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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 had some pretty strange dreams in my time, but this has got to have been one of the strangest.

I'm not sure what kind of congregation I'm in, but it must be something staid like Episcopalian; most of the guys around me are wearing suits. That makes what happens next even more bizarre.

We rise to sing a hymn. As we begin, all of the men around me unzip and pull their dicks out.

(I must be visiting the congregation, because I don't really know what's going on. Nevertheless, I follow along with the rest.)

At one point—during the chorus, I'm guessing—we all swing our dicks to the right. During the next chorus, we swing to the left. So it goes through the entire hymn, alternately. The young guy on my left is doing it; so is the man standing in the pew in front of me, and the older one to my right. We're all doing it. Me, I swing along with the rest.

The collective tone of this bizarre act of Episcopal fertility worship—is it an act of blessing?—is that of mild amusement, but there's something serious about it as well, something ritual. As the hymn concludes, we all shake off, as if at the end of a piss, and re-trouser. Presumably, the service then continues. I don't know for sure, because I always wake up at this point.

I've had this dream several times now. I draw three conclusions.

Contains sexual content

I'm given to understand that things are different these days, but back when I was working restaurants you could always pretty much tell where you were in the house by the ambient sexual preference. The gay guys worked the floor, the straight guys the line.

Not that you would have guessed as much from the banter that you'd hear in the kitchen. In every restaurant that I ever worked, the cooks were constantly on about who was going to suck whose dick, or boff whose butt.

(According to my friend David, this is because the human male is instinctively and intrinsically homosexual. [All heterosexuality, apparently, is acquired behavior.] My own take on it is that such verbal micro-aggressions help relieve the tension of working in a stressful environment with too little personal space. You can make up your own mind.)

One day, for a reason I can no longer remember, I went to the walk-in cooler to get something.

Now, you have to understand that in a restaurant kitchen—for reasons that you can readily divine—all doors open in. Unfortunately, it so happened that at that very moment the head chef was standing immediately inside taking inventory, so that I clobbered him with the door as I opened it.

Apologies immediately sprang to my lips, but when Chef saw who it was, he beat me to it.

“Hey, hey, you're banging me in the butt,” he deadpanned.

Thank Goddess for presence of mind.

 Hooray, hooray, the first of May
Outdoor sex begins today!
             —old saw

So, Atheopaganism is a pleasure-positive path. That’s Atheopagan Principle #10: so long as others and the Sacred Earth are respected, we believe that joy and fun and feeling good are our birthrights as humans.

In 5th grade, we had an assignment to make art depicting "innocence and the light and grace of God" (or something similar). I chose to draw a young boy and girl standing bathed in the light of the Holy Spirit (in dove form), their backs to the viewer, their bodies lightly covered in transparent shifts.  To me that showed the purity of creation, a clear symbol of innocence. I thought it was a beautiful drawing. 

My classmates called me a pervert and were horrified. My teacher told me they needed more clothes.  I didn't see anything wrong or shameful in what I had drawn.  

I grew up with big books of museum art full of nudes, wallpaper with naked women bathing in my parents' bathroom - which was no different than the metallic lions and tigers in the jungle on the walls of the bathroom my brothers and I shared. Bodies are used in art because they are amazing things.  I inherently understood that being naked didn't automatically mean being sexual. 

More than a week later, my bags are unpacked (mostly), the laundry is done (almost), but my thoughts linger with the Parliament of World Religions. With religious observances starting at 7am (I will refrain from commenting on this choice of scheduling) and social activities continuing late into the night, experiences seemed to add up to weeks rather than days.