No one had to teach me how to come. Every afternoon, I’d lie on the cold linoleum of my family’s bathroom, turn on the shower for sonic camouflage and get to work on myself. Like a prodigy with no formal training, I was a natural. Maybe I couldn’t read sheet music, and the finger placement was definitely off, but lying there, clutching my instrument, I learned what my body was capable of.
My parents, blue-collar conservative Christians, homeschooled me for most of my adolescence in an attempt to protect me from the secular world and its corrupting notions of liberalism and science. For their own edification they purchased a book on talking to your son about sex, which I would secretly take from their shelves and study solemnly in my bed at night. There I discovered that my white pee was actually called “semen” and, in the final and shortest chapter, titled simply “Homosexuality,” that the urges I’d been visualizing while making the white pee (fueled by old Archie comic books) were unnatural and wrong. Turned out all those tiny, messy miracles weren’t miracles at all.
If instinct was my teacher, then shame became my tutor. In the years that followed, I’d spend approximately 15 minutes of each day on that bathroom floor and the rest of my waking hours working out how and when I’d be going to hell for it.
Soon I graduated from the bathroom to a corner of our basement, where my parents had foolishly placed our brand-new computer. The creaky stairwell served as a de facto lookout while I entered such imaginative terms into the pre-Google search bar as gay and gay sex. In the waning days of dial-up it wasn’t unusual for me to wait a full 20 minutes as our Dell PC loaded, line by line, a horrifically photoshopped image of George Clooney receiving a blow job from Brad Pitt. I learned about anal sex from erotic gay fan fiction, which always made it seem so simple and spontaneous. Obi-Wan never once shat on Qui-Gon’s dick. Maybe it was the Force.
When I turned 16, my parents reluctantly sent me off to public school. My entry into the real world would coincide with our school district’s mandatory sex-ed class, years too late to be anything but an exercise in not making eye contact with the teacher. By this point all of us had enrolled in a rigorous course of our own design, consisting of facts and fictions cobbled together from internet porn and various misremembered half-truths some older brother brought home from college. It was like a game of telephone played by hundreds of teenage boys with wild ideas about the viability of their sperm in a hot tub.
After little more than a month at public school, I tearfully came out to a friend during lunch period. A short lifetime of shame and mortal fear—I set it all aside in that moment because the smell of Axe body spray got me hard. Sadly, it still does.
The sex-ed class came to an end, but my education did not. (That same year I met my first boyfriend, who was also the first man I heard whisper “teeth” with erotic caution as I gave head for the first time, a VHS tape of his eighth-grade production of The Music Man playing in the background.) Every new experience, even the many, many humiliating ones, felt like a revelation.
“That was sex!” I would say to myself. I eventually realized that it wasn’t, but I would go on to learn things they forgot to teach us: about consent, about the different ways we experience desire, about the ways our bodies betray us. But I still go back to those teenage moments—fucking in the backseat of a Pontiac Sunfire parked inconspicuously in an empty Target lot—when it all felt miraculous again.