WARNING: Graphic Content ahead!
I wrote this story when I was 18, reflecting on an event that had happened two years prior. Now that sexual assault is a big issue in the news, I felt it was time to revisit that story. I didn't think I would ever tell it, and still i've only told a few people all of it, but this is that story. I didn't want to rewrite it, so here it is coming from an 18 year-old perspective: I do have something I know that I ultimately have to get off of my chest. It's something I've only told a few individuals and my parents aren't even included in this list. It's a story that shames me, something that I hate to admit to myself that ever happened. To this day I still can not believe I let it happen. Enough foreshadowing. Today I sit here writing these words knowing that I have to tell this story; that I have to put it on paper with hopes that one day someone will read it and be able to relate to my words and hopefully what I have to say will help them with their own experiences. The truth is, I am a survivor of sexual abuse. Damn. Those seven words are just script on a screen now and if someone else is reading this, that means it's ink on a page. That's all it is. I don't know how to put those words into more than just that sentence because in all honesty, it's impossible to explain all of the feelings inside my head; the shame, the fear and the hurt. Though, now I do hope that I am able to just leave all of my thoughts in this chapter and that afterward it will just be words on a page, something that I can let go of. I am a survivor. It's ironic because I never thought I was surviving anything. I thought, and still do think, that a little piece of me died that day when he took the one thing from me that I will never be able to get back. The man took my virginity and I just let him have it. It isn't until now, when I am much older, that I realize that was something that could be taken from me. I believed it was actually something that I had given away and I blamed myself for the entire ordeal taking place. I mean, I talked to him. I agreed to go to his house. I removed my own clothing that day. I believed that it was something I was giving away and that I was at fault if I regretted it. However, that isn't the entire story. I did text him that day. I did tell him I was a 17 year-old boy and that I was curious about sex. I did tell him that I thought I might be gay and that I wondered if it was something I could experiment with. I did tell him that I appreciated when he said I was cute and that he wanted me. I liked it. I felt good that for once since getting out of my first relationship that someone was expressing interest in me. I didn't care about the age gap. I still don't know to this day how old he was. Late thirties? Early forties? I don't know if I will ever know. I don't know a lot of things about this man. I don't know what his sexual history is like, I don't know if he had a family, a spouse or people who loved him. I don't even know for certain what his name is. If I strain to remember, it might have been Mark however, that may also just be the name that I made up to refer to him for the past two years. You see, I didn't know the man. I met him that day online when I was feeling low and wanted the company. Maybe it is my fault for deciding to meet up with a stranger. Maybe I should have been a smart teenager, but who has ever heard of one of those? The fact of the matter is that I did meet up with Mark. I did talk to him and tell him that I had never done anything with a man before, with anyone in fact. I told him that I was feeling lonely and he said nice things to me. He told me that, if I wanted we could get in that back seat and “fool around.” I said yes. He told me that, as he put his hand on my chest, I was attractive and that he was excited about meeting a nice guy like myself. I like that. He asked if I wanted him to go a little farther. I said yes. He put his hands on my leg and then my crotch and soon was unbuttoning my pants and for the first time I was experiencing anyone touching me like that. Then I was experiencing for the first time oral sex. Of course I like it, I was a teenage boy. I was nervous, sure. We were in a gas station parking lot for god's sake. He raised his head and looked at me smiling. He asked if I liked it and I said yes. He told me that the back of his car was pretty small and said that it might be better to go back to his place. I as hesitant, but what could be the harm. Sure, I knew that I could be hurt. I knew that I could be making the biggest mistake of my life. But I said yes. We drove to his house and I silently regretted my decision, but I wasn't going to tell this man that I was scared. He was twice my age and I didn't want to be the pussy teenage boy that he got mad at for wasting his time. So I sat in his passenger seat silent. When we got to his place, which seemed like it had taken an eternity to get to, we went inside and he showed me around. A couch, a kitchen, a bathroom. His bedroom. It was dark and we went inside and he opened the curtain just slightly so that I could see outside and into the driveway where his car was parked. I knew that if I never left this house and that was the last thing I saw, my chariot into his home, the only hope of leaving, then I would be living in perfect irony. Nobody would find me. I didn't tell anyone I was meeting this man. I couldn't tell anyone. I was in the closet and christian so there was no one to tell who wouldn't