Before Meth: Learning about Gay Sex and the “Plumbing” Problem

Slammed: a Memoir — Chapter 3 part 1

Note: Descriptions of sexual situations.

Growing up gay in Montana in the ’90s, I didn’t have a clue about gay sex.

I knew what hetrosexual sex was, at least mechanically. I owe that education to the gold-mine discovery of my dad’s VHS porn collection at 13 years old. Late ’70s, early ’80s — light on plot, big on hair — these videos made blatantly clear what sex was. Of course porn sex isn’t realistic sex but there wasn’t anyone around to explain that to my 13-year-old self.

I realized during one of my secret viewings, with no great lightning-strike astonishment, that the moments I was watching over and over were when the guys, especially the guy’s parts, were most featured.

“Huh,” I think I said before continuing on with my education.

Porn showed me what “sex” was. It also, surprisingly, helped me first realize my sexuality. Yet, past ogling the kibbles and bits of straight male porn actors of varying attractiveness (which seemed to be much more of an option for the men than for the women in these films), I found myself without any real direction.

I knew I was sexually attracted to men, but how exactly would sex work? These porns showed me heterosexual sex and also “lesbian” sex albeit filmed for the straight male gaze.

But between two men?

Then came an incredible moment in my Catholic high school religion class. Eighteen or so teenagers with backpacks and Trapper Keepers, some boys clinging to the fading grunge fad with flannel shirts tied around their waist, some girls rocking the crimped hair, fidgeted in our seats cause the teacher — the religion teacher — was talking about sex. Rather, he was trying to talk sex, homosexual sex, without actually talking about homosexual sex, in the context of it being a sin of course. With his hands raised as if he was trying to fit something together, the best he could come up with was “The…the plumbing…the plumbing is just not…built for that.”

I literally had no fucking idea what he was talking about. Pun very much intended.

I remember eating lunch in the high school cafeteria, looking out the windows into the parking lot, watching an upperclassman footballer carrying his gear to the back of his black Dodge Ram six wheeler. His skin tight football pants clung to his thick legs and round, generous rear. He was shirtless; his broad chest and muscled shoulders glinted as they flexed in the afternoon sun. While my straight classmates stumbled through adolescent relationships and, to varying degrees, explored their sexuality, I seemed to have no other option than to ogle from afar teenage Adonises who would no doubt punch me out if they knew I was devouring them with my eyes. The only thing I could do was use my own Trapper Keeper to keep hidden my inconveniently risen shame.

The idea of actually touching another man seemed impossible.

Still, my young teenage heart longed for connection, for passion. I longed for love. I longed to know I wasn’t alone.

I wanted the passion between Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet, but that kind of star-crossed straight love was distant and unattainable. So I looked toward the same-sex relationships that were allowed to exist in mainstream entertainment. These were almost always relationships between two women, nothing overtly homosexual, existing almost entirely between the lines. Movies like Fried Green Tomatoes, Thelma and Louise, The Color Purple, Boys on the Side.

I longed for similar stories between two men, even if it was only between the lines.

That’s not what I got.

I got And the Band Played On and Philadelphia, where to be in a gay relationship was to die of AIDS or to care for your lover who was dying of AIDS. This was of course a true and painful reality for countless gay men, but for my young gay self in Montana, where the AIDS crisis was something happening far away on a seemingly distant shore, these stories of gay relationships being a traumatic struggle for survival — a struggle often lost — was daunting and disheartening.

I got The Silence of the Lambs. Ted Levine, in a super close up, putting on makeup, talking to himself — “Would you fuck me? I would fuck me.” — before dancing naked for the camera wearing only a colorful flowing shawl and the scalp of a woman he’s murdered, then tucking his junk back and presenting himself full frontal for the camera.

I got Pulp Fiction. Bruce Willis, after escaping the restraints of his white supremacist captors, bursts down a door to find the lead captor raping Ving Rhames over a barrel. After being freed, Rhames takes a shotgun to his rapist’s genitals. This was was my first exposure to gay male sex and — as a horribly gross mischaracterization — any kind of leather/kink/fetish/BDSM lifestyle. So double fucking win there.

I got To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar where it was ok that Patrick Swayze was a drag queen cause he still beats a guy up.

I got The Birdcage where two men, loving parents in a long-term commitment, never even kissed. When I saw it when it was originally released, there was a moment where Nathan Lane and Robin Williams held hands. That’s it. They just held hands. From the row directly behind me came a fully voiced “Gross!”

Sure, Pulp Fiction is just good ol’ wholesome entertainment, but two men holding hands is “gross.”

And can someone please explain what the fuck a palimony agreement is?

Now, to be clear, as an actor I love nearly all these movies, even with their poorly aged glaring flaws. And you can pry The Birdcage and To Wong Fu from my cold dead hands.

But I wasn’t seeing me. I was seeing AIDS and monsters and drag queens, but I wasn’t seeing me.

Harvey Fierstein hit the nail on the head in the documentary on queer visibility in cinema, The Celluloid Closet, when he said “The hunger I felt as a kid looking for gay images was not to be alone.”

Was there queer cinema in the ’90s that told the stories I was longing to see and hear? Absolutely. But in my teenage closet, when the Internet wasn’t really a thing yet, I had no way of knowing it existed, let alone how to find it.

So, when I touched another man for the very first time, I was flying completely blind.

I was sitting on the white living room carpet, my back against wood shelves that held a stereo system. Reid was lying on the floor perpendicular to me, my legs bridging over his waist. You know. Like bros do.

It was the summer of ’95. We were listening — or at least pretending — to listen to music. I don’t remember what was playing, but it might as well have been Deana Carter singing “Strawberry wine and seventeen, the hot July moon saw everything.”

