“Part of it was I’m sure the money. You know, high school. Five or ten bucks a week is a big difference at that age. I would even tell myself that I was making money hustling that I could spend on my girl. Not that I ever told her or anyone else how I got the money.
“But here I was screwing her and still going with queers, and it came to me that I must like it in a particular way or I wouldn’t continue to do it. I couldn’t say that I had to do it for sexual release because that wasn’t true. I did say that it was because I liked to be blown and she never did that to me, but if that was what I wanted I could have said it to her and taught her how to do it. At least I could have tried to do this to get her to blow me, but I never even hinted at it, and she never thought of it by herself. As a matter of fact it probably would have turned me off if she did it all by herself. It would have bothered me that she would think to do this. I was thinking to myself that I would ultimately marry this girl, and I had feelings that for a girl to blow a guy, it was wonderful, but it was also something a decent girl wouldn’t do. I might have wanted a girl to blow me after we were married, or even before, but if she just went ahead and did it on her own initiative it would be like saying that someone had taught her to do this before, and it even bothered me that she had been screwed by other guys and would have bothered me more to know some other guy taught her how to suck him off.
“What it came to was that finally I admitted to myself that I liked it. The sex part, having sex with a man. Not that I liked it when there was nothing else available but that I just plain liked it. Not that I liked it better than sex with a girl necessarily. But that there was something about it that I definitely liked for its own sake and that it made me keep coming back to it
“The fact that I knew this about myself gradually fucked things up with the girl. Not a matter of ‘Hello, I can’t see you anymore because I’m queer.’ But in the way I saw myself. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just know that we gradually broke up because of my attitude, although it happened as just one of those things, that we argued about some stupid thing and broke up.
“It was either right before or right after the breakup that I finally went down on another man. You would think I would know, whether it was before or after because of it being likely that the two were related, but I can’t remember which it was. Or maybe we were in the process of breaking up, because there was a period of time between starting to have stupid fights and not seeing each other anymore.
“What happened was that this guy picked me up and asked me if I’d like to have a couple drinks. By this time I was old enough to get served in a bar. I was eighteen, which is how old you have to be. The place we went wasn’t a gay bar. It was near Times Square, just a place to get some drinks. Then we went to his apartment.
“It was a nice place, and he was a pretty nice guy. I guess he was thirty or thirty-five. Most of the time when you hustle Times Square you don’t spend any time with your pick-ups. You hardly ever have any conversation. The whole thing is get it over with as fast as possible, and one guy pretends the other is just a cock while the other guy is busy pretending you’re just a mouth.
“With this guy, he was pleasant to be with, and also the drinks relaxed me. I wasn’t used to drinks and I wasn’t falling down drunk by any means but I was very loose and easy about things. We both got undressed and went to bed. Usually you just open your pants but we got our clothes off and got into bed together.
“He didn’t even touch my cock at the beginning. Instead he started making love to me, stroking me all over my body and whispering how beautiful I was. It was common to get lots of comments on how attractive I was, the usual shit, but this was different, it was a case of him really making love to me the way a man makes love to a woman or a woman to a man, and this was new to me. He kissed me on the body, the chest and the legs and all, which felt funny at first. Something about it bothered me but something else said to let go and relax and just go with it, and I did.
“Finally he went down on me and it was really great.
“Afterward I got up to go but he said there was no rush and I should stay where I was, he would make us something to eat and we could have a couple of beers. He made omelets and we ate them in the bedroom and drank some beer.
“We talked a lot about things. Not particularly about sex things. Eventually he said that by just being blown I was missing half the fun. I thought he meant that he wanted me to fuck him and I said I would do that if he wanted but I didn’t really dig it that much and a lot of the time I had trouble staying hard long enough to get it in, which was the truth. But he said that anal sex was banal sex, that was the phrase he used, and it was also the first time I heard the word banal anyway. He said he meant I missed the fun of blowing someone.
“‘You must wonder what it’s like to do it,’ he said.
“Well, of course this was true. I did wonder what they got out of it. How could you help but wonder?
“‘Why don’t you try it?’ he said. ‘You can stop if you want to. Obviously it won’t kill you to have a penis in your mouth. It won’t make you any different. And if it doesn’t jibe with your image of yourself, you can keep it as much a secret as you want. You don’t have to worry that everybody who sees you walking down the street will know at a glance that you like to suck.’
“By talking that way he was taking it for granted that I wanted to try it and that I would like it.
“I said, ‘I probably wouldn’t even know what to do, how to do it.’
“He said, ‘Oh, come now. Think of all the times you’ve had it done to you. You know what feels good when it’s done to you. Just do that to me. Pretend it’s your own cock, silly.’
“So I did it. I liked it. I didn’t get excited doing it but there was something I liked about it. I liked the fact that he was enjoying it. And I liked, oh, the act itself. Having it in my mouth.
“It didn’t even bother me afterward. That I liked it. That I was a cocksucker, because that was the word that kept going through my mind, cocksucker, cocksucker. But to tell you the truth what I felt was relief. A big wave of relief as though I finally went and did something that I had had to do for a long time. Like I finally knew what I was and I could live with it.
“A funny thing, he wouldn’t believe that I hadn’t done it before. After I did it, I mean. He wouldn’t believe that it was the first time for me.
“‘You seem to have a natural talent for this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘It would have been a shame to let such a God-given talent go to waste.’
“I figured he was probably right.”
Not long after having performed fellatio upon a man for the first time, Greg began to have homosexual experiences that were not related to hustling. He began leading what amounted to a double life. On some evenings he would hustle on Times Square, only permitting clients to fellate him. At other times he would go to a gay bar he had heard about, where he would let himself be picked up by someone who appealed to him. The two would engage in mutual fellatio and Greg would wind up staying the night at his partner’s apartment.
He kept both worlds strictly separate. His Johns were told (if they asked) that he only had homosexual relations for money and that he never took an active role. His chosen sex partners were never told of his hustling career. And the girls whom he began to date were never told of either of his homosexual life-styles.