I was twenty at the time (but in gay years, scarcely eighteen months old), the artistic director of a local theater company in Indiana (corn-crunching, conservative, frat-run, middle-of-nowhere Indiana) putting on large-scale productions with small-scale budgets and a lot of found prop materials sourced from local dumpsters and Salvation Armies.
It was tech week, and we were in crunch time getting our set together—the show was some musical I can’t even remember the name of, about a gay man and his romantic past life. Stacking old books and accoutrements onto a shelf in the set’s living room, I pulled from a must-thick box a copy of The Joy of Gay Sex by Dr. Charles Silverstein.
1977. First edition. Co-written by Edmund White! The book found me. How bright and blinding this beacon of queerness was in the middle of Nowhere, Indiana; I felt like a video game protagonist pulling a 1000+ talisman with trumpet fanfare from a hidden treasure box. Its pages were aged to an old-lace white. They smelled like a stranger who would strike up an unprompted conversation on a park bench, one with strong opinions about why the Barbra Streisand A Star Is Born is the “definitive version.”
I was out of the closet, sure—but there is a tender period between coming-out-of-the-closet and coming-into-your-ownness that leaves fertile soil for a lot of embarrassment. That period is like a second puberty, a pit in your stomach anytime anyone so much as mentions or alludes to the fact that you, or anyone in the vicinity, has a sexual or romantic life.
And here it was, that pit—the loudest, most pornographic reminder of the self I was still too scared to know, vintage, and with (very detailed) illustrations on every page.
My coming out had been unremarkable and anticlimactic, its thunder stolen by parents who, though they were conservative Evangelicals who fundamentally disagreed with the whole homosexuality thing, “loved me no matter what.” Ugh! A writer’s greatest nightmare realized. An experience traditionally inducing trauma (writing material) was met with uneasy warmth, tearful hugs, and contradictory statements that are difficult to give dramatic value. The chapter of my memoir that would have been filled with a scene of me getting kicked out of my home or bullied was replaced by a boring conversation on my front porch and the latent understanding that my parents would simply just always be a little sad that I’m gay.
But beyond their tentative approval, the easiest thing for all parties involved was to not talk about it, a well-intentioned but deeply Christian see-no-evil, speak-no-evil policy. Our household kept this policy in regard to anything sinful, especially when it came to sex. Growing up (and still to this day) my parents would cover my eyes or fast-forward all the sex scenes. Kids in my school district received no teaching on the matter, and were instead shipped off by the busload with other seventh graders to Robert Crown, an education center forty-five minutes away that had the sole duty of giving students in the tri-state area “the talk” because our middle school health programs were not equipped, employing the help of silicone models of wombs and urethras, and corny CGI animations depicting the miracle of (straight) life, a product of the penis inserted into the vagina.
And this book, with the same confrontational quality as plastic fallopian tubes, put my embarrassment in full swell again. Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined the gay version of my sexual education and the devastation that came with it. The internet was a thing by then, sure, but not the resource it is today. There was only so much information about anal sex beyond Wikipedia pages and porn, and I had neglected to dive deep as a consequence of the Jesus-Sees-You shame that ran through my blood.
“Oh, my God,” said someone next to me, as I realized I had been holding the book and staring at it for an unknown length of time. “Who brought this?!”
No one knew the answer, or where it came from: a portent of sexual corruption. Someone grabbed the book and immediately started flipping through it, as a few more members of the cast and company gathered around. The book was opened to a chapter called “Fetish,” underneath the title an illustration of a man with a large S shaved on the top of his head, his arms tied behind his back and his body chained to a pair of shining Doc Martens, which he was bending over in full child’s pose to lick. The boots belonged to a muscled black man with high socks and a studded cock ring. The S man wasn’t looking at the Doc Martens, but out, directly at the camera.
“Oh my God,” came the refrain from the crowd now amassed around this book. Ironically, it was the furthest from God I had felt in some time.
With much giggling and pointing, the book was passed around and more illustrations were revealed. Eventually I got over my shell shock and joined in laughing, and we were proud to have come across such a find. We placed it on a shelf and deemed it an unofficial totem of our production. As a group, we decided it was ours, but deep down, I knew it would be mine.
Days went by. The book haunted every rehearsal and every performance. After the show closed, we broke down the set, and the minute I was alone, I stowed it in my backpack.
Learning to inhabit my queerness was less about pedagogy and more like Harry Potter discovering Parseltongue—surprised by his own fluency, lost to those who taught him his first language. Learning to inhabit my sexuality, however, was akin to the experience of running through downtown Shanghai with a water-stained map, not knowing a word of Mandarin, and realizing someone has stolen both your wallet and iPhone. I felt lost, in perpetuity, or so I thought.
Back home, I read the entire book in one wild night, skimming through its alphabetical index of sex: “AIDS, Anus, Bars, Baths, Bisexuality . . .”; “Fisting, Foreskin, Frottage . . .”; “Phone Sex, Piercing . . .”; “Tricking, Types, Vanilla Sex, Water Sports, Wrestling.” What I felt was not quite arousal or curiosity, but more like abject horror at the things I did not know.
The more I peeled through The Joy of Gay Sex, the further away I fell from the man I thought I had wanted to be. The book was a foreign, beautiful language. I paused over an illustration labeled “Fuck Buddies,” an Adonis lying on the ground next to an empty condom wrapper, wearing nothing but a handkerchief tied around his neck. Lengths of rope wrap loosely around his body as he pinches the nipple of the man he has his legs around, a dark-mustached hombre donning a cowboy hat and boots. The cowboy beams down with the corniest smile as he grasps the blondie’s penis with force, shooting semen a full two feet into the air. The look on the Adonis’s face was seared into my memory, a look not of orgasmic pleasure, but bliss—a serenity I had never known.
As I finished the book, I felt isolated, ignorant. I shelved it on my nightstand and only ever picked it back up as a party trick to give guests a good laugh. I trekked through the year with that book on my nightstand. It was a retro, decorative wink, but also a shameful reminder.
It isn’t until years later that I realize as I write: all this time, the book I thought had shamed me into demurity in actuality ushered me (okay, shoved me) into a clumsy sexual awakening. That year was the year I first “Bottomed,” the year I first went to a “Bar,” the year I first tried “Dirty Talk,” “Doggy Style,” “Fetish Play,” and the year I had my first “Fuck Buddy.” It was the year I first experimented with “Lubricants” and “Massages,” with “Mirrors,” “Phone Sex,” “Role-Playing,” and “Toys.” It was the year I first “Sat” on someone’s face and “Spanked” someone, and it was the year I nabbed my first “Trade.”
I had never considered myself a sexual person, but as it turned out, consideration had little to do with it. My libido was a pulsing force inside me, dormant like the very book I found at the bottom of that props box. And though reading it was a slow unlearning of the things that held me back, and a relearning of the things my own body was able to do, the feeling of humiliation that had once run hot through me was replaced by a much different emotion—joy.
Fran Tirado is the Deputy Editor of Out magazine, co-host of the podcast Food 4 Thot, and writer working on a book of essays.