I've posted 163 entries, and I've never told my coming out story.  What kind of gay man am I?

A couple of early hints:  Over the years, friends have often asked me when I "knew" I was gay.  In retrospect, though of course not at the time, I remember clearly an early indication.  My father was generally against new-fangled inventions on the grounds that they just meant there was more to go wrong.  But for some reason, we bought a TV very early.  I want to say 1950, but a couple of years later is probably more like it.  One of my favorite programs was wrestling, and I knew that there was an extra pleasure in watching it while lying on the floor on my stomach.  My favorite wrestlers were Killer Kowalski and Yukon Eric.  Finding pictures of them now, I wonder why, since they weren't particularly attractive.  But my favorites they were.  And when I'd go to bed, I'd have frequent fantasies that Killer Kowalski and I would run off to the Yukon, where we'd live happily ever after in a small cabin.

Perhaps this is too clichéd, but we lived in a house without music.  In the mornings, the radio would be on to Des Moines' WHO, where my father would listen to the farm-to-market reports.  Although he had grown up on a farm, he wasn't a farmer, and I'm not sure why these reports were important;  for me, they were just white noise.  Then the radio would be turned off for the day.  We had no record player or hi-fi or stereo.  But despite the lack of exposure to music, there was a TV program that I couldn't miss: "The Voice of Firestone."  It had been on the radio, but moved to television and sometimes was simulcast (very advanced for the times) on radio and television.  The show had famous opera singers--Risë Stevens and Robert Merrill were regulars; I remember Jan Peerce as well, but wikipedia doesn't agree with me--singing popular arias and sometimes songs from operettas.  My parents had no understanding of my fascination, but there I was at six or seven engrossed by the most beautiful music I'd ever heard. 

Then, of course, puberty struck, and my understanding of my sexuality became more explicit.  It wasn't easy in the late 1950s to find erotic material.  One of my friends managed to obtain body-building magazines, but the men in them weren't my type.  Even though my parents didn't go to movies, my mother would occasionally buy movie magazines, and some of them had sections called "Beefcake Bonus."  I spent years drooling (not the exact verb) over Hugh O'Brian and Mike Connors and Gardner MacKay, among others.  Better yet, my mother kept the magazines in a cupboard in the bathroom, where they were extremely handy.  (I also found in the same cupboard, stuck way at the back, copies of Lolita and Lady Chatterley's Lover.  Lolita was much too complicated and clever to be erotic, but I thought the sex scenes in Lady Chatterley were unbelievably hot.  Was there a whole new side to my mother that I never knew about?)  Even though I wouldn't say that I knew exactly that I was gay, I couldn't not understand that I never looked at pictures of semi-naked women or fantasized about them.  It was always men--and a very specific type of man that has never varied.

More confusing to me was that with a couple of my friends, both of whom turned out to be straight, we'd have study sessions that quickly moved into teenage sexual experimentation.  What I couldn't understand at the time was that for John and Alan, my two regulars, these were just means for always horny teens to get some relief: it made no difference to them who their partner was.  For me, however, these experiences were invested with an extra layer of meaning.  I wasn't playing around with just anyone: the other was male.  And by this time, it was pretty hard to deny where my sexual orientation lay.

Pretty hard, but not impossible.  Despite all the pleasure and the fact that I would never say no (and would indeed be sometimes too eager to initiate the sessions), I still felt uneasy, guilty even, about what was happening.  My Portnoy-like rushing from the dinner table to thumb through a magazine with its Beefcake Bonus and my avidity for "study sessions" were unabated and uncontrolable, but there was also the nagging feeling that there was something wrong with all this.  And even though my family had never been particularly religious, I felt that I was alone in my feelings and that God was going to get me for what I felt and did.  I'm not sure exactly why, but it was in these teenage years that I became fascinated with Catholicism.  In addition to the pageantry and other aesthetic attractions, I think it was that I thought the ritual of confession could take away my guilt.  In small town Iowa in the 1950s, there weren't psychologists.  So Catholicism and confession may have seemed a good alternative.

As I recounted in an earlier blog, I was going to convert while I was in high school, but my parents put the kibosh on that.  When I went to college, however, one of the first things I did was enroll in a conversion class.  After a few months of study, I was baptized (for a second time, the infant Protestant one not counting) and for a while I was a very devout and fervent Catholic.  Confession wasn't terribly effective, since I had "impure thoughts" a few minutes after I'd been forgiven, and then I'd be back to zero, but I kept at it.  Then one evening, at some sort of Catholic Center event, a man picked me up.  We drove out into the country where we parked, he made his advances, I began by responding but then panicked.  I felt so guilty that I called Fr. Gregory, the priest, and asked to go to confession.  He said he had a cold and would prefer to do it another time.  I insisted.  He reluctantly agreed to see me, but was clearly impatient and repeated that he had a cold and would prefer to hear my confession another time.  I insisted.  So he grudgingly agreed, and face-to-face we went through the ritual.  I remember walking back to campus and not feeliing very satisfied.  And then I had an eighteen-year-old's epiphany: yes, the Church might take the guilt away, but who gave me the guilt in the first place?  Why not just eliminate the middle man?  No church, no guilt.  No guilt, no church.  And thus ended my Catholic venture.  Thanks, Father Gregory.

To be continued...