I finally started having sex in my senior year of college, 1984, the first few times with someone I found through the Advocate's Personals. In that time, even in progressive Austin, I simply did not know where to go. I discovered a small gay and lesbian (as we called it then) club on campus, but it wasn't interesting. I know very well now that in Texas, Houston would have been the best possible place for LGBTQetc. people from the 1970s onward, from the organizing to the bars and clubs and sex and social scene. Meanwhile, in Austin or San Antonio, where I'd lived with my retired military parents, you couldn't find "gay" or "lesbian" in the Yellow Pages or whatever. If you didn't know someone or see something, you simply would be lost and alone. Little did I know what was happening in the bars and baths virtually under my nose.
In my last couple months of college I had a brief affair with a professor. I was 22, he was a very handsome and attractiive 40-something. We first saw each other at a gay bar downtown.
He was happy to play with someone young, good-looking, and very smart and eager to learn anything, politics, culture, sex, whatever. I was happy to spend time with an attractive older sexy man who didn't expect me to be stupid or irresponsible but who recognized that I was intelligent and eccentric and who gave me both the respect and additional learning I craved. For example, together we watched the TV remake of "The Streetcar Named Desire" with Ann-Margret broadcast that spring and also the 1951 movie version with Vivian Leigh. So this wasn't just about sex. It was also part of the beginning of a rite of passage into the tribe, just as the guy from the Advocate ad had showed me Judy Garland's Christmas Special.
We both knew this interlude would end in May. He went abroad for awhile and I graduated and went back to San Antonio to get ready for grad school in Washington, DC. When I arrived to stay, there were lots of attractive older men who didn't always recognize what they were getting when they got me. There were also lots of guys my age who were cute, but who didn't really share in who I was and what I was all about. I was lucky to meet people, both older and my age, through Dignity, the as-called-then lesbian and gay Catholic group and a few of the men there became sexual connections or good friends or both. And I found the discos (went occasionally), the leather bars (more often), and eventually the sexclubs. When I decided to leave grad school and work instead, I had a lesbian boss from Maryland who told me all the places to go in Baltimore.
As a side note, the sexclubs were better for me than the baths since, in the 80s at least, if you went to one you weren't just wandering around and around to be picky or stand-and-model, you were there to drop all pretense, abandon yourself, and have sex.
So that was my experience as a young guy, so much different than today. To be honest, now that I'm 54 I seldom think about young guys as being potential sex partners even though I may have some aesthetic appreciation. Unless I'm at whatever place and time of abandoning the self and embracing sheer sex -- so seldom with my responsibilities these days -- then I want someone where there's points of commonality. I want that look in the eyes and something interesting to talk about or at least to listen. Although I tend to write too long, I can be a very good listener, and guys my age and older have a lot of life experience to talk about.
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