no.1 “sleeping next to boys“
When my teenage self first dreamed about having sex with another person it would have been shocked to know it was gonna be with a fifty year old living in a shared apartment next to a dozen ZZ Top posters. But then again: who actually gets the first time they’ve been dreaming of? Growing up in Dusslingen - a small German town where most of the world’s supply of toilet cubicles is manufactured - wasn’t particularly hard or exciting. There was a gay banker who was seeing the one gay restaurant owner and in this part of rural Baden-Württemberg ‚the gays‘ were still easily recognizable by a small silver ring on their right ear. Anyone with a knack for nostalgia can just go back to my hometown, where the nineties are alive and kicking.
Nevertheless I managed to find someone. He was short and blond and had weirdly long fingers that he kept cracking while we were walking through wheat fields in late summer. It was a gosh dang love story. One evening when we were seventeen he invited me to spend the night. We watched Saturday Night Live with his parents and I loved them. They were good Christian parents who actually seemed to like each other. We went up to his room. I looked at everything like precious metals from a beautiful planet. He showed me some music and when I thought I was about to burst from happiness he laid on the floor and feel asleep on his hand. I took a picture of him dozing off. It was everything, but I never got closer to him than that. Intimacy briefly waved at me and then walked in the other direction fast. He was straight and deeply infatuated with a girl. I realized then and there that the whole romantic thing was gonna be a bumpy ride.
My whole life I had been sleeping next to boys, in cars, train compartments, on field trips in tents, during sleepovers, and never was there anything more than platonic touch. Something had to be done. Action I asked for and action I received. The desired spread came in form of a digital innovation like mana from heaven: the online dating app.
In a suburb a few kilometers north of Dusslingen I connected to someone. His name was Detlef. He had a shaved head, grey eyebrows and artificially tanned skin. With him being 35 years my elder and a somewhat fetish version of Mr. Clean it’s not hard to figure out how it all connects to my father having abandoned me. But like a heat-seeking missile I roar right into these Freudian hyper-clichés to wreak as much havoc as my primitive psychology allows. A little reminder: I am 18 years old and worlds away from even this small amount of self-reflexion when I enter Detlef’s shared apartment and face his classic rock posters. I am still thinking that this is nothing but fun, that this is right and the only way to go when I fuck this strange older man. His nipples are pierced and he turns red and grunts when he comes. Nothing about this is how sex ed said it would be. Except ejaculation.
When I go home that night it still seems like paying a visit to a friendly acquaintance. But when I discover he’s working at the local video store weeks later and both of us act like we’ve never met before as if by some unspoken pact it dawns on me that this whole thing had nothing to do with intimacy, and that being close to someone physically doesn’t mean there has to be any closeness at all. To many this might seem naive. But bear with me. I’m just a small town boy who searched for love and found someone to fuck online.