Gaining Momentum Part I

It has to be said that I am often slow. Not in general, but certainly on a social level I’m like slow glass. It takes awhile for the light to pass through and reveal itself to me. Especially when it comes to relationships and sex.

I’ve written about this here before. I have a running joke that I could be in a dark corner/room/anyplace with a woman and she would be tearing my clothes off, covering me with passionate kisses and begging me to take her to bed/the wall/someplace/anyplace and in my head I’m thinking “I wonder if she likes me”.

Yeah, okay, that’s an exaggeration. I’m not quite that slow…but sometimes I’m close. Also that scenario rarely actually happens, when it does…I’m generally way more on the ball….so to speak.

But last April, when I attended MomentumCon (thanks very very hugely to my friend @dangerouslilly), I began to learn and realize just.how.slow. I actually am and have been.

Let me explain, if you’ll be kind enough to indulge me and read on.

My whole early life, I’ve been giving myself hints about what my desires were and are. What I like, what I don’t like what I want. My subconscious would give me ways of thinking looking and thinking of things. But I wasn’t getting it. I think the reason for this is because I grew up in a fairly repressed household…you know, the classic “stop touching yourself” kind of thing when you’re a kid…subtle if unintentional parental messages of shame. You know the drill…It was the 60s and 70s and my parents were young and children of the 40s and 50s.

So I never asked myself certain questions and I managed as I grew older to squelch my darker ideas about sex and thus left them unexplored.

In my early teens I read books by gay men, knowing that I wasn’t attracted to men. I was fascinated by the sense of being “other”. I was mystified by this. Why was I so interested in the thinking of struggling gay men when I was clearly attracted to girls. I didn’t realize this then…but I was drawn to reading about people who struggled with self and societal acceptance. I think I was trying to tell myself that I had desires and attractions that I wasn’t accepting. It certainly was what I was doing. And since there were no ready books for me out there yet (Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty was completely out of my radar until I was in my 40s) Merle Miller was what I had to go on.

In college I became frustrated with the plethora of books on women sexuality and the absolute lack of books on male sexuality. Other than a book by Bernie Zilbergeld, I could find nothing. This is the very early 80s. No internet. And oddly, though I was in a very liberal college with lots of artists, I wasn’t encountering the kind of “dark play” that still crept in the back of my mind. In high school I would role play with my girlfriend, but she would only go so far and since I viewed myself as being unusual I simply let it go as far as she was comfortable and resigned myself to not going further.

I simply had no awareness of any other option and I think, being partially on the spectrum, or at least the way that I was on the spectrum, things just didn’t occur to me. So…suppression continued…it went on through my brief marriage and even further.

A couple of years after my separation from my wife, I discovered online role play…you know…the old Yahoo chat rooms. I just went early on to meet people but eventually learned there were people creating their own “worlds” and stories.

I was in my 30s and this is where things, still slowly, began to come alive...



To be continued