazzled moorings the instant I withdrew my helping hands.
I turned thin and pale; my odor changed from sour to stercoraceous; reflexes vanished altogether; palpitations of the heart set in, accompanied by giddy spells and sudden faints. My left eye developed so fearsome a tic that its aftermath may be seen to this day in the crapulous squint with which you are perhaps far too familiar. My blood ceased to coagulate: for eleven months I went about completely swathed in bandages. Satyriasis, ever latent in my yielding genes, turned chronic and then acute: treatment consisted in the rapid alteration of ice packs with cauldrons of scalding water. I was placed on a diet of loblolly laced with seaweed extract.
It was this revolting dish even more than my rampageous libido that brought my nervous system to a state of utter dissolution. I would start up briskly at the slightest sound and begin to canter counterclockwise, and in ever widening circles, crepitating all the while like a Percheron at close trot (you know that horrid sound thup-thup-thup-thurp-thup), and nickering suspiciously. I became unhinged that the mere sight of a girl reduced me to mucilaginous pulp identifiable as human only by a pair of inflamed eyes and a faint squinking sound that seemed to proceed from the hepatized heart of the mess. Ah, sweet suppurating soul of Satan, I thought I never would get adjusted!
Even now, more than three decades later (and I, as you know, a power of moral strength, a civic leader, a respected - nay, beloved - unity figure), even now when I forget a friend's name, or lay my spectacles, or pause in mid-sentence idiocy (my thought having died twixt concept and delivery) - even now such lapses set a clammy chill upon my heart, while purulent memories of my secret shame incarnadine the sallow of these aging cheeks.
It's then, while panic tightens my sagging throat, that I whisper to myself: "It's true after all. It does make you crazy. It does cause the brain to soften. Why, oh why did I like it so much? Why didn't I stop while I was still ahead of the game? Was it only one time too many that caused this rush of premature senility? Or a dozen times? Or a thousand? Ah well - little good to know it now: the harm's done, the jig's up, you're thoroughly raddled, better you'd been born with handless stumps."
An instant later I blessedly recall the name, I find the spectacles, complete the sentence - and the salacious ghoul of my sickened fantasies retreats once more into the shadows, not banished to be sure but held off at least for a few more days or hours. I ask you, boy - if the mere memory of past guilt has such power to swoon my adult mind, can you imagine the effect upon a naturally depraved constitution of what then was present guilt?
I recall a certain chill winter night on which my father took me to one of those Calvinist fertility rites disguised as a father-and-son banquet. I was in no real shape to mingle with respectable society, being then at the dismal nadir of my lechery and much given to involuntary belching, squirching, belly-rumbling, wind-breaking, nasal pearl-diving and the like. The banquet consisted of dead fish, stale bread, soft-boiled potatoes and leather-bottomed pie.
Master of the revels was an acrid old goat named Horace T. McGuiness who kept a doxy, engaged in brutish orgies, and reserved his public hours for denunciation of everything dear to a little boy's heart. This excrementitious old fornicator was greatly venerated in our town, and much in demand for such festivities as that which I describe.
He buttoned his protruberant vest on discs of decayed egg yolk and brayed like Balaam's ass voiding hot barbed-wire. His nostrils extruded threads of ductile mucus which streamed downward in gay opalescent loops to a scraggle of brush which concealed practically all of that moist, pink, vulviform cave of the winds that served him as a mouth. When speaking - and he always spoke - he displayed the carious ruin of what in his youth had been a gaggle of strong yellow teeth. With every phrase he emitted dense clouds of sewer gas, while his harsher consonants shot forth such poisonous showers of spittle that full-grown bull blowflies fell stunned to the tablecloth the instant they flew in range.
The old debauchee opened his discourse with a series of blasphemous demands that the Almighty agree with his ghastly notions and make our young minds (his whole talk was addressed to us youthlets, never to pa) receptive to the bilge he proposed to pump into them. Then he got down to the meat of the program which, to no one's surprise, was girls. When you go out with a young lady, he slavered, you go out with your own sister. As you treat her, so will your sister be treated. It followed that you must not think of it in relation to her, you must not suggest it to her, and certainly you must not do it to her. If you did, you were a blackguard, a degenerate, a runnion, a cullion, and a diddle-cove.
