A Tale of Sexual Awakening

“I'm soooo horny! I wish you were a girl!”

Two adolescent boys, sleeping in the back of the family station wagon. In retrospect, I realize that that night could potentially have been my first shared sexual experience.

Thank Goddess, it wasn't.

Looking back, I can see that that night in the car wasn't the first time that my cousin had orchestrated the two of us into a potentially sexual situation. Though a year younger than I, he was by far the more sexually precocious of the two.

He was also—even at the time, I knew it—self-centered and immature. He would have been a terrible partner to discover sex with.

Sheltered, trained by my parents to obedient compliance, I would almost certainly have been the loser for the experience.

Instead, my ignorance, and naivete, saved me—at the time, I had no idea that sex between males was even possible—and I didn't respond to my cousin's clumsy overture, if that, indeed, is what it was.

When, years later, my first dorm-room fumblings with another guy finally flowered into sex, transmuted by the alchemy of first love, they came as magical, a revelation.

I've never discussed that night in the car with my cousin. I wonder if he even remembers?

That I later came to identify as gay, and he didn't, isn't really an operative category here: early adolescent sexuality generally tends toward the amorphous.

Next time we see one another, though, I do plan to bring it up. We're both mature adults now, after all, sidling into age.

Does he remember? What did he intend that night? Did he even intend anything at all?

All these years later, I'd be interested to know.