by Dan Savage
“Well, Terry and I have been growing apart,” I said, looking serious, “and we think a baby will bring us closer together. And I'm hoping a child can accomplish the things we didn't, and we feel sorry for orphans.”
Ann looked a little stunned, then laughed out loud. She'd read “10 Reasons Not to Adopt,” too. Terry apologized, but Ann said there was no need.
“Usually when I ask that question, the answer is a very sad story, and there are tears. Most couples don't have a sense of humor about adopting at this point, so this is a nice change of pace.
“But now, down to business. What are your real reasons?”
We told Ann about the lesbians, the next-door neighbor, and the long road that brought us to open adoption. We even told her about wanting a hobby. Ann was open, and so were we.
But we did wind up telling Ann a lie. We couldn't avoid this one, since we'd already told it to a room full of people from the agency. When we went around the table introducing ourselves at the seminar, I said Terry and I had been together three years.
During our first home-study meeting, when Ann asked us how long we'd been together, I looked at Terry. We left the seminar feeling as if we hadn't needed to lie about how long we'd been together, but we'd already done it. I felt bad lying to Ann, but we had already told the head of the agency we'd been together three years, and we couldn't change our story now. How long had we been together?
“Three years,” said Terry. “We've been together three years.”
“How did you meet?”
Terry and I looked at each other, and there was a long pause. We both must have blushed, because before either of us could say anything, Ann said, “Well, there must be some wonderful story about how you met.”
We told her everything: the gay bar, the drag queen, “You've got a pretty mouth,” and the bathroom. Ann loved it.
Rutherford B. Finger
I'm bent over an examining table. Behind me, the great-great-grandson of a nineteenth-century American president snaps on a rubber glove. We've arrived at the business end of the full and complete check-up required by the agency—complete with full digital penetration. The agency wants some assurance I won't drop dead the day after the kid arrives, and my prostate gland apparently holds the answer to that question.
We adopters must have cash on hand, health insurance, smoke alarms, friends and relatives willing to vouch for us, a roof over our heads, and, most important, the ability to fill out forms and enclose checks. The finger is yet another way in which we are required to prove ourselves worthy and breeding couples or singles are not.
Now here I am, ass cracked open, waiting. We've already looked in my ears, checked my eyes, listened to my heart, and reviewed my health history. Now, the deluge: Dr. Finger, having pulled on one rubber glove, starts talking to me in hushed and soothing tones. This-lubricant-may-feel-cold, you-may-experience-some-slight-discomfort, we'll-take-it-slow.
Less highly evolved readers probably assume that I'm digging this—that for gay men, any opportunity to stick something up our butts is welcome. While I can now brag that I've been fingered by an American president's great-great-grandson—how many people can say that?—a rectal exam is not my idea of a thrill. Being gay does not mean you enjoy anal penetration at all times and under all circumstances. Personally, I don't enjoy rectal exams or colostoscopes any more than straight women enjoy speculums or suction abortions.
Gay men do fear the finger less than straight men, though. After all, we're not worried a prostate exam will make us gay. We arrive gay.
I'm still bent over at the waist, ass cracked open, and all I want—all I really, really want—is for Dr. Finger to stop reassuring me and get the fingering over with. I would like to pull up my pants. I don't enjoy being naked, not in front of strangers—not even in front of Terry. Exposing myself like this is not working any sex magic for me.
But it is bringing back memories. . . .
The first time I had a finger in my ass was also a less than magical experience. One day in July 1979, when I was fourteen years old, I started having cramps. About an hour later, I started bleeding. Buckets of blood were pouring out my ass, filling the toilet as fast as I could flush it. I should have called in the Feds—Mom and Dad—right away, but I stalled, hoping the bleeding and the cramps would just . . . stop.
As I sat on the toilet bleeding to death, I wondered what could be wrong. Nine years of Catholic education kicked in: this had to be the result of something I'd done. Could just thinking about getting fucked in the ass do this? Had I harmed myself ? Or was God punishing me? He was my heavenly Father, and I was his child, but I'd been jerking off a lot lately. Maybe my heavenly Father was firing a warning shot.