To this day I don't know why that crazed old rake's clapper-claw affected me as it did. I was a menace only to myself. For all the harm I was able to do girls, or they me, their whole concupiscible tribe had just as well been my sisters. On the other hand, it seemed plain to me that if one day I did burst upon the world as the hymeneal Genghis Khan of my dreams, I'd be in for an extremely incestuous time of it.
Several winters later, when my headmaster at McTeague's Chicago Academy for Distraught Boys, enraged by the nocturnal racket of my solitary revels, clapped hands on me and dragged my quaking hulk to a lupanar much favored by the faculty, I stood spellbound and terrified as the grisettes paraded for my selection. The vile, incestuous objurgations of old Reek-mouth still fevered my brain. These girls were my sisters - the tall one over there, and the tiny one with the dazzling blue curls, and that charming creature with the wise clitorial wink (the first I'd seen to that time) - all of them sisters! How could I even think of them that way?
Piteously I tried to explain the taboo that held me apart from this naked herd of mooing female relatives. Headmaster (he was a goodhearted man but quick with his right) cuffed me about for something under an hour. Toward the end of the beating I was enabled to see the thing from headmaster's point of view rather than that of old Stench-tooth. I began to regard the lovely denizens of that establishment with rising interest. My heart grew light. My temples ceased to throb. My eyes began to glitter brilliantly. I found myself laughing, as Columbus must have laughed when first he spied the shimmered green of Hispaniola.
Ah-ha, my darlings - no sisters ye nor brother I, blessed be the sapient gods! (Descend, Murgatoyd!) Flee for your lives, thou still unravished brides of quietness - thou foster children of slow time! (Down, slavering monster!) Weep, ye Sabine maidens - cringe, ye moaning seraphim! (Abajo, little Sir M!) That which ye greatly feared has come upon you! The stuprator is at hand! Estoy aqui! Me voici! Adsum!
I learned, so to speak, the hard way. (Ah, Chicago, Chicago - stud-barn of the western world!) Not once in those three wild aphrodisiacal weeks did headmaster or I set foot outside that house of ecstasy. We ordered the telephone disconnected, and had our meals sent in piping hot from the Pump Room. I, who had barely matriculated, qualified for graduate work in three fiery days. When finally we returned to the vertical world (headmaster, being without tenure, lost his appointment at the Academy, while I, poor lad, was sent down for simple venery) I was a new boy: snake-lean, rock-hard and ferociously determined that earth herself should reel beneath the measured thunder of my copulations. That, however, is a different story to be reserved for later times and nicer problems. Returning now to that atrocious hugger-mugger which set me thus to dreaming: -
Having deranged our building psyches with this sister business, old Pus-head passed on to the subject of procreation - or, more precisely, non-procreation. In unbelievable detail he shambled through the story of Judah, son of Jacob, son of Abraham (nee Abram), son of Terah, son of Nahor, son of Serug, son of Reu, son of Peleg, son of Eber, son of Salah, son of Axpharaxed, son of Enoch, son of Jared, son of Mahalalcel, son of Cainan, son of Enos, son of Seth, who was born to Adam and Eve in their autumnal years.
Now to the story. Judah had three sons improbably named Er, Onan and Chezib. Er caroused so heroically that "the Lord slew him," making of his wife Tamar a widow. Judah thereupon commanded his second son, this Onan chap, to marry his brother's relict and have children by her. Onan yielded to the first command and moved in with the girl (note how that sister theme creeps in again?), but he flatly refused stud service, devising instead an escape route that ensured his memory and made his name practically a household word to this day. He spilled his seed out onto the ground. (Hence onanism, onanistic, and the like, for you know what.)
By closing my mind and abandoning all sanity I can still hear that demented old reprobate howling his bill of particulars against poor Onan, shaking his fist at us all the while and sweating like a diseased stoat. "He wasted his seed! Oh monstrous, shameful, nameless act he spilled it right out into the ground! All of it! Yes sir, every last drabble of it! And this displeased the Lord. And the Lord slew him!" This ringing period he concluded with a gust of spittle so noxious that a waitress, caught in its mere fallout, sank fainting to the floor beneath a tray of priceless cut-glass fingerbowls.
Without even a sideglance at his gasping victim, old Sprue-tongue rushed on to a warning against the most dangerous period of a boy's day, which he leeringly defined as those last ten minutes before the coming of blessed sleep. This period, he rasped, was Onan's hour, that dread time of temptation which separated the men from boys. He commanded us, on pain of Onan's fate, as we loved God, loathed sin, and cherished our immortal souls, thenceforth to sleep with our hands outside the covers "until, in the unpolluted glory of young manhood, that chaste girl of your dreams appears on the transept of God's heaven to give you, through holy matrimony, that love which no man deserves and all desire." Whereupon we were ordered to rise en masse, lift high our swearing arms ("All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!") and take the pledge.
