In tenth grade biology class, when I was
fourteen years of age, one of my classmates approached me, asked to borrow a
pencil, and slipped his hand up the leg opening of my shorts. Out of shock and embarrassment, I pulled
away from him. Soon after the incident,
I (in my bewilderment) related it to two girls in French class, asking them
what they thought lay behind the young man’s intent. After all, he was one of the most popular students in
school, and he seemed by all outward behavior to be completely
heterosexual. I wish I had never
related what had occurred, because the girls confronted him after class (which
I had asked them not to do). The young
man confessed his action was meant to ridicule me; he claimed he had touched me
on a dare. A group of his friends suspected I was gay and wanted to know if I would get an erection if
fondled by another male.
I’ve always had my doubts about this
claim, and this doubt is further strengthened by something that occurred two
years later, during our senior year. I
was house sitting for my French teacher when the young man who had touched me
dropped by unannounced. We were by no
means friends, and in fact, rarely even spoke to one another. He took a seat in the living room and
started thumbing through an Under Gear catalog I had placed on the table.
I remember I had once overheard one of my
female classmates saying that he was on the swim team of the local country club,
and that during competitions he wore the briefest of suits. That image of him became the touchstone of
my first homosexual longings. The house
over which I was watching had a pool, and I asked him if he wanted to swim
(miraculously hoping he would pull down his shorts and be wearing the swim suit
I so oft imagined him in.) But he said
‘no’ and then left as quickly as he had come, without having ever really said
much of anything.
I wish I had possessed the sense of self
at the time to have looked at him and to have said, “I want you,” but I had no
self-confidence and wasn’t really certain what my desire was, other than I
longed for him in a way I couldn’t express.
The memory of him haunts me even now, over a decade since we last saw
one another. I wrote a letter late in
2005 to his parent’s home, addressed to his father, asking what had become of
my classmate.
The letter went unanswered.