“I was on my way home from school one afternoon and these two high school boys, I suppose they were fifteen or sixteen, started walking along with me and talking about me. ‘Isn’t it cute? Is it a boy or a girl?’ Obviously I wasn’t cross-dressing or making up, but I was naturally effeminate in behavior and, hell, I looked like a girl. ‘What’s your name, sweetie?’ They knew my name, but I said it was Brendan, and of course they called me Brenda.
“I was excited that they were paying attention to me.
“Then one of them told the other that they could have some fun with me, that I was the same thing as a girl. I was totally ignorant about sex at the time, just incredibly ignorant. But I was wildly excited without knowing what I was excited about. They asked me to come for a walk with them and I did. We walked on out of town and they went on teasing me and talking about blow jobs, which was an expression I had heard, but didn’t begin to understand.
“We wound up in a wooded area on the edge of town. They told me to take my clothes off and I refused. If I knew nothing else, I knew nudity was taboo. They forced me. I put up a token struggle, but, actually I was thrilled to the core and enjoyed being forced this way. That element of masochism, incidentally, has long since vanished. I like a man to be masculine but I don’t enjoy being overpowered. As a matter of fact, it’s very important to me that I be the one who does the seducing...
“They made a big thing about my penis. ‘Look, he’s got one after all! I guess he’s a boy after all! But it’s so small it hardly counts.’ That kind of thing. Of course it was small, I was twelve years old and undeveloped and hairless. It’s grown somewhat since then, lover, in case you were wondering.
“They dropped their pants and I blew them. Sucked them off. They had obviously experienced this before; though whether it was with girls or other boys or even with each other I have no idea. I didn’t like the act itself. There was an odor that disturbed me, perhaps because I associated it with uncleanliness. I had always been scrupulously clean, fastidious. But I was enormously impressed with the size of their cocks. The only cock I was familiar with was my own, and it was a puny thing in comparison. For the longest time afterward I thought that the relative size of my cock was an indication of my femaleness, that because I had a tiny one I was halfway between being a boy and a girl.
“The ejaculation surprised the hell out of me. I gather a lot of people throw up the first time. I didn’t, but kept spitting, and when I got home I must have brushed my teeth and gargled for hours on end. Ah, how tastes change!
“Afterward, they asked me if I knew how to jerk off, and I again didn’t know what they meant, although again I had heard the expression. One of them played with my balls and said he didn’t think there was enough there to work with, and then he began playing with my penis and wonder of wonders, it got hard. Still tiny, but hard, and what an exciting sensation! I had the first orgasm of my young life. The one who did it told the other one that I was fun to play with, and the second one tried it, but I couldn’t get aroused a second time. They wanted to do other things, I don’t remember what, but I said I had to get home, and home I went. Later that night I jerked myself off with a piece of fur and thought about being a girl and imagined having a huge stiff cock in my mouth.”
Over the next few years, Brendan continued to have relations with those boys and a great many others. Most of the time he performed fellatio upon them, and occasionally served as a passive partner in anal intercourse. “I got a certain degree of pleasure from this right from the beginning,” he said, “but it was a long time before I learned how to enjoy it completely, to the point where I could get a pleasure from it equivalent to what a woman experiences when she gets fucked.”
Quite often his partners would bring him to a climax manually, and some of them performed fellatio on him in return, while a smaller number wanted him to sodomize them.
“It was a long time understanding this. I was completely into this either/or thing, male or female, and I thought they would prefer to relate to me as to a girl and ignore my penis entirely. Which of course a great many of them did, wanting me to leave my clothes on completely and just go on down there and blow them. But I’ve since realized that they responded both to my girlishness and to my maleness.
“You might think that this was partly because some of them at that time were genuinely gay, or bisexual if you prefer. Or that they were young with their sexual preferences incompletely formed and thus open to experiment. You know, the old concept of the child as a polymorphous pervert who can get off on anything that feels good, until social standards and role development teach him just what he may and may not find exciting.
“Not true. Not the whole story, anyway. Because I have gone to bed with any number of men who consider themselves wholly masculine and exclusively heterosexual and who will say to me that they can dig me because I am feminine, and that they could not possibly get interested in an ordinary faggot. And I’m sure they quite honestly believe this. But answer me this. If that’s so, why do they always want my cock? They may not go down on me necessarily but almost invariably they have to touch me, they have to play with me. Realizing this helped me realize that I wanted to keep my cock. It wasn’t the only factor, but it was important.”
And, in a later conversation on this theme, “I’ll tell you what it is. Everybody not only starts life as a polymorphous pervert, but everybody stays that way. Forever. And the defenses you throw up along the way to rule out certain sexual acts never get rid of the underlying desire. So every man, however straight he may think he is, has an urge somewhere inside himself to play with another man’s cock, to take it in his mouth, to get buggered. But he buries it so deep he doesn’t even know it’s there, and he can never recognize another man as a sex object.
“All right. Now when a man buries this deeply enough, he’s what we call heterosexual. Exclusively heterosexual. So then suppose he meets me, and he finds himself capable of regarding me as a girl. A girl who happens to wear a cock, but a girl. A girl who walks like a girl and talks like a girl and probably knows more about making effective sexual overtures than any girl he ever met. He says to himself, well, this thing may have a cock on it but it’s still a girl, and thus I can ball it without compromising my manhood, my heterosexuality. I can just lie there and let this ‘girl’ blow me, and what’s so faggy about that?
“At which point we go somewhere and go to bed, and believe me, I’m sensational. Nobody ever complains. And after he comes he looks in his mental mirror and realizes that he’s still the man he always was, that he’s no rotten creepy faggot, for Christ’s sake. And if he just balled me, and he’s not a faggot, then I’m not a man, right? Which means he can do anything he wants with me and it won’t count. It won’t reflect on that manhood of his.
“And the next thing you know he’s got my cock halfway down his throat and he’s so excited by the whole thing that you wouldn’t believe it—”
Brendan first began cross-dressing shortly before his sixteenth birthday. He took a bus to Albany, bought several female garments, and changed in a men’s room.
“Talk about panic scenes! I was all changed and made up when I realized I had to walk out of there and everybody would see this girl heading out of a men’s room. I just got my courage up and walked out of there with my face burning. I suppose I must have drawn some stares but nobody bothered me. After that I used to take a hotel room for three dollars just to have a place to change my clothes. I could afford it. I was getting money now and then from boys I went with in my hometown. Just small change. A quarter or fifty cents or a dollar. I wasn’t actually whoring. Someone would put a make on me and I would be reluctant and they would bribe me with the money. It’s fairly obvious why I liked taking the money. You know, proof that I was desirable.