A detour into a bit of personal history. Like the man says, I'd like to take you, if I may, on a strange journey.

My body started to wake up when I was 12. I started having urges, physical, visceral urges that were unfocused, that I didn't know what to do with. I'd have wet dreams about girls in school, the usual sort of thing. It was around then that my very sexually liberal parents noticed I was having some trouble and decided they'd help me out. My parents are (or were at the time) unusually sexually active. My father the horny-but-reserved science nerd with a massive Playboy and Penthouse collection (and apparently unusually high testosterone count, as we later found out), my mom the ex-hippie/ex beach-bunny on her third husband, they love each other deeply and showed it. For years I had the room underneath theirs, and I'd be up at night listening to the cheerful squeak of the bedsprings as they played (indications of a healthy marriage; they're still together). Their bookshelves held titles like Our Bodies, Ourselves, Where Do I Come From, The Sensual Woman, and books by Philip Roth and Terry Southern, all of which I pored over with fascination.

My mom decided on an unusual way to take me in hand. There was no manual at the time for how to go about that kind of thing, so she decided to have my dad teach me how to masturbate. She figured better that than my running around getting girls pregnant. Hell, she even bought me my first Playboy.

When my dad taught me to masturbate, we talked about it for a while; he explained how wet dreams worked, let me know how male genitalia worked and ran me through what to expect, then he jerked me to my first full orgasm; I was really surprised to see all that white stuff spurt out of my penis all over the carpet. He then showed me his penis for comparison and reference, which was obviously much bigger at the time. That was it for that. However, this didn't quite have the intended effect over the long term; the wet dreams after that were sometimes about him. I had the usual Oedipal thing, with a bit of Elektra thrown in as well, which made for a certain amount of confusion. Once I found my dad's banker's boxes full of porn mags, I spent a staggering amount of time with those, and also cleaning up the copious amounts of juice produced in the endeavor.

As my adolescence progressed and I started hanging out with my first high-school best friend and trading porn back and forth, the softer stuff gave way to harder, Hustler and dodgier titles; the open porn and ads started me thinking more about the dick side of the force. As I read about gay sex, crossdressing, and the shallow-end-of-the-pool aspects of non-vanilla sexuality in early high school, my sexuality got more complex. My inspirations have often come from non-obvious places; even a MAD magazine special issue on sex and violence clued me into fetish and enema play, vintage porn flicks, and BDSM! I found myself raiding both my parents' underwear drawers, trying on my mom's clothing and sniffing both of their underwear, and the like. I'd also experimented with putting a vaguely phallic deodorant container up my ass, which agreed with my more than I'd expected.

In that vein, in the second year of high school, during a campout with said best friend, after a lengthy session of looking at porn, he fumblingly fucked me for the first time; it was nothing to write home about at the time (would have worked better with lube, in retrospect, but he was smaller than me so it worked anyway), but obviously I liked the experience enough to repeat it later in life. We didn't fuck again, but I'd suck him off during almost every sleepover after that. Eventually he got weirded out by it and started hanging out with other guys, and I didn't see him much after that. I found out years later that he later did a gay prostitution stint in another state for a while.