But when I did think about doing things with my butt—bad things, things that might anger my heavenly Father—it was always with dread. I understood I was attracted to men, but I didn't really want to be this way. I didn't really want to get fucked in the ass. When I masturbated about it, about getting fucked in the ass, it always happened in circumstances where I couldn't stop it from happening. I would be taken by force, against my will. I was never a willing participant in my late-night masturbatory fantasies, so why was God punishing me? I was the victim!
Or maybe God had me all figured out. It's not as if I was doing a very good job of fooling myself. Somewhere, deep down, I knew that as much as anal sex might repulse me, I was masturbating about getting fucked in the ass because getting fucked in the ass was the logical, if wrath-of-God-provoking, implication of my desires.
When I first figured out that I was gay, the thought of a guy touching me back there revolted me. I was attracted to other boys, but I was not immune to the cultural prejudices that my family, friends, and classmates swam in—I was soaking in them, too. Being attracted to boys meant I was going to have to sleep with gay men. And gay men were boofooing, fudge-packing butt pirates. If I was going to be sleeping with gay men, I would have to learn how to do this disgusting thing. I didn't have to like the idea of anal sex, and I was sure I never would like it, but the gay men I would sooner or later be sleeping with would expect it of me. And so, to acclimate myself to the idea, I jerked off thinking about it.
So sitting on the toilet, bleeding, I figured I was being punished. But I'd also jerked off thinking about the blow jobs I would be required to give. Why couldn't God curse me with bleeding gums instead?
I started making deals. Maybe if I promised never to think about my mother's best friend's son kissing me, God would stop the bleeding. So I promised. Maybe if I swore to throw away the Playgirl magazine I'd hidden in the basement, the bleeding would stop. So I swore. Maybe if I solemnly vowed to jerk off about girls and only girls from now on and forever after, amen, God would stop the bleeding. I solemnly vowed.
But the bleeding didn't stop. When I started feeling faint, I called in the Feds.
“Mom?”
I told her I had the shits. She took one look in the toilet and screamed, “Jesus Christ!” I'd tried appealing to him already, but Mom didn't know that. She did know this wasn't the shits, not even ambitious “bloody stool.” This was serious. She asked when it had started, and when I told her three hours ago, her jaw dropped. Why hadn't I called her right away? “I don't know,” I muttered. Had the blood been coming out of my nose, or shooting out of my eyes, if I'd had a sunburn or a hangnail, I would've screamed for my mother right away. But screaming “Look what my ass is doing!” seemed as good as screaming “Guess what I've been thinking about doing with my ass!” In my mind, there was a straight line from my ass to my secret.
Soon we were on our way to the hospital.
Now, let's remember that this was 1979. At the time, my father thought Anita Bryant was a right-on sister, and my mother was a lay Catholic minister. I didn't think the your-third-son-is-a-fag news would go over well with the Feds. All the way to the hospital, I kept wondering what my mother was thinking. No man had been anywhere near my ass, nor had I done any what's-this-gonna-feel-
like probing on my own. If what I'd read about homosexuality in my parents' copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) was at all accurate (it wasn't, not at all), my first boyfriend (whom I would meet in a bowling-alley bathroom) would expect me to give it up, so I had contemplated fingering myself, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.
My mother was sitting beside me in the ambulance, holding my hand and smiling. I worried that her smile meant she was connecting the dots between my wanting to see the national tour of A Chorus Line on my thirteenth birthday and my bloody ass. My mother wasn't stupid, as she liked to remind us.
At fourteen, I lived in a constant state of panic; the monotony was broken only by moments of terror. Fear of discovery ruled my life. My bloody ass wasn't my first fear-of-exposure moment. I'd been caught looking at underwear ads, staring at older boys in locker rooms, and watching Solid Gold. At a party a couple of months before my ass started to bleed, I found a copy of Playgirl. The party was at a bad girl's house when her parents were out of town. She'd invited the entire St. Jerome's Teen Club over to drink beer and make out. On the way to get another foul-tasting beer, I spotted it. Playgirl. In the dining room. On the floor. Almost under the table. Partly obscured by the tablecloth. My first impulse was to grab the magazine and run, but if a gay adolescence leaves you with anything, it's an ability to squelch first impulses. My first impulse in freshman swim class was to get a boner, but did I let that happen? No.
