The Years of Living Dangerously

After spending the day running around in parts of the county I haven’t seen in a while, I was decompressing and trying to get my noodle to settle down after absorbing a lot of information… when it decided to make a 270 degree turn, climb into its time machine, and jump into the gutter a little to look at the, ah, more crazier years as a bisexual and, no, I not only don’t know why it went there – I don’t know why it’s still on my mind right now.

I’ve often shared a lot of my exploits during those crazy times, when straight sex and gay sex were both brand-spanking new and I was doing my level best to wear the new off and by any means possible.  By today’s standards of behavior, the sex I was having was insane and dangerous beyond belief; I’ve told people about those times and have watched their eyebrows crawl into their hairline as they would say, “I don’t believe you did some shit like that!”

Well, yeah; during the crazy times, the only things you had to worry about as far as STDs went was syphilis and gonorrhea and everyone knew that if you happened to be unlucky and get this, all you had to do was go to the free clinic and anonymously get it taken care of.  I kinda laugh and say that this is one of those times that I’m glad I didn’t know then what I know now and that ignorance was, in fact, bliss; what you didn’t know about wasn’t going to hurt you until, of course, you found out about it the hard way – and a lot of people did, sad to say… but I wasn’t one of them.

Some think or believe that, today, STDs are the only danger a bisexual (and particularly males) has to worry about.  A guy can still be raped by other men, beaten, abused, and tortured by his fellow man – and just because they think it’s fun to humiliate or otherwise harm men like that.  Back in the crazy days, the old heads used to scare the shit out of and tell us not to hang around any railroad tracks because if we did, the hobos were gonna get us and rape us because they just loved tender, young – and stupidly careless – boys.  Didn’t really stop us from being around the city’s rail yard or other railroad sidings until one of our number did get caught on the tracks – by hobos – and gangbanged for several hours (or so we heard) and spent a few days in the hospital getting checked out for bad stuff and while he didn’t get infected with anything, he did have a bad crab lice infestation.

You’d think that after hearing about this, all of us young fuckers would cool our jets, right?  Nope, not even; shit, we even continued to play around the rail yards and tracks and ventured into other areas of the city’s underside that we were continually warned not to go into.  We knew what happened to our friend, just like we knew that he went down to where he was sexually assaulted because he was hoping to get assaulted and I know our mindset was one of, “Hey, that was him – nothing like that is gonna happen to me!”

Ah, the innocence and naivety of youth.  Even though we were told of the “dangers” of having sex, it didn’t do a whole lot to stop most of us; we didn’t think a whole lot about dumping loads of sperm into the girls who hung with us because, hey, that’s what they wanted, right?  Things like, oh, getting her pregnant – while one of the things we were cautioned about – just went through our minds like water through a sieve; that none of us got any of the girls “in trouble” was a good thing but that’s not really the point.  We weren’t supposed to know about sex yet a lot of us were having more sex than people way older (and supposedly wiser) than we were.  For us, it was care-free, uninhibited fun to be doing the nasty to each other and in any way we could.

Sucking dick and eating pussy, once acquired, was the thing to do; anal sex among the guys just par for the course and even with some of the girls who finally realized that, hey, if he puts that creamy stuff in my pussy, I might have a baby… but if he puts it in my ass, yeah, that’s the ticket!  Even some of the girls who were “saving” their virgin pussies for when they got married would eagerly suck dick and insist on taking it in the ass and none of us were even concerned or, importantly, knowledgeable about hepatitis and the ways one could get this liver-destroying disease, like sticking your unprotected cock into someone’s ass, for instance.

Some folks live their entire lives without having – or coming close to having – a same-sex or group sex experience… but not the kids I hung out with for all those years; for us, it was damn near part of our daily routine or, really, any time a bunch of us got together.  Of all the things that we could have – and probably should have – been worried about, our biggest fear was getting caught in the act; parents back then just did not have a sense of humor about such things and in a time where “neighborhood parenting” was in effect.  One parent catch you doing something you shouldn’t be doing, they just wouldn’t rat you out; you’d get your ass tore up by them, taken home, and ratted out so your parents could beat your ass some more.  If you know about switches, then you know why we’d be so concerned about not getting caught.

But even when some of us did get caught in the act, do you think that slowed things down?  If you got busted in the act, you got your ass tore up, got grounded for x-amount of time, and when you regained your freedom, yep, you just had to get caught up on the goings-on!  Honestly, that any of us actually survived those crazy days continues to amaze me; today, I know that we were incredibly lucky – God does look after fools and children – but even when something “bad” happened, like when I got raped, do you think that really changed anything?  Yeah, it made me be more careful, just like those who’d get caught in the act would learn to be more careful… but the head-first plunge into sex never really stopped.  Sure, some of the gang grew out of the craziness or their families moved, stuff like that and while we would miss our friends, there were still other kids in the hood who were willing to take their place and join us in this dangerous fun.

The moral boundaries didn’t matter even though we were made aware of them in that “do as I say, not as I do” way parents tended to behave in.  Asking a question about why something regarding sex shouldn’t be done would get you into more trouble than anything else and, besides, the usual answer was, “Because I said so!”  Get caught choking your chicken and you had to listen to the going blind/hairy palms speech and, yes, yours truly had to listen to it a few times and the words “Don’t do that!” was, as parents eventually learn, was just license to keep on doing it.

Cultural boundaries, while greatly enforced back in the day (read this as stay with your own kind) didn’t mean a whole lot, either, and even though getting caught or even being suspected of sexy hanky-panky with someone who wasn’t like you added much more danger to the mix, nah, you just learned how to cover your tracks, get a quick and dirty lesson about plausible deniability, and got a good understanding of the word “discretion” – hey, it was only “illegal” if you got caught.  All those stereotypes about not sucking dick or eating pussy?  Yeah, I knew they were bullshit way before I even heard them.  “Good girls don’t but bad girls do?”  A lie and a half, truth be told.  Boys don’t have sex with other boys?  Not even close to the truth.

I know it’s easy to look back on those years today and see just how incredibly careless we were and how “rebellious” we were in doing something that we were straight-up told not to do, let alone be concerned about; sex was something that we were told that we had plenty of time to experience and that there wasn’t a rush to do it – these are the same people, mind you, that would also tell us that tomorrow wasn’t promised to anyone and that just as easy as life was given to us, it could be taken away; yeah, so much for having plenty of time and no need to rush…