The Night I Lost My Virginity

When I was a kid at summer camp, my friend Marty told me that heterosexual sex comes in six steps, which boys had to follow in a precise order:
1. Kissing
2. Fondling the girl's chest.
3. Taking off her bra.
4. Taking off your pants.
5. Having her do things to you with your pants off.
6. Something to do with where babies come from.

You might engage in the preliminary steps many times, but not until you talked the girl into #6 had you "lost your virginity" and "become a man."

I figured that gay men must have a similar procedure:
1. Kissing
2. Fondling each other's chests.
3. Taking off your shirts.
4. Taking off your pants.
5. Doing things with each other with your pants off.
6. Something to do with your backsides.

You could engage in the preliminary steps many times, but not until you talked the guy into #6 had you "lost your virginity" and "become a man." I assumed.

1. Jake. I didn't get an opportunity to do anything until shortly after my 18th birthday, when my friend Mary asked me to visit her for spring break and determine if her "kid brother" Jake was gay.  We ended up sharing a bed.  (Don't worry, he was less than two years younger than me.)

We skipped the kissing, started with the fondling, and then, because our shirts and pants were already off, skipped directly to #5.  There was no #6.

So I concluded that I was still a virgin.



2. Wolfgang. My next opportunity came during my sophomore year at Augustana College, when I spent a semester in Regensburg, Germany, and dated Wolfgang, an 18-year old choirboy at St. Peter's Cathedral.

Since we both lived in dorms, we never spent the night together.  Our shirts came off, but not our pants, but we managed to go to step #5 anyway. Again, there was no kissing and no step #6.

What was going on?  Why were the steps all out of order?  Why no kissing?

And I was still a virgin.







3. Fred. When I returned to Rock Island in the spring of my sophomore year, I dated Fred the Ministerial Student.  We spent many nights together, alone in his apartment, and later in the trailer we shared during our five weeks of living together in Omaha.

There was a lot of cuddling on the couch, followed by taking off our shirts and pants and going straight to #6.

Wait -- I had done #6, but I still felt like a virgin.

Maybe you had to do #5 first.  I talked him into #5 a few times, but he behaved as if it it was trivial, just playing around, not an essential step on the way to becoming a man.

And there was still no kissing!  When I tried, Fred turned his face away!  I wanted that more than the backside stuff.


4. The Guys at the Levee. In the fall of my junior year at Augustana, I learned how to cruise at the levee, wandering from parked car to parked car to strike up conversations, then either follow the guy to his house or engage in sexual intimacies right there in his car.  Either way, what you got was #5, nothing before, nothing after.

 No kissing!  No shirts or pants off!  Just an unzipped zipper!

Wait -- maybe for gay men, #5 and #6 were the least intimate.  You didn't need to take your clothes off.  You didn't need to know the guy's name.  Sometimes, in the dark, you didn't even see his face.

And maybe kissing, the act heterosexuals would do with anybody, even strangers, was the ultimate in intimacy, the act that would make you a man.




5. Ron. One of the guys I met at the levee was Ron Burton, a husky bear in his mid-40s who taught geology.  We soon had an ongoing arrangement: every couple of weeks he would invite me to his house, sometimes for dinner, sometimes later, sometimes to spend the night, sometimes not.

In about eight nights together, we skipped the kissing and fondling, and went straight to clothing removal, and then either #5 or #6, never both.

After eight nights in Ron's arms, I wanted intimacy!

He held handcuff parties for his advanced students every semester, so in the spring of my junior year, I enrolled in his paleontology class and got invited.

No one had ever had the nerve to handcuff the professor before, but I did.  And kept him handcuffed as the other students left in pairs or groups, until only the two of us were left in the house.

"Ok, you can let me loose now," Ron said, somewhat annoyed.

"Not yet.  There's something I want to do first." I put my arms around him and brought my face close to his.  He didn't turn away.  Then I kissed him.  Long, deep, passionate.  My first, unless you count brief lip-pushes with girls.

When I moved my head away, he was staring.  "Um...I didn't know you felt this way."

I removed the handcuffs, and we went into the bedroom for the ultimate in male intimacy.

I had finally lost my virginity. I was a man.

See also: Dad Explains the Facts of Life; and Are You a Top or a Bottom?