be angry at me for being so promiscuous and be angry at me for being gay. No one would no what happened to me. So I sat on his bed and decide that if I kept him happy, I'd be leaving and I might just make myself a little happier in the meantime. I sat on the bed and he sat next to me. I don't remember what he said exactly but I'm sure it was as charming as, “why don't you let me see a little more of you.” I know how disgusting that sounds now after experiencing more of life and actually having decent experiences with sex, but at the time I just went with it and we undressed ourselves. For literature’s sake I could spend a paragraph describing what he looked like and turn this into a “Fifty Shades of Grey”-esque chapter, but for my own sake, and even any readers, he was old, Mexican and averagely endowed. I was a fatty teenage boy who was shy and completely awkward considering this was the first time I had ever been completely naked with someone. Mind you, I was home-schooled throughout middle school and spared that ever embarrassing locker room scene in my life until a much later age. From here on I am ashamed of the events that transpired. I wish I had don something, anything differently and that I wouldn’t have gone on to lose my virginity to a man who I struggle to even remember his real name. It was a Saturday in February. We were both naked and we started by lying next to each other on the bed. I guess that was something I was okay with. I always have been a sucker for “romance” and cuddling has always been my biggest turn on. That said, this was in no way romantic. He quickly got to what I imagine he may have done multiple times with different people on that same bed before me. I closed my eyes and figured if anything, this could just be pleasure and that would be the end of it. That's what I wanted anyways, right? Pleasure? I know for a fact it isn't. I wanted someone to replace the empty feeling I had for the only person to have ever broken my heart at that point. I wanted someone to make up for the loneliness I was feeling and this man was not that person. I grabbed him at his shoulders and gently pulled him up off of me. I told him I wasn't really into what was happening and that I was hoping he would take me back to my car. He assured me that everything was alright and that I just needed to get comfortable. He told me to go down on him. To pleasure him. He told me that it was polite to reciprocate what he had already given me. I wasn't so sure. I had never done anything like it. He put his hand on my head and raised his crotch up to my face. I didn't want to but I knew I had to. I stopped after only a second. This is the one thing that in the last two years I have /been called a prude for. When I tell people I don't enjoy giving oral, most have said that I just need to suck it up or that I am a wimp for it but it all goes back to this moment honestly. I hate the feeling of reliving this moment. I slid back up the bed but he grabbed my waist and told me to fuck him. This is the reason I never thought of myself as a victim. He didn't force himself on me, but he did psychologically have an advantage and he knew it. I felt like I had to please him. I didn't know if I’d leave his house otherwise. So we went all the way. I lost my virginity to him and it has been my biggest regret ever since. I was scared at that moment. I was the only one besides him to know that this had happened. What if he told someone? What if my parents found out? What if I got a disease? He didn't have a condom. I didn't even know to ask. So many thoughts were running through out my head in this moment and I had to be strong. I didn't want to seem weak in front of him. There was a mirror in his bedroom and it was positioned right next to the bed. Of course it was. I can still vividly see myself in that moment, naked and hunched over his body. I can remember every detail of it, including my face. I was ashamed even as it happened. Finally I got up and started to dress and we said nothing the entire drive back to my car. After he dropped me off and had driven out of sight, I sat in my car alone and embarrassed. Like most pivotal moments in my life, I turned on music to try and escape to another place. This had always been my tactic. It was that moment that I started to cry. I cried as the music started playing. I'm not sure entirely if it was the song that was playing that caused the emotion, or if the song was just the perfect soundtrack to all of the emotions I was already feeling. Just a few months earlier “Artpop” the fourth studio album from Lady Gaga had been released and this was the album I blasted when I was in my car alone. There were plenty of care free party songs and great tunes to make me happy, but on that day, the song that was playing as I cried in my car was a ballad. A love song entitled “Dope.” I sat in the gas station parking lot bawling. Hot tears fell down my face for the entire four minute length of the song. I didn't move the car as it played. I was surprised, baffled even, at what I had done. I was supposed to save myself till marriage. I was supposed to save myself for a nice Christian girl. I knew neither of these things were actually any type of goal for me, but I did want my first experience to be with someone I cared about. Someone I could say I loved. Someone like the person in the song that was playing. But that was all over. I couldn't take back what I did. So I started my engine and drove to the only place I could go. Home.
