More of me, Anatole: My Personal Experience of Innate, Essential (Femininity and) Masculinity, and incidentally, Rape, in Men

I had been a macho gay eleven-year-old, after hitting puberty late in my tenth year--the kind that worshipped strong handsome men, and that detested girls, and didn't kiss them but still made them cry. By the time I was thirteen, awareness of the opprobrium which attached to my normal-for-me gay sexuality, plus the redoubled surges of testosterone natural at my advanced stage of puberty, were turning me into an introverted, hyper-masculine monster, hell-bent on having sex with a man.  I knew of only one (flamboyantly effeminate) man, a cousin, Lester, some eight years older than I, whom I was pretty sure I could corner and, if necessary, browbeat or blackmail into having sex with me.  And, one fine, hot July day, just before harvest, in the middle of a patch of tall weeds behind an abandoned cow shed, I virtually tripped him and beat him to the ground.  And it was awful.  Cousin Lester was a young man in external appearance, muscular-from-farm-work, super well-endowed (a good 9 inches) and uncircumcised, and even handsome (when he kept his mouth shut)--but as effeminate as a little girl. Sex with him was, for me--like shooting fish in a barrel, or stealing candy from a baby--an act of molestation. For all his having between his legs a membrum virilis of a size that boys dream of, at his heart, and in his slightly retarded mind, he was nothing but a flaming, silly sissy, or mere girl. I was as sick to my stomach afterwards with searing, remorseful disgust as if I'd  been having vaginal (or anal) sex with, say, Loretta Young or Elsie the Borden Cow.

I avoided cousin Lester for a couple of years after that.  Then, when I was fifteen, came word that he'd been killed in a car accident, and, as cousins did in those days I went to his (open casket, neck visibly broken) funeral--my impression, viewing the remains, was that, for all the embalmer's art, he still looked like a simpering, nelly queen.  His older sister, overcome with grief, fell weeping into my mother's arms, saying, "Lester was so sweet!"  It shocked me a little that she knew that, but I thought to myself, "Yes.  In fact, 'sweet' was all he was."





Skipping forward seven years--an immense span when one is young--bypassing the first time in Spokane, when, as a 19-year-old, I first had real man-to-man sex with a virile  30-year-old construction worker who came up to my specs (muscular, hung, uncircumcised, chiseled good looks, butch as a Stag at Eve), and whose specs I came up to; and going beyond those edifying occasions later, when I was  20 years old, in Paris, where I saw, with utter amazement, disbelief and horror, my first drag queen (in the bar of the Moulin Rouge), and where I was once robbed at knife-point and then ruthlessly fucked, or, if you will, raped, by a horse-hung, god-like-beautiful Portuguese pimp (thug or voyou) a couple of years older than I, in a coupe-gorge just off the Place Pigalle, who so liked my liking his raping me, as well as he liked raping me, that he gave me half the money that he had just stolen from me back--to an illuminating encounter which occurred late one evening (or early one morning) in San Francisco, shortly after I had first arrived there on my own, at the age of one and twenty:

2:00 a.m. closing time in the Blue and Gold.  Being a little drunk, and the bar being dimly lit, there were several things I didn't notice about the young fellow about my age who put his hand in my pants when Last Call was announced, and invited me to come home with him:  He was wearing lipstick and eye makeup--and when we got to his place a couple of blocks away and he took off his jacket, I was nearly asphyxiated in a cloud of women's perfume.  Still, having got that far, and pretending to be somewhat drunker than I was--and I remember thinking then that maybe, when we both got hard, he'd start acting more masculine--but it got worse instead of better.  As he started taking his clothes off, the stench of civet-based perfume got stronger and stronger--It was getting on my clothes.  He unzipped my pants, pulled down my shorts, and leaned over as if to kiss my dick with those ghastly, greasy rouged lips--And that was it.  I pushed him away roughly, yanked my pants back up, and ran out and down the stairs, followed by his (ïts) mingled moans, squeals and curses. Once back in my apartment, I stood under the shower for more than an hour to get the sickening stink of perfume off me.  I still shudder to this day, to think that I came that close to getting lipstick on my penis.