Quote:
Originally Posted by jonn3
Very different from what I went through. We were young and had no idea what we were doing - there was no one with experience to teach us. We stumbled through - experimenting and figuring it out from what felt good and sometimes from comments we heard about. But it was not like one of us knew what to do or was comfortable enough to get rid of that awkward feeling.
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This is an interesting observation, indeed. True, within the peer group, the levels of experience were rather similar but not the same. A dude who has already topped, say two other dudes knew much more about topping than a total newbie, at least in our eyes.
It was through the exchange of this incrementally growing group knowledge that we all entered a steep but very efficient learning curve. Sure, some dudes were more keen on learning the 'tricks of trade' than the others but that was to be expected anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jonn3
That was my situation - mostly dealing with it all alone with the door locked by resorting to "what was available at hand" 
There were no gay organizations at school and if there were I would not have had the courage to join one. I was still waiting to "out grow" the phase like some of my buddies had.
But there was no place where is was accepted to be out and cruising - it was mostly getting to know someone as a friend and then stumbling through advances and retreats as you tried to figure out if he wanted more as well.
And if he did usually the sex was sort of separate from the friendship - it was something you did but it was not romantic - it was physical. |
I doubt that anyone among us in those days has ever thought that there would ever be anything like the gay lib, gay organizations, gay neighborhoods and gay marriage. We actually never envisioned the notion of separate gay identity at all. Mostly, because we did not see any merit in it at all. Life used to be pretty good as it was. Most of us sensed that underground m2m sex was societally acceptable for as long as it was kept private, and was not threatening to challenge the existing order of things. None of us felt like being the outliers.
With the doubtless benefit of the hindsight, I now see that the whole 'underground' context has been very beneficial for most of my buddies and me, too.
We all learnt that little should be expected from the outer sources in our lives. If you wanted to have something for yourself, well, you had to go and get it. The government, school, business or anyone else for that matter would get involved only if they saw such involvement as conducive to furthering their own agendas.
Most fortunately, history has proved us all wrong. The businesses saw a great earning potential in tapping into the pink dollar/euro/pound pools, and together with the businesses the political nations got involved, too...
But the lesson we learnt in our late teens and early 20's was very valuable. You did not wait. You did not rely on others to do anything for you. You did not develop any sense of self-entitlement.
If you lacked your mechanics and your protocols, you looked for the dudes out there who may have been a bit more conversant with the subject at hand, and you tried to gather all the knowledge and information available. You learnt by trial and error, too, and you were moving on quickly. Being patient meant a bad case of blue balls, and no one cherished that prospect too much.
The 'can do' and 'let's give it a try' attitude turned out to be invaluable in the lives of the few of us. What was originally a hormone fuelled enterprise soon turned out to be a very good MO in the world of education and business, too.
KD