Later, when I tried to couple-up with another man, we frequently watched porn as monogamous sex became increasingly boring. For the most part, those desolate days of flipping through magazines, or staring at the screen, seemed distant and desperate. Soon after irrefutably accepting that I was “gay,” I attended my first San Francisco “Pride” Parade there, I saw a couple of men who were the stuff of my daydreams, which had magically somehow come to life.Īs a sexually active young “gay” man, I only rarely watched porn. Like the superheroes I worshiped on TV, they lived in a separate world that I could only hope to occasionally look into.Īs a teenager, when I started purchasing gay porn, the reality of pictures depicting that which I had only ever imagined in my mind, confirmed in me the idea that somewhere out in the universe there existed people who felt as I do.
Yet, these were supposedly straight men, and they loved women. And, in pornography, the men, self-contained and aloof seemed ever distant, but also somehow graspable for I was alone with them and we were vulnerable together. As for the male, he symbolized the other that which openly disregarded me, but I longed for acknowledgment from. In pornography, the female form was less than fascinating-it represented the element I knew and understood. Consequently, I was often accepted into their circles and they treated me as if I were another girl: we sat around at recess and lunch, shared confidences, and watched boys. For instance, some of my female classmates felt instinctively protective of the odd and shy loner. Looking back, overall, the women and girls in my life were accepting and loving. In all of them, my eyes were immediately drawn towards the men. Although I could never admit it, those mean boys hurt me and I thought in gay porn, I could be healed.Īs a boy, I owned a fairly prodigious porn collection that I had acquired by stealing magazines from a local store or from my older brother, or taking the discarded copies out of the men’s lavatory at my father’s business. In a sense, after years of being either ignored or mercilessly teased by other boys, and thus adoring and hating them from afar, when I saw the men in pornography, I thought I had finally found acceptance. As a lonely and rejected little boy, my first discovery of gay pornography felt like a miracle.