I had met Reid in the spring when we both had auditioned for Billings Studio Theater’s production of Chicago. He had tan skin, apple cheeks, dark eyes that twinkled when he smiled, and hair like Tom Cruise somewhere between Legend and Top Gun. He also had the most silky baritone voice.

The first time I saw him, my immediate thought was “God, I hope he’s gay.”

My fluttering heart went into overdrive when we actually became fast friends. By the time Chicago closed, we were hanging out more and more and, though I didn’t realize at the time (or perhaps wanted to admit), we were absolutely flirting: laughing a little too hard, holding hugs a bit too long, sitting a bit too close when riding in a friend’s back seat. Maybe it should have been Bonnie Raitt’s “Something to Talk About” playing on the stereo.

He placed his hand on my ankle.

I was trying to play it cool while feeling the new sensation of another man’s heat radiate so close to me, another man’s hand on my skin. Neither of us spoke. I’m not even sure we were breathing.

After a few long moments I placed my hand on his chest, my fingers over the seam of his button up shirt. Neither of us were looking at the other.

It was like I was standing on the edge of a high dive. I was holding my breath, looking for the signal to keep going, terrified Reid would suddenly jump up, disgusted, and exclaim “gross” before fleeing.

But he didn’t jump up. He didn’t flee. He stayed right there, under my legs, as his hand began to lightly run up my shin. He was so achingly slow I could feel his hand make contact with each individual hair on my leg.

Still unsure, inching closer to the precipice, I slid my fingers between his shirt buttons and felt his skin. He was warm. My breath was short. His hand found my calf which he clasped more firmly. I undid a couple buttons and my entire hand disappeared underneath his shirt.

It was a slow erotic descent into the unknown. Our exploring hands gave way to exploring mouths and we explored everything. Well, almost everything.

It was awkward. It was exhilarating. It was clumsy. It was overwhelming.

It was wonderful.

Not only was I no longer alone, I was now absolutely shit-faced butt-crazy in love with Reid!

He was my first everything. First touch, first kiss, first love, and eventually first fuck.

For a good month that summer everything was twitterpated and sugar sweet. We both were still tightly sealed behind closet doors, but we had each other.

Until we didn’t.

Reid was my first everything.

But I wasn’t his first anything.

His first everything had been the summer before. A guy named James. The way I was feeling about Reid? That’s how Reid, tragically — especially for me — felt about James. Before I knew it, what had been the volcanic passion between us became unidirectional. Suddenly, I was trying to win back the affection of the only other person who existed while he gazed longingly past our closet doors to someone who wasn’t there. Someone who wasn’t me.

I remember being in the basement, the same basement where I had burnt the paper tulips. He was sitting on the green couch, sullen, wondering aloud “It’s like he doesn’t know I’m here. Like I don’t exist.” And there I was sitting on the floor, my head on his thigh looking up at him like a fucking Labrador, wondering the exact same thing.

So, Reid gave me my first broken heart.

Time marched on, and we remained friends. Good friends even. Good friends who could get on each other’s nerves faster than you can blink and fight about it just as quickly, but good friends nonetheless.

I still had no fucking clue about fucking. I had no gay elder to turn to and it wasn’t like I could look to my parents to tell me about the bees and the bees.

Reid and I had done all the other things two guys can do, and plenty of it, but when it came to actual penetrative sex? We gave it a single stumbling attempt, but the “plumbing” had us…vexed. It seemed like way more trouble than it was worth, so we never tried it again.

The summer of ’97, at 19, I had a short tryst with a 30-something. It was passionate though short lived. I didn’t learn anything new, unfortunately, as he was a top endowed with a hill I wasn’t ready to die on.

That same summer I had an all out affair with a married man in his 40s. He finally showed me what it was for two guys to fuck, learning what it meant when the “plumbing” was cooperative. It was fun for a time, but then it turned, crashed, and burned. Though it was legal, the age difference — along with the fact that he was fucking married — was inappropriate and quite toxic. Add onto that he had some mental health issues that bubbled ferociously to the surface leading him to be surprisingly indiscreet for a man on the downlow. By the end of the summer his wife had divorced him and I had ended the affair.

Homewrecker at 19. Boy can I pick ’em.

That same summer Henry and I met in #gaymontana, an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) room. It was a virtual space for gay men who were tech savvy enough to not have to rely on AOL for all the internet had to offer, limited as it was at the time. Henry lived in Missoula where I was heading in just a couple of months for college. He offered to show me around and help me get acclimated. I found him sweet and kind and took to hanging out with him quite a bit. Hanging out turned into more, and the rest is history.

With Henry, sex was enjoyable, but in hindsight it was kinda basic. With others besides Henry, it was fun but also clumsy.

I didn’t know how to heed the words of Salt-N-Pepa. Even after I started having sex, I didn’t know how to talk about sex. Since there was no real communication, there was no real exploration. It was like I was afraid of revealing that I didn’t know what I was doing, as if it wasn’t painfully obvious by the floundering limbs and nervous laughs and apologies sprinkled throughout any naked times.

There was no “What are you into?”

“Well, I’m into this and that, but I really don’t like it when guys do this thing.”

“Cool, I’ve always been curious about this.”

“That’s hot, yeah, let’s explore that.”

Even though I had fun and got off, it always felt on some level like a sexual improv where everything was funny for the wrong reasons.

Also, I hate improv.

So, in 2003, when I was desperate to fill my tank once again with that mind-blowing jet fuel, this was in spite of the fact that, in truth, I didn’t know how to drive.

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Chapter Guide

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