Well. You can imagine how I felt, poor shuddering pertinacious masturbating little dolt! My young companions, their faces shining with devotion, rose like eager chipmunks to recite that preposterous oath as solemnly as if it were a Te Deum. I felt compelled to join them, my skin flushing beet-red beneath a field of yellow pimples then riotously in bloom from the base of my throat to the farthest border of my scaly scalp. Seated once more, I vomited softly into a cannister of caramels my father took with him wherever he went. As for father - from that time forward a murk, a dark estrangement rose between us. How could I, degraded sperm-wasting voluptuary that I was, ever again look squarely into the calm serenity of his grave sperm-thrifty eyes? I couldn't and never did. For us, that moment was the end.
When I went to bed that night the thermometer shivered at twenty-three degrees below zero. I slept alone in public, so to speak, an open porch with only a dismal flap of canvas to separate my quarters from those glacial winter winds that howled for three straight months each year on the other side of it. Shuddering like a greyhound bitch in heat, I burrowed beneath mounded covers. My congealing breath formed a beard of frost on the quilt beneath my chin. My pale hands, like twin sacrificial lambs, lay freezing outside the covers. It made no sense at all to me, yet I'd been gulled into taking their peccant oath, and now in my own dim-witted fashion I proposed to keep it. It was the witching hour.
While I lay there pondering Onan's fate, nerves twitching, gonaducts aflame, ten chilly digits convulsively plucking at my counterpane, I tried to divert my tumescent thoughts from their obsession. I thought on heroes and their heroism: on Perseus, Jason, Odysseus, Achilles - and it was on Achilles that I paused, evaluating again that dip in the Styx with only his left heel exposed. It occurred to me that the tragedy of his death stemmed directly from the triviality of the wound that brought him low.
At this point my incomparable flair for nastiness took charge. What would have happened, I asked myself, if Thetis had held the little tyke by his tippet instead of his heel? Since everyone understands there's utterly no point in living once your tassel's been shot off, all tears and sympathy would have been focused on that gory dopple, reducing his subsequent death to mere blessed anti-climax. The whole point of the yarn, it seemed to me, would have been changed, and for the better. Thus musing, I fell asleep. The next morning I was rushed off whooping to the hospital, brought low with quick pneumonia and seven frostbit claws. So much then, for keeping pledges.
There are still other stories I could tell you - tales of those corybantic pears that would inflame your bowels and thin your heart's young blood. They would, however, be merely cumulative: if my point isn't made by now it never will be. Yet the more I think on it the more positive I become that you will never truly be able to comprehend in all its horror that interminably sustained convulsion which was your father's youth. It's only reasonable that this should be so, since you've had so many advantages that were denied to me. To name but three of them - a private room, a masturbating father, and Albert Ellis, Ph.D.
Neither, I think, will you ever be able to understand that flood of savage joy which filled my heart on first reading Sex Without Guilt. I felt, with Keats, like "some watcher of the night skies. When a new planet swims into his ken." Having passed through such flaming pubic hells as would altogether carbonize a weaker lad, can anyone hope to imagine the wild surmise that stunned my soul on discovering that I'd been right all along? That all my Brobdingnagian juvenile debaucheries had been as innocent as so many taffy-pulls? That I was, in truth, an example and a martyr for all who'd gone before me and for endless millions still to come?
For that's what it amounts to, son. I carried the ball for all of us, and carried it farther than anyone had a right to expect. I was the Prometheus of my secret tribe - a penile virtuoso, a gonadic prodigy, a spermatiferous thunderbolt; in fine, a masturbator's masturbator. In that sad hour when you lay me away, remember with awe what I did, and carve those words in ageless granite above my resting place, that your sons and your sons sons may not forget the blood of champions coursing through their veins.
I am still, as you may suspect, somewhat distraught from reliving for your instruction the calamitous tale of my youth. That it's been painful I can't deny, but what is pain compared to the immeasurable satisfaction of being a proper dad to you? I am also, perhaps, still too deeply under the literary and erotic spell of Lolita, which I've read four straight times in four straight days. If you don't know the book, you must get it at once. This chap Nabokov, like Dr. Ellis, is a way-shower, one of those spirits who understands that everything under the sun has its time and place and joy in an ordered world.