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Being gay is a strange and ever-changing thing. Sometimes I feel as if I was dropped into a culture that I never wanted to be a part of and now must constantly keep up appearance just to save face. As if gay sex and dating isn’t hard enough we have to deal with coming out, homophobia, elitism in the community, racism, stereotyping, and fat-shaming. It’s one thing if being gay was just about liking dick or thinking that facial hair was hot, but it isn’t. It’s so much more. One of the hardest things I had to deal with upon coming out was losing my sense of community.
First, it was my family. Although to this day I remain in contact with my family it will never be as it was when I was younger and straighter. When I came out it took years for my parents to come to terms with my news. Once I had gotten into a huge fight with my mother over the situation that after I told her that I loved her, she hung up on me. To this day that remains one of the most emotional moments in my life, that my own mother couldn’t tell me she loved me. So, I had to learn to live without them. When I got engaged and married my husband it seemed as if this was a relief for my parents. I was now somebody else’s problem. I know this isn’t the case and they’d deny it, but I don’t ask them for help and I hardly ever have. Part of this is because our lives are so separate now. It’s even weirder to think that I am now supposed to make my own family as if I haven’t already lost a great one. Even on social media I will see my grandma, my aunts, or my siblings post statuses about their lives and I feel so far away. It’s almost as if they see me as a different person now. I guess I am. The second community I lost was inside my church. I was excommunicated and left the LDS church at 19 because I was openly gay. Religion was so important to me growing up that learning to live without it has been almost impossible. It feels as if I lost my place in the universe. I lost friends and mentors too. It seemed as if this one decision had put me on a path that competed with everyone who was already in my life. The new people weren’t always so great either. The gay community is much more of a high school faction than an actual community. We have the jocks, the cheerleaders, the plastics, the drama queens, and the twinks. If you’re buff then you’re a “jock” and if you’re lean then you’re a “twink”. If you aren’t fit then you’re an “otter” but if you’re not lanky enough you become an “average” joe. Suddenly if your pecs aren’t as defined you turn into a “daddy” and if you get too hairy you become a “bear.” It’s almost as if being gay is like a videogame and coming out is like the “start screen” which then leads to picking your avatar and going on a bunch of quests. Apparently, I’m a bear, and that’s what the nice people call me, because I’m overweight but I’m technically not hairy enough to be called this, nor do I like these labels. Figuring out where I belong has been torturous at times. I’m too effeminate to be with the guys. I’m too open-minded to be with the liberals. Even people who are exactly like me can’t relate because they are too busy finding their own place in this world. For now, I just sit at home and watch Netflix while I try to make this marriage life work. It’s easy for the most part, but sometimes I wonder if it’s just a purgatory with no advancements. I can’t have kids and move my future along. I can’t go back. I’m just stuck here longing for everyone else’s communities. I’ve always found peanut butter sandwiches to be a comfort food. I used to come home from school and have a sandwich and a tall glass of milk while I watched the afternoon cartoons. My father was the same way. He would come home from work and often the first thing he would do is make himself a snack. His favorite kind of sandwich was peanut butter and honey and I think all the honey he ate is what lead to him to get sweeter over the years. My mom on the other hand always loved mustard with her peanut butter. Whether her version of the snack influenced her personality is still a matter of debate but I can honestly say sometimes I was more scared of her than my dad. The biggest trial in my childhood was choosing whether to put honey, mustard, or either grape and strawberry jam on my sandwich. I even found myself splitting the sandwich into four sections and combining a little bit of everything on the bread so that I could have everything I wanted. Today, I still come home from work and make myself a peanut butter sandwich but over the years I’ve grown accustomed to the bitter taste of mustard complimenting the peanut butter. This ritual is one of three things that has always stayed constant in my life.
