Sex Without Strings: A Handbook for Consenting Adults (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  On an intellectual level, I know that neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality is “normal” for me, or rather, that one is as normal as the other. Neither is the exclusive representation of my true nature, whatever that is. I’m fundamentally bisexual, attracted to either men or women more for themselves than for abstract reasons. I know this, Jack, but on some gut level I don’t entirely believe it.

  One indication of my uncertainty is that, in one way at least, I do choose sexual partners on the basis of their sex. What I’m getting at is that I almost always switch from one sex to the other. lf I’ve broken off with a man, my next lover will be a woman. If my last lover was a woman, my next will be a man. This doesn’t count casual contacts, there’s no pattern in them, but as far as serious relationships are concerned, there’s this pendulum effect; I go from one sex to the other and back again.

  I don’t know whether or not this is typical in bisexuality. I can see how it might be, because I don’t plan it this way, I don’t literally say to myself, “Well, I’ve just broken off with a woman, so the next person I’ll be strongly drawn to in terms of an intense relationship will have to be a man.” It just works out that way.

  • • •

  Erica’s background is upper-middle class. She is an only child. Her parents were divorced when she was four or five years old. She does not remember the divorce, and says she has little recollection of her early childhood. Her father was a chemical engineer; he was frequently abroad, and spent the greater portion of his time in Latin America. Before the divorce her parents had traveled together from job to job. After the marriage terminated, Erica and her mother moved back to the mother’s original home town, an industrial city in eastern Pennsylvania.

  When Erica was ten years old, her mother was found to have a virulent form of cancer, which killed her in less than a year. Erica lived with her grandmother for a year and a half. The grandmother seems to have been either eccentric or dotty, depending on one’s point of view. Erica thought at the time that the woman was as nutty as a pecan orchard, but is now inclined to accept her as highly individualistic. (She ate only cashew nuts on Mondays and Thursdays but dined more or less normally on other days, for example.) After a year and a half of this, during which time Erica developed a loathing for cashew nuts that has endured to the present day, her father returned to take custody of her.

  The rest of her childhood and adolescence was spent largely at boarding schools. She attended six or seven schools and did poorly at all of them in spite of a high IQ. She talked her father into withdrawing her from some of the schools. She left a couple of the others at the schools’ suggestion; not only was her scholarship weak, but she was something of a discipline problem.

  It was at one of these schools that she had her first significant sexual experience.

  • • •

  I don’t know if there’s more sex at boarding schools than there is anywhere else. I think it does become a great deal more obvious there, because it’s a completely closed environment and everybody knows a lot about what everybody else is doing. Also, the sex is a lot more likely to be homosexual in nature, not because boarding school girls are fundamentally lesbian but because they’re fundamentally sexual, and there’s very little opportunity for sexual outlets with boys.

  There’s a lot of talk about boarding schools turning you into a homosexual. From what I understand, most of the schools nowadays have either turned coeducational or are in the process of turning, so maybe there’s little point in speculating about the whole thing.

  I suppose the obvious analogy would be to prisons. From what I’ve read, there’s a tremendous amount of homosexuality in prisons, and to a large extent it’s because it’s the only game in town—men are deprived of women so they turn to one another for sex. Of course, there are prisoners who are gay or bi on the outside, but there are also men who engage in homosexual relations without a qualm while in prison and revert to absolutely straight behavior on the outside.

  Of course, there’s a difference between adult prisoners who have already pretty well defined their approach to sex and young kids who have had little or no prior experience. I would think it would be easier to shrug off a homosexual relationship as “just something I did while I was in jail” than it would be to have your whole sexual awakening take place with a roommate or a girlfriend and then try to tell yourself later that it was because there were no boys around.

  Although now that I think of it, there were a lot of girls who did more or less that, but in slightly different terms. The sexual relations they had with one another they later passed off as “just kid stuff,” or they explained to themselves that they had been “going through a normal developmental phase.” Depending on the intellectual level of their rationalizations, you might say.

  The first school I went to, I was there less than a year, and while I assume there was sex happening, I was not aware of it at the time. I’m sure it was going on around me, if not with girls as young as I was, because I’ve never heard of a boarding school that didn’t have a certain percentage of the girls fooling around with each other. Nor have I ever heard of one where all the girls, or even most of the girls, were into lesbianism. You read about schools like that in cheap fiction, but I’ve never heard of one yet.

  The second school I went to wasn’t a bad place generally. Its academic rating was high, and there was a certain social cachet to having gone there. I was there for two years, and it was there that I first had a sexual experience. As a matter of fact, you could say that it was there that I first really became aware of the existence of sex. My mother hadn’t told me anything before she died, and of course my father was never around long enough to tell me anything, not that he’d have been inclined, and my grandmother—well, it’s hard for me to believe she even knew anything. And at that first school I was very withdrawn and everything and never reached the stage of sharing secret information with my classmates.