His description of a two-year Saturnalia between an aging pervert and a twelve-year-old female (a "nymphet," as Nabokov so charmingly describes young girls in the immediate stages of pre- and postpubescence) is something to make your mouth water. Now that Lolita has brought nymphetophilia into the world of fashion and made it, thank God, as respectable as ornithology, I'm willing to place it on record that my own sexual taste in young girls runs strongly to larvines, beside whom your average nymphet seems gross and dissolute. A larvine begins to glow at five-and-a-half and generally is quite hagged out before her eighth birthday. Perhaps it's the very brevity of her flower that so attracts me. The man fortunate enough to catch one of these delightful creatures at the very peak of larvineal bloom - provided, of course, no one catches him - will be rewarded indescribably.
A pair of them approach even as I pen these words. They live two houses down. I spy on them night and day with a 40-power Stankmeyer-Zeitz. They're on the point of passing my study door en route to Sunday school. One of them's already in the third grade. Soon she'll be too old. Closer and closer they come. My excitement mounted like the fires of Krakatoa.
Now (squish-squish-squish) they draw even with the door. Glowing grandeur of tiny milk-fleshed thigh. Liquescent breath of gay vulvaginous pearl. (Psst! Speak to the nice old man. Come into my parlor. Ice cream? Candy? Morphine? Exciting photographs?) They continue down the drive. Patter of footsteps fainting with my heart. Nubescent rumplets winkling wild their nappled wonder. Scent of loinwine sighing, crying, dying on soft amber-tawny singing little legs. Oh my God --
Goodbye, boy!
DAD


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con·cu·pis·ci·ble adj. Driven by or filled with strong sexual desire; concupiscent.
Cor·y·bant n. Greek Mythology pl. Cor·y·bants or Cor·y·ban·tes (-b n t z ) A priest of the Phrygian goddess Cybele whose rites were celebrated with music and ecstatic dances.
dox·y n. Slang pl. dox·ies 1. A female lover; a mistress. 2. A promiscuous woman.
fes·cen·nine adj. Licentious; obscene.
gri·sette n. A French working-class girl or young woman.
hy·me·ne·al adj. Of or relating to a wedding or marriage.
in·car·na·dine adj. 1. Of a fleshy pink color. 2. Blood-red.
Krafft-E·bing , Baron Richard von. 1840-1902. German physician and neurologist particularly known for his studies of sexual deviance and the published collection of case histories Psychopathia Sexualis (1886).
lechwe n : tawny-colored African antelope inhabiting wet grassy plains
lob·lol·ly n. pl. lob·lol·lies 1. Southern U.S. A mudhole; a mire. 2.The loblolly pine.
[Perhaps dialectal lob, to bubble + lolly, broth.]
Regional Note: Loblolly is a combination of lob, probably an onomatopoeia for the thick heavy bubbling of cooking porridge, and lolly, an old British dialect word for "broth, soup, or any other food boiled in a pot." Thus, loblolly originally denoted thick porridge or gruel, especially that eaten by sailors onboard ship. In the southern United States, the word is used to mean "a mudhole; a mire," a sense derived from an allusion to the consistency of porridge. The name loblolly has become associated with several varieties of trees as well, all of which favor wet bottomlands or swamps in the Gulf and South Atlantic states.
men·sal adj. Belonging to or used at the table.
ob·jur·gate tr.v. To scold or rebuke sharply; berate
Paphian \Pa"phi*an\, a. Of or pertaining to Paphos, an ancient city of Cyprus, having a celebrated temple of Venus; hence, pertaining to Venus, or her rites
Per·che·ron n. Any of a breed of gray or black draft horse originally used in France for drawing artillery and heavy coaches but now bred in other countries for general purposes
pu·ru·lent adj. Containing, discharging, or causing the production of pus
rel·ict n. 1. Ecology. An organism or species of an earlier time surviving in an environment that has undergone considerable change. 2. Something that has survived; a remnant. 3. A widow.
sap·ro·gen·ic adj. Of, producing, or resulting from putrefaction
sa·ty·ri·a·sis n. Excessive, often uncontrollable sexual desire in and behavior by a man
ster·co·ra·ceous adj. Consisting of or relating to excrement
stoat n. The ermine, especially when in its brown color phase
stuprate, stuprator v. t. To ravish; to debauch