The second thing that has always remained the same as I’ve grown older is my love for superheroes. As a kid, I would watch cartoons that featured my favorite heroes or I’d spend hours in my room reading my newest comics. Luckily for me, as I’ve grown older the superhero renaissance really started to take off. Due to this renewal of mythos, I felt as if the world still had so much to offer and that good people always triumph over the trials in their life. To this day I’m still a hopeless romantic when it comes to a man in tights fighting for justice. Throughout my twenties, I had a wide variety of friends that ranged from potheads and party-goers to republicans and church-goers. My contact list was incredibly diverse and it wasn’t a surprise when one of my safer, more responsible, friends hit me up to check out Marvel Universe Live, an elaborately costumed “Disney on Ice-esque” performance starring some of the most popular superheroes at the time and was typically meant for kids 12 and under. Of course I wanted to go because I was a hopeless nerd hoping for a chance to take a peek at Starlord’s phaser. Eventually the night came and went and the performance was a blast. My little group enjoyed a hulking dose of wholesome entertainment that only a Disney production could provide. There were pyrotechnics and motorcycle stunts and heroes swinging all around the stage on wires doing kicks and flips. At the end, the good guys won and the heroes saved the day. We were feeling happy and delighted, the type of felling one might get from putting four different flavors on a peanut butter sandwich. Then we got to the parking lot. As much as we may wish for life to be as wonderful as the two-hour performance we had just seen, life has a twisted sense of humor. We searched up and down the aisles of the parking lot with my keys up in the air frantically pushing the “lock” button on the key pad hoping to hear the little “beep beep” noise that my car always made when I had lost it. It was hopeless though because we had realized the car was gone. Now, a lot of thoughts went through my head including wondering if the Green Goblin had swooped in to hijack the car, however that didn’t make sense since the goblin rides on a cool flying skateboard type thing and this type of crime seemed below him. Also, he wasn’t real. The true threat of the night was much more sinister and unforgiving. My car had been towed away and was being held ransom at an impound lot. The third thing to remain constant in my life is my response to bad situations. I am always hit with a mixture of anger and sadness and I tend to get quiet in bad situations. As we searched for an Uber and got a ride to the impound lot I was quiet, contemplating what I might be able to say to the villain who had stolen my baby. A bunch of curse words and $240 later we had rescued my car from the evil tow-man’s clutches and we were on our way home. No, good things don’t always happen to good people and sometimes no amount of fighting will change the course of events that we wish we could change. Sometimes we must realize that life is a lot like a peanut butter sandwich. We can try as hard as we want to turn mustard into honey but a bitter situation doesn’t have a sweet taste however, even a bitter sandwich can still taste good. As we drove home we made a list of all the good things that had happened that night. We realized that it was a good thing that we had the money on us to pay to get the car back. We talked about how we had just seen a great performance and how we were lucky to have gas to get back home. No, this wasn’t a sweet situation but it wasn’t all bad either. I felt like a kid again that night as I went from excited to despair. Once we rounded the corner to my street and pulled the car into the driveway I sighed and accepted that bad things happen to good people. I got out of the car and locked the doors behind me as I went inside, reached into the cupboard and found the bread. After this stressful day, I was going to need a peanut butter sandwich. My name is Erick and I am an entertainment junkie. It all started just before the turn of the century when my parents loaded up their car with me, my siblings, my grandparents, and a few cousins and took us to the movies. This car wasn’t a car but rather it was a box on wheels, the type that most pedophiles would drive and it could hold a significant amount of people. I remember this detail not because as a two-year old I was concerned with proper seatbelt safety, but rather because the first movie I can remember watching was screened at a drive-in theatre. For the younger readers, there once was a time when, to see a movie, a family had to leave their house and journey to wherever they were screening the film. In the 90’s a drive-in movie had one flat cost per vehicle, no matter how many cousins were squished in the back seat. So, in the year 1999, I sat on my parents lap and watched Disney’s Tarzan.