  At the second school, though, I learned rather quickly about the mechanics of sex, what it did and what it was for, and that it was supposed to feel heavenly. (I had known some of the biological information previously, but, honestly, very little.) I also learned that there were certain kinds of girls who liked each other and didn’t like men, and there were rumors about certain of the instructors, implying that they were of this sort. I suppose some of them were.

  While we recognized this specific category of girl as a lesbian we were still capable of getting involved in lesbian behavior without recognizing it as such, both in terms of acts and emotions. On the emotional angle, it was possible to have a crush on a teacher or older girl where you revered her and saw her as the ultimate in female sophistication and beauty, without thinking of the girl in specifically sexual terms, without wanting to have sex with her, and without having your friends necessarily regard the crush as homosexual in nature. As a matter of fact, I think a lot of those crushes are not sexual at root. When you have no parent around, and no older sister, and you’re looking for someone to model yourself on, you can have a crush on someone and it can really consist of a desire to be like that person, to emulate that person, rather than a desire to have sex with her.

  In physical terms, it was very easy to find yourself experimenting with another girl sexually in much the same way that you might dance with another girl. We had dances frequently—you were supposed to develop social graces that way—and we would pair off and one girl would take the boy’s part and lead and the other girl would take the girl’s part and follow. And in plays certain girls would have to play male roles because there were no boys around to play them. This was not thought of as a sexual thing, and it really wasn’t; there was simply no other way to learn to dance, or to present any play other than one set in a convent, or something like that.

  In the same way, girls might find themselves taking turns “playing the male role” in sexual experimentation. Like, two girls might be talking about kissing, and what it might be like, and whether it was enjoyab
le, and if it was disgusting or exciting to have someone else’s tongue in your mouth, or whatever; and one would suggest that one or the other pretend to be a boy in order to find out what the whole thing was like. In another environment, with boys available for this sort of experimentation, I suppose less of this would have gone on. But even in a coeducational school the same thing happens for certain girls, not necessarily because they have a predisposition to homosexuality or anything like that, but because they aren’t popular and aren’t sought out by boys and yet have the same interest in learning about these things that everyone else has.

  I remember one night I was sitting around talking with a girl named Winifred. She was called Neigh, as in Whinny, as in a nickname for Winifred. Well, Neigh and I were talking about kissing and boys and sex and so on, and it was exciting, not because either of us was turned on by the other, but because the conversational topics were stimulating in and of themselves. And the idea came up—I don’t honestly know who suggested it—that we could take turns being the boy and see what it was like. Kissing each other and that sort of thing.

  I guess I was thirteen years old at the time. Twelve and a half or thirteen.

  So we did, and it was very interesting and very exciting. We first danced, with her leading, and then she gazed solemnly into my eyes and kissed me. It was very moving, a very moving experience. She kissed me quite a few times, and it was certainly a sexual turn-on for me, and I believe it had the same effect on her.

  We did this over a period of several hours, taking turns playing the male role both in dancing and kissing, although I don’t know just what we thought constituted the male role in kissing. Probably being the first one to initiate the activity or something like that. We were French-kissing, putting our tongues into each other’s mouths and hugging each other close. One thing I remember quite vividly is that Neigh was very well developed compared to most of us at that age. This is a fancy way of saying that her tits were a lot larger than mine, when you come right down to it.

  I didn’t come right down to it. Meaning, I didn’t go down on her or get into anything sexually heavy with her. It’s so hard to explain this. It was sexual and yet it wasn’t sexual. Maybe what it amounts to is that it was sexual for me but not for Neigh. Or that it was sexual for both of us, but that I could recognize this in certain ways, while she was not prepared to. I remember, for instance, that I had private fantasies of carrying things much further. The two of us never got past a little minor breast-stroking, and that with our clothes on, but when I was lying awake at night and trying to sleep, I would imagine us going much much further than that. I had a devilish little imagination. I fantasied us lying nude in each other’s arms in the standard coital position—which at the time I thought was the only coital position—and rubbing our yummy little pussies together as if we were a man and a woman fucking.

  Incidentally, I thought for the longest time that I had invented this idea. I was rather stunned to know that girls had been doing this with other girls ever since Sappho held court on that island.

  It was around this time that I found out about masturbation. I had already discovered that it was pleasant to touch myself. I was especially interested in touching my breasts, which were beginning to develop about then, although they weren’t setting any records. I think this touching was more a matter of luxuriating in myself as a developing woman than masturbation as such, but it did provide a physical pleasure. And I also touched my genitals and found that enjoyable, but I didn’t know it could lead to anything.

  Then one girl was talking about it, about masturbation, I think she was saying something to the effect that her roommate was at it all the time, that she used to do it when she thought the other girls were sleeping, and she talked about how she would get all hot and make these wild sounds and then moan into her pillow when she got off. I didn’t know much about this whole concept of getting off but I was interested in finding out, and I began handling myself rather more forcefully and I found out what an orgasm was.