The magazine could be a trap. Someone might have put it there to see who'd pick it up. Two or three of my awful peers could be watching from inside the kitchen, or hiding under the dining room table, ready to jump out. The girls would chant, “Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!” while the boys beat me up, and I would have to go home and blow my brains out.
I was cautious. For an hour, I cased the dining room. I tallied heads and tried to account for everyone at the party, to make sure no one was missing and possibly hiding under the table. I peeked inside cabinets. It wasn't a trap, I finally realized, it was an opportunity. So I did the bravest thing I had ever done in my life up to that point: I dropped my coat on top of the magazine. Two hours later, I topped that act of heroism: I picked up my coat—and the magazine—and walked out the front door. I was trying to look cool.
I probably looked like I was having a seizure.
Getting that magazine out of the bad girl's house was only the beginning of my troubles. I lived about eight blocks from the bad girl's house, and it was a short walk home. But what if I got stopped by a cop? I mean, I looked pretty guilty sneaking down the street with a magazine under my shirt. If a cop stopped me, he would find the magazine—and he would probably know my father. I slunk down side streets, terrified. Once I made it home, the first thing I had to do was find a hiding place. Well, actually, the first thing I had to do was masturbate. The centerfold was an oiled-up guy with lots of body hair, sweaty-looking balls, and a really ugly mustache. Not my type at all, but he was naked and I wasn't supposed to have this magazine, and that was exciting enough.
When I was done, I looked around my bedroom for a spot where the magazine, and my secret, would be safe. Soon I found the perfect parent-proof hiding place: I slid the magazine between my mattress and box spring. For the first few weeks the magazine was in my possession, all I could think about was where I'd hidden it. Was someone going to find it? What if there was a fire, and the firemen pulled my mattress out the window, the way they'd done when a house down the street burned down? They would find the magazine. Or what if, for some reason, the Feds looked under my mattress? Soon, I couldn't concentrate on anything else. It got so I couldn't leave the house; if anyone went near my room, I would run in and lie on my bed. I was a nervous wreck.
Now, I knew my brothers had porn hidden in their rooms, too, magazines that they didn't want the Feds to find, either. While I'm sure those mags caused my brothers some low-level anxiety, their suffering couldn't compare with mine. If the Feds discovered my brother's magazines, at least they were filled with pictures of naked ladies. Billy's and Eddie's mags didn't give them away as perverts. Oh, they might be punished, but they wouldn't be found out. In fact, about this time, my mother found Playboys in Billy's room. As she lectured him at the dinner table, my father said, “Well, at least they're pictures of girls.”
The anxiety of keeping that magazine in my room soon overwhelmed me. So one day, when no one was home, I removed the magazine from its hiding place in my bedroom, sneaked across the hall, and hid it in my sister's bedroom. If it was found in there, Laura would get in trouble—mere trouble—but Mom and Dad wouldn't think she was a pervert. I could hear my father say, “At least they're not pictures of girls.” Getting Laura in trouble was a risk I was willing to take.
But Laura's room wasn't a very good hiding place, either. My sister slept in her bedroom, which limited my access.
I considered hiding it in one of my brothers' rooms, mixing it in with their other porn mags. But what would happen when my brothers found it? They would figure it was mine, and take it straight to the Feds. So I opted for the basement. At first, it seemed there were a million places to hide my Playgirl magazine in the basement, but almost everywhere I looked someone had some occasional cause to poke around. My mom was always coming down and “organizing” things. Shelves were stacked with stuff my father used around the yard. But there was one place no one but me knew about. It could only be a temporary hiding place, but it would get me through the summer. The furnace—an enormous old cast-iron monster with a two-foot-wide iron door—was creepy, but it would do. The heat wouldn't be coming back on for months, by which time I would find a new hiding place. I opened the furnace, leaned in, and laid the magazine on the flat metal surface beneath the unlit burners.
