Some historical perspective: how fast times can change!
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This is long... but I think it may be informative to younger folks who haven't lived in the times that brought us here... read if you like, skip if you don't...
I was born in the early 1960's... and that means I learned about sex and sexuality in the late 1970's. At that time (some called it the "free love era"), teenagers in my hometown in Florida were fucking everyone and everything!
That's not to say being "gay" was ok! It most certainly was not!
In short: free love meant you could fuck literally anyone else who wanted to - it was just sex! - but, kissing was for men and women, and having romantic feelings was also strictly male/female!
I can still remember a neighbor of mine (a jock named Joe, with a FAT, but otherwise ugly cock) saying he wasn't coming over to my house again for a while - until he got a new girlfriend - because he wasn't gay! (So I could fuck the cum out of him every weekday after school - so long as he had a girlfriend! But, if he didn't have a girl, and we kept fucking, THAT was "gay"? Damn we were fucked-up-in-the-head! But it was "FREE LOVE, MAN!"
(Funny aside: we used to TIME each other... I would suck or fuck him for exactly 5 minutes, then he'd suck or fuck me for the same amount of time... we used one of those old "flip" clocks to time it!
)So, in our high school, fucking guys was cool, so long as you were also fucking girls! It was easy to explain: other than herpes (the "gift that keeps on giving"), our biggest fear was getting the girls pregnant... so we fucked like teens like to do! But, we were ALWAYS horny, and you didn't have to wear a condom or pull out if it was a guy! It was all cool, so long as you ALSO fucked girls!
Mind you, in these days, there was virtually no thought of trimming pubes, much less shaving your ass! And the idea of a condom used for anything BUT pregnancy prevention was quite-literally unheard-of! Thus, cumming INSIDE a guy was much preferable to pulling out! The cum in your pubes would dry and be a REAL PAIN to clean later when you could shower!
But this wasn't just a "neighborhood" thing - it was a whole high school thing! I grew up in coastal Florida, and my parents were reasonably well-off: I had easy access to a boat (actually, 2 small ones, plus 1 closer to a yacht in size), and the intracoastal waters, where we lived, had dozens of little "spoil" islands where we, as teens, could go (by boat) and be "unreachable" by the adult world. "Boom boxes" were relatively new (and ate through D-cell batteries quickly), but if you knew what you were doing, you could "wire one in" to a boat's electronics and you had loud music for an entire day quite easily.
We would all go out to these islands, typically 4+ boats at a time, typically 2-6 people per boat, strip naked, frolic in the water, sunbathe for that oh-so-impressive "all over" tan... and fuck like rabbits! (We also didn't know the skin cancer risk of all that "all over" sun exposure!)
We didn't call it anything but an "island party" (no sex-related labels: no "orgy," no "poly-amorism," not even a "sex party"!), but we virtually always had sex at these island parties - because it was fun - and so long as the girls didn't get pregnant, we were all just happy to be getting drunk and getting our rocks off!
Again, I want to be clear - there WERE rules! You could fuck guys and girls, or just girls, but you couldn't fuck just other guys! That was "gay" (used in a VERY derogative way) and you likely would not be invited back. (There were also rules, like not cumming inside of girls - or even getting close - and not fucking girls who were known to be "going steady" with someone else, unless he was there too... so it wasn't a complete free-for-all, but it was damned close!)
YES: My life as a 16 & 17 y/o High School student in 1979 and 1980 was SWEET!
Then, in the fall of 1981, I moved to Atlanta for college. Unbeknownst to me, or my incoming classmates, Atlanta was in the middle of a 1-2 punch:
- a serial killer was on the loose (Wayne Williams - a black man) - was abducting, raping, and killing young black boys - and the cops were CONVINCED it was a white man... until they weren't!... that's another topic for another day...
- and AIDS. AIDS was discovered in 1981, and no one knew a damned thing about it. In 1981, wearing condoms for protection from anything but pregnancy was just plain dumb.
