I have spent a large proportion of my life thinking about sex. This goes back long before puberty. I remember lying in our back garden in a tent. I remember the particular garden and it was of a house I left when I was 12. This was long before my first pubic hair and even longer before any need to shave. I was a boy - with the undeveloped genitals of a boy - with absolutely idea of how a woman's genitals were formed byond a vague extrapolation from my younger sister. But I lay in the tent and imagined naked women. it was raining and this added to the magic of the moment. I cannot remember how I imagined vulvas - I think there was a sort of vague mist in that area- a feeling of unknowing and mystery. All that was clear was the shape of the buttocks and the hips. What I remember was a desire to kiss. That is all. I wanted to kiss the area of mystery. To honour it with my lips.
I suppose I was about 11 and this period of my life was deeply traumatic. I was very unhappy and stayed that way for many years. Although adult desire was not yet a part of my own experience I was aware of its power as my mother had fallen deeply and passionately in love with a man who was not my father and this effectively destroyed my own security. Although in those repressed and distorted days of the mid 50s, sexuality was unspoken - at least in the polite, uptight and hypocritical middle class environment in which I grew up - I was to become fully aware of its power. My mother glowed and shone with the desire that this new man had awoken. i could see that although I had no way of knowing the whys and hows.
After all these years I cannot recall the exact chronology but am sure that the evening in the tent - the details of which are still vivid - happened around the time that this affair blossomed and before my father knew about it.
I lay in the tent. And imagined naked women. Not girls - women. And wanted to kiss them in that vague and undefined area between their legs. I did not even know of pubic hair - the area was shrouded in mystery. I had seen, at that point, no porn of any description. That was to come much later. But, at that moment, I knew my desire was fixed. I lay there, listening to the rain beating against the canvas and knew something deeply important about myself and that was that i was fascinated by women and wished to spend my life striving to find out more.
It is strange to look back now after more than half a century and realise that I am still that boy. Sure, I am not as ignorant of basic anatomy as I was then, but the emotional drive remains the same. Very, very little has changed. What i had then was not, and could not be, a desire to penetrate and to possess. I did not even know what there was to penetrate. What I felt was a desire to kiss. That still remains and will, I trust stay until the coffin is nailed down. Yes, now I know how it feels to be enfolded and have had my share of sexual experience. But deep down I am still the boy in the tent in the rain in the garden who simply wanted to press his lips on an undefined but wonderful area.
Our dear friend and comrade Helen Gregory
3 weeks ago
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