  It wasn’t long before I was a really fantastic little masturbator. I’ve read a lot on the subject of masturbation guilt and have always wondered why I never seemed to have any. It seems that this applies more to boys than to girls. Maybe it’s that the male orgasm is a more concrete thing, it leaves evidence in the form of a puddle of sperm on the sheets, while a female orgasm is just something you feel. Or maybe society is more uptight about inhibiting male masturbation. In any case, I was completely cool on the subject. I did it in private, generally while I was waiting to fall asleep, and fantasizing about all the things Neigh and I would never get around to doing. I was quiet about it, too. But not out of what I would call guilt. It was more the feeling that this was something it would be somewhat embarrassing to be caught doing.

  Gradually Neigh and I stopped our experimentation. As I said, it never went beyond a little breast fondling and some deep kissing, and instead of getting passionate in the course of it, we usually wound up giggling, so the relationship had to either get more intense or stop. And it stopped.

  The next girl I got involved with was something very different. She was almost two years older than me, a tall brunette with a willowy body and very strong facial features—a hawk nose, a sharp chin, and really deep-set eyes. You know the women they have in sadomasochistic pornography, with the ten-inch high-heeled boots and the whips? Barbara would have been a perfect model for that sort of thing.

  Barbara picked me out. Just as some younger girls have crushes on older ones, some of the older ones with butch temperaments will develop passions for younger girls, or less-experienced girls. I sort of noticed Barbara taking notice of me but didn’t pay much attention to it, probably because of my naïveté on the subject. She would linger around so that our paths crossed, and she would look me up and down, and otherwise give off signals that I might have picked up on.

  Then she used an intermediary. She had a girl in my class come up to me and tell me that Barbara thought a great deal of me. This puzzled me, because I couldn’t imagine why anyone would think much of me at all, as I didn’t think all that much of myself at the time.

  “Barbara likes you, Erica,” I was told. “She was wondering if you liked her.”

  “Well, sure,” I said. “I think she’s neat.” Or something dumb like that.

  I guess my words were duly reported back to Barbara, and a day or two later she invited me to have a Coke. She paid for the Cokes and we talked about all sorts of things, none of which I can presently remember. She said she wanted us to be special friends. Now about this point I knew exactly what she meant. I had sort of half suspected it earlier, and now there was no question in my mind. So in no sense did she seduce me. When I agreed that I wanted to be her special friend, I was agreeing to have sex with her. No question.

  Even so, we didn’t do anything for the first couple of days. We would arrange to meet each other and we would walk around holding hands. We spent quite a bit of time together.

  In the meantime, I had of course completely incorporated Barbara into my masturbation fantasies. I was very highly sexed right then, very stimulated at the thought of having sex with Barbara, and none too clear as to who would do what and with which and to whom, but I figured she was the leader and, same as in dancing, all I had to do was follow her lead.

  As it turned out, the physical seduction, if you want to call it that, did follow some dancing. She invited me up to her dormitory room to hear some records, and we danced to them, and of course she took the male part and did the leading, and she held me very close to her so that our bodies pressed and rubbed together, and after we had danced to a couple of records she put her hands on my shoulders and held me at arm’s length, and we looked into each other’s eyes, and then we were kissing.

  It was nothing like kissing Neigh. It was extremely passionate, and a few moments later Barbara was wedging a chair against the doorknob so that nobody could open the door, and very soon afterward we were in bed together. She did thi
ngs I hadn’t even thought about and most of the things I had thought about as well. She was completely the initiator, which was quite as it should have been, because she was the one who knew what we were doing.

  She made a tremendous fuss over my breasts, which really made me feel wonderful, because I felt hers were so much larger and nicer and I had been worried that mine would turn her off. When she went down on me I was completely astonished. I had thought she was just getting ready to look at me down there, and then I felt something wonderful without knowing what it was, and then I realized she was licking me and I almost fainted, but it felt so good that I stopped even thinking about whether it was decent or not and just swooned off into a dazzling come that was a hundred times as strong as anything I’d managed with my grubby little fingers.

  She was not only my first sexual partner—unless you count Neigh, who doesn’t really count. She was also my first real relationship, because we were together for a couple of months, and I didn’t have anyone else during that time, and I don’t think she did either.

  I don’t think I was in love with her. We would talk about how we loved each other and how it wasn’t just sex. I don’t think I really meant it, although I probably believed it at the time. I think Barbara may well have been in love with me, but maybe that’s just ego on my part, that I wanted to believe it, even that I still want to believe it.

  There was a very definite butch-femme distinction in our relationship, with Barbara the butch and me the femme. By this I don’t mean she was mannish in manner. She wasn’t. But she was dominant, and also she was the aggressor sexually. Her main interest was in bringing me to orgasm. That was the most important thing for her.