“You would go out, two couples, and you would park somewhere and neck. Even if you didn’t happen to feel like it, it was all part of the expected pattern. You had to try to screw a girl because she expected it, but she wouldn’t go all the way and everyone more or less took that for granted. From what I’ve read, this was standard American dating behavior about ten years ago. Well, the South is always at least ten years behind the times. When I talk to people my age who grew up in New York or California I feel as though I was cheated. They were into a semi-hippie thing all through high school and it was more than just that they smoked grass and let their hair grow and got into rock music. They were much more honest with each other, they opened up with each other. We didn’t, and I still haven’t learned how to do this in certain important ways.”
After one such date, a friend told Alan that he knew a homosexual who would perform fellatio upon them and thus ease the frustrations caused by a night of necking. “He said it was better than jerking off. Of course I always jerked off after dates, but I felt very uptight about it and would never admit it to anyone, or be inclined to talk about it. And I would go through periods of time when I would try to give up masturbation, which I suppose everybody does, and probably with as little success as I had.
“I told him I wasn’t queer, and he said of course not, neither was he, that the guy who did the blowing was the queer. He said the guy was always good for a couple of bucks, and that it was a way to get rid of your frustration and pay for the cost of the date at the same time. I said I wasn’t interested, but we doubled again about a week later and I asked him if he had gone to that queer that night, and he said yes, and he was going again. I said, well, I could use a couple of dollars, so why not.
“There was this particular place where the queer — it’s funny, I never use that word nowadays, but that was how I always thought of this particular fellow — particular place where he would park his car. I guess he was in his thirties or forties. He would park his car in this one spot and anybody who wanted to get blown would go there. I don’t know if he paid everybody or just the guys who asked for it, but I gather that there were plenty of guys who went down there every Friday and Saturday night. He liked teenagers and he was a number freak, he wanted to suck as many guys as he possibly could. He didn’t touch any part of me but my penis, just opened my pants and went to work. It was all over in a couple of seconds. I told him I needed some money for gas, which was what my friend told me to say. He gave me two dollars.
“I saw him another three or four times and it was always the same routine. I think one time he gave me five dollars, I’m not sure.”
Alan still has trouble defining the experience. “I don’t think I enjoyed it. I remember thinking that it was really a big nothing. No real pleasure at all. That factually it was less fun than jerking off because there was something basically uncomfortable about the whole scene. There was another person involved but the other person wasn’t appealing or interesting, he was just a device. Whereas when jerking off you could have fantasies, but here all I did was sit there while he went to work, and then I would come, but I would feel as though I hadn’t come at all...
“But something made me go back a few times, and I suppose I ought to be able to figure out what it was. I can’t think it was the money, not then. On the New York scene it’s different, because I really do need the money. Not that I would starve without it, but that I would have to work without it, and I’m not ready for that right now.
“Sometimes I think that I went to him because of the ego pleasure of being wanted, of being wanted by someone who got nothing out of it but the pleasure of using me as a love object. And who actually was willing to pay for that pleasure. But the thing that I’m not absolutely positive about was whether this motivated me or whether this is something I read about and I just think it might apply in my case. That’s the trouble with reading a great deal and tending to intellectualize a subject. You can’t really be sure whether something applies or whether you are just grabbing onto the idea.
Alan had no homosexual experiences while at college. He did have heterosexual relations there, once with a prostitute, several times with a girl with whom he thought himself in love.
“I went to the whore to get it over with. I felt ridiculous being a virgin and I just wanted to get it over and done with. I did some drinking first to get my courage up. I was so afraid of making a fool of myself, and I was also scared of catching a disease. Naturally I couldn’t get erect at first, and she went down on me. I remember how I responded immediately when she did this, and how it flashed through my mind that she was doing just what the queer had done. I thought I could climax like that and it would be just what I had done in the past, except that before I got paid for it and now I was paying for it. And I felt that I would still be a virgin unless I succeeded in coming in her cunt. So I insisted that she stop and I got on top of her and screwed her in the usual fashion. It wasn’t very enjoyable.
“With the girl I was going with, this was something that evolved naturally. She had had more experience than I did. We began having sex fairly regularly, and it was good. But she was in love with me and I thought I was in love with her and then discovered that I wasn’t, and there were too many times when she wanted to make love and I wasn’t in the mood, and I felt that she was too possessive and that I was in the process of getting trapped into a whole marriage routine. Then there was a false alarm, a pregnancy scare, and I could see everything closing in around me, and when she finally got her period I had to end it, I didn’t want to see her any more. It was shortly after that that I dropped out of school and came up to the city. I don’t know how much the one had to do with the other. It’s hard to say, because there were other factors as well, a whole discontent with the college scene and a desire to do something in the theater and a whole process of escaping from my family and everything.”
This, incidentally, was as close as Alan came to talking about his family. Whenever I brought up the subject, he either avoided answering or said that this was a topic he would prefer not to discuss.
“I don’t think it ever occurred to me in front to start hustling when I got to New York. Of course I knew that there were men who would pay money to go down on young men. I had had the experience with the guy at home, and I had read books and saw Midnight Cowboy, so I was aware of the general existence of that whole scene. But I didn’t go to New York looking for it.
“For one thing, I never thought of myself as a homosexual. I had never felt any desire for sex with another boy or man. As for what had happened with the queer, I thought of it as kid stuff, something hardly worth thinking about. And I still have never considered myself a homosexual and have never had genuine desires in that direction, not that I’ve been able to make myself aware of.
“If anything, I think my particular hang-up is that I’m not a particularly sexual person at all. That I’m not able to relate to other people because I spend too much time inside my own head. With girls, for example, there’s a definite similarity between how I feel with them and how I feel with a John. There’s nothing distasteful about being with a girl, not for me, and there’s none of the guilt afterward, none of the gnawing worry that what you’ve done is perverted and that there’s something abnormal about you. So in that respect it’s much better. I feel good when I’ve had enjoyable sex with a girl, whereas I feel nothing but numb and a little dirty after I go with a John.