In my school years I was so innocent, of course the boys at school were always boasting about their sex lives – I doubt many had much experience in fact, but they certainly knew things, enough to fool me into believing they were up to stuff…
Even at junior school I remember a mate describing seeing a boy and girl laying cuddling and kissing and playing with each other’s “privates” Whether these were older kids or what, I can’t say I remember, but the fact he knew such stuff… I was never taught anything about sex by my parents, they believed apparently when I mentioned this to my mother as an adult that the kids would ask when they wanted to know… how innocent they were that having been fobbed off with I’ll tell you when you’re older when I asked what my balls were for they wouldn’t probably get another chance.
At my secondary school we did get education, first the actual sex as related to animals and by extension humans and all the parts of the body with “proper” Latin nomenclature was part of first and second year biology, but it wouldn’t be until the fourth year that the school took the period we had wasted on Religious Education ever week for three years and substituted lessons in relationships.
The teacher said when many of the class said it was a bit late that many of us wouldn’t know as much as we’d like to believe and that in fact it was a little pointless saying much before we’d have the basic biology and many wouldn’t have the physical means to do anything with the knowledge anyway….!
In fact I found it very interesting , I don’t remember details now but two things stand out to me
Firstly while finally learning in biology what my genitals were for and surprise my cock wasn’t for pissing, it was a fellow pupil who standing up in his desk while waiting for a maths teacher to come into class and waving his hand around his groin explained what wanking was to this innocent! Though he made an “O” with his finger and thumb and unsurprisingly I soon discovered for myself that my whole hand was not only less strain to use added more stimulation!
Secondly the sex act was about movement not just insertion, something never covered in biology!
As I attended a single sex secondary school and of course that did lead to a lot of homosexual innuendo (or maybe that's just normal between boys at that age trying to out macho each other). But I did meet an actual gay guy who claimed to have had sex with an older guy he’d met – apparently he said they had broken into some garages … I’ll never know the truth of course, but this story and have these conversations with other guys my age did introduce me to both the fact there were gay people – where the insult we’d been throwing at each other since we were 12, “Mo”, came from, and that I just might be one! (Though I denied to myself that I could be anything but “bi” for many years to come)
A few other thoughts from this time I do remember the shyness I felt when in my first year at secondary school I was expected to shower after sports… I hadn’t been naked in front of anyone since my parents stopped bathing me years earlier. Even my elder brothers were sufficiently older I was in bed long before they retired. And though I remember seeing one of them naked occasionally as he slept in the nude, the other left home before I was 10.
So boys of my own age naked… actually once I tried it – it was ok, in fact fun.
I lost my nudity taboo there and then.
I also remember, even in my first year at secondary school being handed a book of porn, not a magazine but a novel, the story was based on the slave revolt of Spartacus and involved much sex including homo, (I think) but certainly anal and rape scenes.
The book had lost it’s cover…. But surprisingly perhaps I don’t remember the pages being stuck together.
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When I left school I joined a job with as few opportunities as a single sex school for interaction with the opposite sex and again in this masculine atmosphere of the 1970s no real chance to explore any sexual interactions at all.
I did as I mentioned elsewhere buy porn – I remember the Guards scandal when in 1976 some of the Household Division Appeared in the Gay Magazine “HIM” – I searched it out and it was the first gay magazine I ever brought. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/24/gay-guardsmen-discharged-him-magazine-1976
Subsequently I found a second hand (LOL) book shop which had an extensive selection of old porn magazine including gay ones such Him and Zipper and even a couple of harder BDSM mags well Bondage anyway – “Bound and Gagged”
From adverts and listings in these I discovered the names of Gay shops and bookshops and pubs, sadly none near me in South East London, but as I worked more centrally I did give me the chance to explore further afield in my lunch break and one day around 1979/80 I went to look at the outside Coleherne Arms, a gay pub from the mid-fifties which was a “notorious leather bar“ (according to Wikipedia) certainly I remember it also featured in a Sunday Paper of the day.
Well I was walking away, having satisfied my curiosity when I heard a call and looked around and there was a hunk who’d obviously spotted me staring (or something) or perhaps just fancied a young “chicken”? Anyway I probably blushed, and certainly hurried away, probably grateful for the excuse I could make to myself that I didn’t have the time as it was lunchtime to turn back to talk to him.
I was a shy odd person (in fact in some ways I still am) so wasn’t the type to be invited out by friends – I’d disconnected from any I had at school when I left and never really found any at work…
… along with many young men – for all the braggado – I believed I was nothing to look at, and it’s only when I look at pictures of myself from my 20s I wonder what I was on – I was hot then… I just didn’t see it
….hence my virginity at 30.
