As Boys Grow (1957)

After the events I describe below, I saw this video, or one very like it, in high-school P. E. class.  Quite well-made for the time.  There was much nervous laughter in the room: the shock of recognition.

It was 60 years ago this month that puberty suddenly struck and changed me forever.  Rather unusually, I remember the specific day and even the hour.  It was a little after 8:30 in the morning on a June day; my dad and I had breakfasted and were getting ready to go downtown to his office. In summertime, I often rode downtown with him, where I was free to roam around the parks and shops of our small city, or spend an afternoon at the movies.  Dad was in the bathroom, shaving, and I was wondering how he would like the new shaving bag I had already bought him for Father's Day.  

I was sitting on my bed, dressed in T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, doing nothing in particular - probably reading the morning paper, or a comic book, when all of a sudden I became aware that there was something berween my legs that felt very different.  It was as if someone had flipped a light switch.  Something that thereto had been no more interesting than the bathtub faucet - a necessary but unremarkable part of my body - now begged to be touched.  It tingled.  What an odd sensation!  But most interesting.  A pleasurable sensation inside my shorts that I'd never felt before.  Of course, I said nothing about it to my father.

Soon he was dressed in suit and tie, and off to town we went.  While Dad and others busied themselves with paperwork, I sequestered myself in a back room where I often sat, making paper hats and airplanes out of scrap paper, or picking out something to read from my stash of comic books.  But that day, I was solely interested in finding out what this newly awakened thing in my pants was all about.  Jn fact, I spent hours, as I recall, touching and rubbing and fondling it - it just felt so good!  A mysterious but quite delightful surprise - nothing had prepared me for this sweet experience.

For the next few days, I could hardly think of anything else.  I will spare my readers the lurid details - which are common to all boys and men - but after another two or three days of fooling with it, I was suddenly rewarded with a powerfully joyous release, a greater pleasure than I had ever known before.  Kaboom!  I remember wishing there was some kind of machine that would prolong that wonderful feeling, which subsided all too quickly - it was some years later before I heard the word "orgasmatron," but that's just what I had wished for.  And of course, I wanted to enjoy that feeling again and again and again, as often as possible.  For quite a long time afterwards, it was a daily quest, first thing after getting home from school.

So my ship set sail towards the blue horizon of manhood.  I was fortunate to be untroubled by any thoughts of sin or damnation - no one had ever mentioned anything about this new development.  But this bookworm needed to know all about it, so sometime in the fall of that year, I went to the public library, where I was not quite old enough to check books out of the adult section - but there was nothing to stop any kid from using the card catalog and browsing through the stacks.  I had the good luck to come across an excellent book, Boys and Sex, by Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, who I later learned had been one of Dr. Kinsey's associates in the 1950s.  And that book told me everything I needed to know, and more, very clearly, without moralizing.  It wasn't until several years later that I got involved with a fundamentalist church and got weighed down with the whole hellfire-and-brimstone business - not only on account of masturbation but also homosexuality.  You guys know what I'm talking about.  

Curiously, before that summer none of my friends and playmates had ever done or said anything sexual; but beginning that fall, after my "great awakening," several boys about my age came on to me at different times.  And I knew instinctively that that was just what I wanted to do, no doubt about it.  Alas, a day came when I realized I was a homosexual - that horrible thing everyone hated - and of course, you fellas know what self-loathing that leads to, and the damnation stuff besides.  So I was, in a manner of speaking, eventually cast out of Eden and made to walk the long, rocky path to self-acceptance.  I didn't come out until I was 24, after I'd left the church behind.  A painful walk; but I suppose all journeys of self-discovery are.

I'll conclude here, with the happy thought of that boy discovering what it means to be a man, in the physical sense at least, and how very sweet it was in that dawn of innocent pleasure.  It makes me smile.  Can you relate, fellas?

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