Flash forward to now and I am addicted to many different mediums, searching for entertainment. It can be said that in 2017 any exploration of the world ends at a person’s doorstep but I couldn’t disagree more. Numerous times have I been taken on a journey to a far-away land without leaving my couch. I’ve explored Skull Island with Kong and the galaxy with Star-Lord. I’ve gone to Atlantis and Mars and I continue to explore every day. Some of my greatest adventures have come in the form of musicals. In fact, one of my favorite musicals is an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Misérables. In this musical, a thief named Jean Valjean starts a new life by avoiding his parole and his story leads us through a wonderful cast of characters during the French Revolution. I learned from the protagonist that we all must face ourselves one day and have a “Jean Valjean moment.” That is, a moment in one’s existence where they ask themselves “who am I” and “what am I doing” to rise from the predicaments they have put themselves in. In my life, I have had a series of J.V. moments. One of the most notable times I had to ask, “who am I” was the summer I gave my first blowjob. As a writer, I have learned not to lead with such allegories that may be deemed inappropriate by a general audience, however I also stated early on that one of my favorite musicals has a thief, brothel-owners, a prostitute, and a lot of premature death so keep in mind that no subject is off the table in my story. So, it was the summer before my senior year of high school and I was feeling rebellious. A friend and I had gotten pretty good at staying out late and offering sex in exchange for gas money and food. Yes, we were underage and yes, we could technically be considered prostitutes, but for all intents and purposes so far, I had just played the part of the pimp with my friend (who we will call Gale) doing the dirty work. This changed when we were 60 miles from home, with almost an empty tank of gas, and Gale decided she didn’t want to have sex with any more guys. Suddenly, I was going to have to get into the game. At this time, I was still considering myself a bisexual man and I had come out to Gale only because she is the type of friend that likes sex and drugs and you must too in order to hang with her. I was desperate for friends at 17 and one thing lead to another and suddenly here I was soliciting sex for money. For anyone who knows anything about Craigslist personal ads, they may know it’s usually only guys who post them. No woman is stupid enough to put themselves in danger with a sex-driven stranger so we found a guy and we made a deal and decided that I would be giving him a blow job for 20 bucks. I wasn’t prepared for what I got caught up in emotionally. Gale was in the back seat of the man’s car and he had decided he wanted to make out with her while I did the other work. He leaned his seat back and unzipped his pants and for the first time I was putting a penis inside my mouth. No, I wasn’t sure I was gay and no, I did not enjoy doing it contrary to what many people would assume about a gay man. It was seven a.m. after a long night of being out with Gale. I remember the time because while she was sucking the man’s face, his alarm kept going off every five minutes. I can’t look at Lorde’s song “Tennis Court” the same way because that was exactly the tune that was playing while I was at one of my lowest points. It was almost a half an hour later and this guy just couldn’t get off so eventually he paid us the money and admitted he was late for work. We parted ways, I filled up the gas tank, and Gale and I were on our way home. In the car, we sat mostly quiet for almost an hour. At this point I was more confused with who I was than just 24 hours ago. “Who am I?” I wondered. I was about to go home and sneak into my room where my parents assumed I had been the entire night. I was a lying to myself and to others but I wasn’t sure how to change who I was during that time. When I got up to my room and into my bed I decided that I was done doing anything to seem cool. I decided that I had one year left before I had to face the real world, and I was going to be my best self. I didn’t figure out who I was in that moment, nor do I think Jean Valjean only had one moment of self-realization in his own life. What was important to me was that I was going to change the path I was on and become better. I pulled up my blankets and turned on the music on my phone. “You’ll Be in My Heart” from Disney’s Tarzan was the song of choice that morning. I always wanted to be better at keeping a journal. I think at a young age I already knew that just regurgitating what I did that day was boring and nobody would read it. See, I always wrote with the intention that someone would read what I put on the paper, whether it was because I had published it myself or because I died and my children and grandchildren were reading what I had written. I owed it to them to write solid content. So that’s why 12-year old Erick started to write his own autobiography. Flash forward almost a decade later and that’s exactly what I’m here to do again.
By the time I’m popular enough that some publisher cares to print my story, I will have already forgotten most of it or heaven forbid, I died without being able to tell it. So being in my twenties I decided now was the best time to rehash what I wrote when I was 12 and expand what happened to me in the last two decades and narrate what will happen in “the best years of my youth.” When I’m thirty I want to be able to look back and say that I have a story for every topic that could possibly be discussed. I want the stories to be honest and pure and stand up for themselves. I have met about million people in my lifetime and each one has contributed to this story. Going forward, these personal essays won’t always be chronological and the characters won’t always go by a real name, but the events and meat of the history will always be truthful to real life. Fiction has a place and a time but there’s nothing like real life. It can’t be duplicated and is unique to everyone. Some may ask, “why do you write about yourself, won’t you look back and be embarrassed by what you said or did?” Truthfully, no. I don’t have any regrets in my life and the stories that I share always have meaning to me and hopefully to someone else too. So welcome to what I call 90’s nostalgia for gay men or “Gameboys and Gay boys.” |
Erick L. Graham Wood
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