Notes on Love and Life: How It All Began
Looking back at more than six decades of discovery, starting with my first awareness of sexuality in 1950s Atlantic City.
This is the first part in a four-part series of essays by Howard N. Fox.
Next Up »Read Part 2: “A Port in the Storm”
Part 3: “Our Success Story—Despite the Odds”
Part 4: “Rounding Third Base”
I’ve been in a monogamous relationship with my partner Douglas Messerli since we met on February 4, 1970, at an early gay liberation meeting. “Liberation’” was the terminology denoting any progressive cause in those counter-culture days during the Vietnam War, when young men were burning their draft cards and women were burning their bras, and the sexual revolution was burgeoning throughout the Baby Boomer generation. He and I were both at the University of Wisconsin, Madison when the campuses of Berkeley, Madison, and Columbia were the triple foci of “revolutionary” radicalism.
Douglas and I had been together for 44 years when we got legally married in the Beverly Hills courthouse on November 23, 2013, taking our friends Diana and John, our witnesses, to a nice lunch after the brief solemnization of our relationship. This was during a window when same-sex couples had the freedom to marry in California, since the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in Hollingsworth v. Perry, thus invalidating Prop. 8. Then, after the Obergefell v. Hodges case in 2015, it became legal across the entire United States.
Douglas’s and my youthful flings are quaint yet still worth-remembering. Today, with both of us in our late seventies, our life remains good, wholesome (except for a predilection for day drinking), and productive. More on all that later, as I’ll relate in our four-part mini-saga for The Queer Love Project. For the moment, I’ll reflect that my path down this now lifelong and satisfying sexual orientation was ignited, however inchoately, one morning when I was about nine years old, in a way that was innocent and a lot of fun. Many people these days may not understand (or prefer to un-understand) that many peoples’ discovery of their sexuality begins during their childhood, despite it being true.
As a kid, I grew up in the early 1950s in Atlantic City—long before the days of gambling, and even longer before the days of the economic failure of the casinos—when its citizens still envisioned the town as a respectable, if somewhat aging and indeed old-fashioned, family summer resort. We enjoyed the clean and well-maintained beach, dowdy grand hotels lining the Boardwalk, and faintly tawdry amusement piers and inane souvenir shops. And there were the winter stagnations when much of the Boardwalk was shuttered in hibernation mode—a sense of abandonment ameliorated at the residential end of the island where my family lived. Year-round, it evoked a pretty normal image of many an American small town: corner grocery stores, neighborhood mom-and-pop businesses, stately old brick elementary schools, and churches and synagogues sprinkled throughout. Lucy the Elephant—the residential end of the island’s world-famous piece of fantasy architecture, whose interior spaces were accessed via a stairwell buried within a hind leg of the behemoth—was just a short bike ride from my family’s modest but comfortable house. We lived in an English-style stucco cottage with a green terra-cotta roof, just like all the other houses in Margate, Ventnor, and Longport: all bedroom communities fancifully named after small seaside towns in England.
I spent my first 12 years on this skinny island, more slender and shorter than Manhattan, that nonetheless boasted a palpable urban metropolis feel on its famous northeast end and a small-town Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet zeitgeist on our southern neck of the woods, from whence I often bicycled to our urban uptown. I grew up understanding both of these stereotypical visions of American cities from their representation on television shows (black-and-white only in those days) and from the myriad kiddie-matinee movies that I attended every Saturday afternoon for 25₵ at the Margate Theater about three blocks from our house on Exeter Avenue (another fanciful English place name appropriation in our community). I spent my grade-school years believing that I enjoyed all of the ideals of American life – urban sophistication and polish, married with small-town neighborhoods and homey likeability – as my day-to-day reality, forever assuring and always reliable.
My older cousin Joel (perhaps two or three years older than I) used to come to visit from Baltimore during the summer months when the city was hopping with tourists and touristy amusements. We shared my double bed during his visits. One summer morning, when my father was at work at his Atlantic City Boardwalk costume jewelry store and my mother was out of the house shopping, Joel and I found ourselves—he maybe 11 or 12 years old and I maybe 8 or 9—lying in bed in our underwear. I was wearing what we now sometimes call “tighty-whities” (aka briefs), while he was wearing older-style pale blue boxers, like our fathers used to wear in those days.
There we were in bed, Joel and I, almost naked. Neither of us knew about sex. (Maybe Joel was beginning to become aware of it, but I certainly had no concept whatever of it.) I do recall getting little boyhood erections starting at about six years of age and having no comprehension of why, or what it meant; it was just a strange bodily happenstance, like hiccups. Of course, at about the same age, I began to develop an interest in my own body and in my friends’ bodies. A few times my best friend Gary and I, both around age five or six, would pee together into the toilet “crossing swords” with our urine streams as we did so, and enjoying that we could and did. On a couple of other occasions, a friend or two and I would hide ourselves in my bedroom closet and “show tussies”—our butts and assholes—to one another. It was all innocent enough, but once we got caught by our parents, who were visiting downstairs in the living room and, although they did not punish us, they soundly admonished us never to do it again. (Hah!)
Yet this one morning in Margate with the parents out of the house and Joel and I improbably in bed together in only our underwear in mid-morning, we started to wonder about our bodies, regarding them as sources of mystery. Not simply as the skin and musculature and innards that made us just like cats and dogs and birds and insects yet visibly highly different from them—that all was obvious enough to us even as kids. Curious about ourselves, we decided to take off our underpants. As we lay there, Joel’s hairless (or nearly hairless) dick miraculously stood up. Mine didn’t. But I wanted to touch his. So I did. I don’t recall that Joel touched mine, but I was intensely curious about his. I don’t think either of us really knew what to make of it all. Yet there we were in my boyhood bed—my only personal space in the house I grew up in—two young boys naked and really curious about each other’s body.
I don’t remember how or why the next thing happened—no rational reason whatever! But I suddenly decided I wanted to put Joel’s penis in my mouth. WHAT!!!??? That made no sense! WHY!!!??? That’s where your pee comes out. I never wanted to put Gary’s pee-pee in my mouth! What’s going on?
And yet, at that moment, it made all the sense in my own befuddled and confused and exquisitely tempted imagination. Nonetheless, I couldn’t countenance doing such a thing, but I really wanted to….
After a few moments, I discovered a solution: I would go into the bathroom and get a glassine-wrapped gauze pad out of the medicine cabinet and put it over Joel’s dick. Then I could put my mouth over it! I did it. It was a “Band-Aid” fix, but in my young-boy, bad-boy relationship to what I was about to embark upon, that gauze pad did the trick. Such was my first time. Nothing more happened, nor could have happened, to us young boys that day.
The event came and went without further comment. Joel and I jerked off together several times when we were a couple years older, as do many adolescent boys. Joel turned out straight. I didn’t.
But, jeez, do I remember that first blow job. If only I’d known and understood then what it could mean later. Well, I took maybe another four or so years for a second blow job to happen. By then, not simply an incomprehensible yet compelling experiment, but a keen desire (and in a couple of episodes, a mutually pleasurable exchange).
Later on, it happened a lot….
This is the first part in a four-part series of essays by Howard N. Fox. Read Part 2, “A Port in the Storm”
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