But Atlanta was also a culture-shock for me... I had no idea how "progressive" my Florida upbringing had been! My college was more than 1/2 enrolled with certified, card-carrying Georgia Rednecks. Sure, they were smart enough to get into college, but the idea of a guy sticking his dick in another guy was gross and unthinkable depravity! Hell, getting a blowjob from your girl was considered "kinky") [How ironic that 40 years later, getting a blowjob from your girl is now considered a "goodnight kiss"!]
Still, I joined a frat - and, as I learned only too late, one that wasn't particularly progressive in terms of the sexual revolution! Then again, none of them were back then! But, there was REAL RISK in having sex with any other member of the frat, so I didn't... but, I did find some other, like-minded guys in some of the other frats on campus (as well as a few from other Atlanta area colleges).
BUT, for the first time in my life, I was having sex "in secret" (from anyone other than my parents). The girls I was fucking didn't know I was fucking guys (they knew I was fucking other girls, but that was OK - we weren't "going steady," after all! So, it was ok to be seeing - and fucking - other people. It was just assumed that they would be girls though! ... And, the guys I was fucking didn't know I was fucking girls (but again, it was OK to be fucking other guys)!?!?
College was my introduction to the idea (totally foreign to me at the time) that one could only be "gay" or "straight," - you absolutely could be NOT be both! I had been introduced to the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual", but having no other guide to go by, I termed myself an "omnisexual"! A term I made up myself, but after many many years, I've decided that a more accurate label for my sexuality is pansexual - but I didn't learn that term until nearly 2000 - almost 2 decades before it started to become a common term.
So, all this deceit was new to me, and it was terribly stressful. I almost flunked out of school, so I LITERALLY shut down my entire sex-life beginning mid-way through my sophomore year until my senior year! (To me, it was a clear choice: fuck now and be poor all my life, or fuck later and make a good living the rest of my life!). How did I accomplish this? I discovered porn! Specifically: Stars magazine (a gay magazine) - ironically, in my Junior year, I would be invited to NYC for Spring Break to shoot photos for them, as well as to do 2 porn videos. (I was paid over $2500 - in 1984 dollars - for the trifecta!) The owner of Stars magazine (Glenn Turner) had seen some pics I had sent in and had been trying to get me to come up - but when I did, it was about 2 months after he had moved to CA! So, I met the photographer (Tom something-or-other who owned Man-Age Studios, a major contributor to Stars back then), but never met Glenn himself. And, they never published my photos - he sold the magazine not long thereafter... I don't know the details.
But I remained largely celibate until my final quarter - my "graduating quarter" at college...
How quickly things had changed!
Given the nature of things, I honestly believe that one "benefit" from my taking a couple of YEARS off in my sexual life was that I wasn't exposed to AIDS (or, later, HIV)! It was RAMPANT in Atlanta in the early 1980's - only San Francisco and NYC were hit harder! By NOT being sexually active during that time, not only was I finishing my degree, but I was also (accidentally) insulating myself from the "gay plague!")
So, by the time I tried to "get back into the game" at the end of my senior year, all the rules had changed. The CDC & the Surgeon General were making it clear that sex between men was causing this AIDS disease - and it was nearly ALWAYS fatal! (SCARY AS FUCK!)
What's more, the new kids (freshmen) who were coming to the school were, quite literally, scared to have sex! Not even with girls, but ESPECIALLY with guys!
More to the point: where the primary goal of our frat parties in 1981 was to get girls into the house, get them drunk (along with ourselves), and to get laid, that goal had changed by 1985... now, the goal was just to get drunk and "party" (which usually meant other drugs). Sex was FAR less common! And sex in front of others was suddenly forbidden! Where did all this "Victorian sexual morality" come from? (Don't ask me - that's a legit question... I don't know!)
NOTE: I have never been into those "other drugs", and it was while in college that I learned that I have a very unhappy response to getting high on weed... I go impotent! And for someone who is normally multi-orgasmic, having a dick that won't get hard is a VERY BAD side effect! To this day, I avoid weed! I'd rather get off than get high!