When my mother and I arrived at the emergency room, the nurse on duty turned out to be my aunt Peggy's best friend. More panic: I was sure she'd be on the phone with my mother's sister in no time. “Your effeminate nephew is here—the one who wanted to see A Chorus Line on his thirteenth birthday. His ass is bleeding like someone stuck something in it.”
My father wasn't at the emergency room. He might have been at work, or maybe he was away, or maybe he figured he had sons to spare. I don't remember, but considering what was about to happen, wherever he was, I'm glad he wasn't in the emergency room with Mom and me. After the nurse filled out her forms— bleeding profusely from the anus, check; brought this on himself, check; going to hell, check—the intern on duty came in. And he was beautiful. Guest-star-on- The-Love-Boat cute, with straw-blond hair, dark eyebrows, and a jaw made for clenching. He wore V-neck scrubs with no shirt on underneath, and when he leaned over me, pressing on my stomach, I could see down his shirt. He asked my mother some questions, she answered them. He was concerned, he said, very concerned. This wasn't normal. The cramps could indicate appendicitis, but the bleeding was not normal, not normal at all, not even with a burst appendix. Just not normal.
I wanted to die.
I wanted to die before the beautiful intern said, “I'm going to have to check . . . inside.” Mom nodded, and the doc—the handsome Love Boat doc—pulled on a rubber glove and walked to one side of the bed. I'd probably lost fifteen or sixteen gallons of blood at this point, and I was still having cramps. I wasn't sure when the next gush was going to come shooting out of my ass, but I was praying it would happen before the beautiful intern got his finger in me, and I would be dead before he could “check inside.”
The same folks who think I should enjoy Dr. Rutherford B. Finger poking around my ass as an adult will also think that I was secretly thrilled at the impending loss of my fourteen-year-old third-base butt-cherry to the Love Doc. Wrong. I was hoping I would just bleed to death so I could go home. In a box.
But things weren't going my way. The Love Doc rolled me on my side. I started to go into a panic-attack meltdown: Did I stick something in my ass and forget about it? What if I did it in my sleep and left it up there? He pulled my shorts and unde
rwear down to my knees, exposing my rear to him and my full frontals to mom. More cramps. I was now in a white-hot panic. Delirious, I convinced myself there was something in my ass—a chair leg, Legos, a Number 2 pencil. He'd stick a finger in, pull out a Lincoln Log.
The panic must have shown on my face—I mean, how could it not? I could scrounge up a closet-case poker face most of the time, but this wasn't high school gym. This was an exceptional circumstance.
My mother had been sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, low enough that I couldn't see her. But I guess she could see me, or she sensed how distressed I was, because she did something that, while it was well intentioned, I will never, ever be able to forgive her for, not if I live to be a hundred thousand years old: she stood up, walked over to the bed, took my hand, and looked me deep in the eyes with an expression of motherly concern on her face . . . just as the beautiful intern in the V-neck scrubs stuck his finger in my ass.
There was nothing in my ass, and I didn't have appendicitis. I had ulcers, dozens of bleeding ulcers in my colon. I was rushed to surgery, I was chopped up, and I lived. No one could figure out why I had ulcers, or why they were gushing blood the way they did, or why a nice, polite, calm, well-liked kid—so even keeled, so well mannered—would suffer from such stress-induced ulcers as I had. I was fourteen years old, my father asked when he got to the hospital, what on earth was I stressed out about?
Dr. Finger is still talking. I wish he'd stop telling me about it and just do it. He'll be gentle. When the day dawns that he does put his finger in my ass, would I be so kind as to push against his finger as if I were having a bowel movement? Okay, now we're going to start. . . .
Jesus, I wish the first guy who fucked my ass had been this considerate.
Dr. Finger is wasting a lot of tender bedside manner on me. He's probably violated hundreds—thousands!—of men in his career. But the vast majority of those men were probably straighter, older, and much more married than I am, the kind of men who've never had a thing in their asses that they hadn't chewed up and swallowed first. Exit types, never entries. I, on the other hand, have had things in my ass that would make a Thai bar hostess blush.