When I left college and started my career, I moved back to Fla... and the scene here was equally changed: No more island (sex) parties, no more naked frolicking on the beach, and far FAR fewer people nude sunbathing... people were sexually "hunkered down"! And there had been a morality shift too... it was no longer OK for guys to fuck other guys "to relieve sexual tension"... hell, even SEEING another naked guy was "gay" (still in the most derogatory of connotations). (I used to play racquetball - in the late 1970's when I went to my dad's racquetball club, guys walked around the locker-room with their towels on their shoulders or in their hands - dicks ALWAYS flopping about! When I returned in 1986, everyone's towel was around their waist with special attention payed to ensure you stayed covered up while getting dressed!)
However, I had a very good-paying job and there was a new technology emerging: dial-up BBSs... (Bulletin Board Systems)... While I was at college, I had discovered a UUCP NewsGroup called MOTSS : Members of the same sex - a chat room for guys who liked guys! (Girls just weren't common on computers back then, so while there MAY have been a lesbian there somewhere, I never noticed.)
Hence, I named my BBS "Space Coast MOTSS". Over time, it grew to a few hundred users.... and through there, I found a few "swingers" - mostly people a little older than me. I also met quite a few gay men (again, mostly older). I met my first, ever, true "boyfriend" on SC-MOTSS... Michael was an electronics repair tech... 12 years older than me, but because of his mixed Native American heritage, he actually looked younger than me (except for his hands, curiously, his hands looked his age...). He also moonlighted as a bartender in a hole-in-the-wall gay bar in Cocoa Beach.
Michael introduced me to his circle of friends, among them a very sexy guy - my age, for a change - named David, who, less than 10-months after I met him, died of AIDS.
This was ca. 1987 now, and AIDS was at its height for killing people. We had to be careful!
Michael had grown up (sexually) in the same "moral times" as I had, and he was very used to the free-wheeling, openly sexual way of the 1970s... but this was 1987, and AIDS was very real. While Michael loved to have sex with other guys, the common belief at the time was that only anal sex transmitted the disease. (It was in error, but that's what Michael and I believed at the time)... so Michael would occasionally "hookup" and blow some other guy while he worked at his bar. And I was happy having someone who liked to fuck as much as I did - and since we had anal sex nearly every night, I was "satisfied" with just Michael.
Michael and I broke up after about 2 years, and I moved away. There's a ton of other history to share about the 1990's and 2000's... but this is the 2020's and HIV is a completely manageable disease (not unlike diabetes: it won't likely be the cause of your death unless you fail to manage it!)
But the DAMAGE done to the American gay & bi-sexual male psyche over the 30 years it took to gain "control" (such as it is) of HIV/AIDS remains evident.
- there is still a "life or death" stigma associated with "casual" sex
- there are morals police (usually in their 30's and 40's) who still insist that the only "acceptable" sex is between monogamous partners who use condoms
- there are kids (mostly in their teens and 20's) who have been raised by HIV/AIDS epidemic-traumatized parents to fear and loathe sex
In MY (recent) experience, there are VERY FEW people under the age of 50 who have a healthy attitude about sex (that is: sex is natural and something we're genetically programmed to enjoy and to seek out! But there are STDs that can be damaging, if not deadly, so some care has to be taken. Like everything else enjoyable in life, it needs to be enjoyed with some degree of care, moderation, and reason.) And, still in complete honesty, there aren't many OVER the age of 50 that haven't been tainted by the horrors of the HIV/AIDS epidemic either!
I don't know that American Society will ever get back to a "free love" kind of acceptance of human sexuality that we found in the 1970's... but the past 40 years seems to have destroyed 200+ years of progress towards it!
That said, the trajectory looks promising:
- transgendered people were mostly vilified and ostracized in the 1970's - even by many "regular" gay men!
- gay men in the 1970's were often assumed to be pedophiles (The term for young gay men back then was chicken, not twink!)
- openly gay and lesbian couples weren't accepted (outside the gay sub-culture) in the 1970's. Not only couldn't they marry, but they would be looked down upon with suspicion if they even lived together!
- gays in the 1970's were considered automatic security risks (and couldn't hold government security clearances!)
- interracial couples were still uncommon and usually looked down upon in the 1970's
What a long, strange trip it has been!
