February, 2003

Sometimes people spend a lot of energy denying an essential part of themselves, concealing it or resisting it, thinking it is a weakness or worse, an immorality or an affront to God. There was a time when I thought I had lost my faith. It seemed there had been so many unanswered prayers, undeserved penalties, precious things ripped away for reasons unknown, unexplained. The genesis of renewal of my faith began with the birth of my daughters. The first time I saw that first little girl, tiny, no bigger than a loaf of bread, I was in awe, in love, humbled by the miracle God can make from the oddments and olio of two human beings, knit together in a perfect small body. This first marvel was confirmed by the announcement that we had twins, a fact unbeknownst to us until the very moment of her appearance. She was as beautiful and unblemished as her sister. I remember, for a moment, I had this overwhelming feeling of wholeness. It was something I hadn't felt in a long time.

It's not that I haven't had a good life, because I have. I always remember no one loves me like Stephanie, it's a thought never far from my mind even when we argue. Success hasn't been a stranger either. I'm no Bill Gates, but I don't live under a bridge. I know I've had a privileged life; I didn't grow up in poverty or struggle to get an education. I have a faith in God, a wife who loves me, gorgeous children, a job I like and every material thing I could ever want. So when I began to contemplate and lament an event that happened thirty years ago, I felt very selfish, covetous and ungrateful. But still it was something that changed me, scarred me and made me incarcerate a part of my identity, my heart. I remember my father telling me that giving up that relationship was a small sacrifice on my part. He was wrong. Maybe I am weak but it was an onerous discipline I imposed upon myself to abandon that singular friendship. I had to buy into an idea that I had made a bad decision, had been immoral and hadn't loved but rather had given into a base instinct that was contemptible, lustful and common. Recently I've learned nothing could be further from the truth. This revelation has made me realize I've spent a lot of my life limping around with this self inflicted amputation, pretending it doesn't exist, that it does not cause me pain. I've discovered I forsook that freedom and innocence I had as a boy to express and give love instinctively, for a rigid and unforgiving false morality that mistakes complete unalloyed affection for a failure of virtue.

The beginning of this eye opening disclosure began in October of last year. After the events of September 11, I had kept my promise and called Hoop. I apologized for my stubbornness and arrogance, telling him I was wrong to have reduced our personal affinity to a business decision. Amazingly, Hoop wanted me to come back to Houston and resume my old job. I was stunned by his magnanimity and I accepted. We moved back to Houston in November 2001 and bought a home in a suburb outside the metropolitan area. The home we bought was in the midst of construction and we, or rather my wife, got to make a lot of the interior design decisions. I don't care much how a house looks on the inside as long as it has four walls and a roof to keep out the weather. However when it was completed Stephanie wasn't totally satisfied with how everything turned out. The dining room was a particular disappointment to her. It is a rectangular room with a trayed ceiling, chair railing and windows on two sides. Stephanie decided that what would make the room just right would be a special wall treatment. I think she may be a victim of HGTV, but that is an opinion I keep to myself. She wanted to do a faux finish technique called frottage. I've heard of trompe l'oeil, marbleizing, stippling and a lot of other challenging home decorating ideas I have to hire other people to do because I am so artistically impaired I can't do them myself, but I had never heard of frottage. A few days after she had told me of her decision, I was doing some work at home on my computer and I thought I would do a google search of the word. When I did I got several sites that described the technique, gave a step by step (do it yourself, screw it yourself) explanation and a site I had not anticipated. Perhaps this was one of those serendipitous events, fortuitous in the sense that I would soon be involved in a small journey of rediscovering a part of me I had come to revile. This site is dedicated to the advocacy of a masculine expression of physical, emotional and spiritual camaraderie that has been ignored by the prevailing cultures of 21st century America. The physical component is manifested sexually through a body to body contact that rejects the current gay community's preoccupation and promotion of anal sex. The act described on this site was called dick to dick and I found myself reading, slack jawed, details retelling what Phillip and I had done years ago. This communion of bodies was extolled as the ultimate bona fide physical articulation of affection between two men; fulfilling, cooperative, unselfish and mutually pleasurable. The emotional and spiritual components posited that this egalitarian and masculine act creates a bond between men that allows a closeness and fraternity denied most of us by our society, a society that denigrates men as less than masculine because they've had sex with other men.

What knocked me out most was a page of personal stories that recounted the stories of hundreds of men, some straight and some gay, who told of their discovery of frottage as youngsters and their continued, persistent fantasies involving it. The dawning knowledge that a lot of straight men had similar stories to mine was eye opening. That they still entertained thoughts or continued to practice this act was even more startling. The moderator took pains to explain that this was a natural, normal phenomenon among most healthy, well-adjusted men whether they were primarily heterosexual or homosexual. I had lived a long time with the idea that what Philip and I had done was wrong. My father had convinced me, I had convinced myself that I had suffered an awful moral failing by giving into the temptation of having sex with another boy. To hear other men say that they had done the same thing in almost the same way began for me the realization that what we had done was not only normal, but a pure and noble act of love.

I decided I would write the site and relate the story of Philip and me. I must have started this endeavor at least half a dozen times. Each time the memory and emotion would overwhelm me. The more I thought about it, the more the old anger, the old anguish of the separation would return. And then the dreams returned. They were intensely erotic, urgent and real. And they made me sad beyond tears. I knew I would have to commit the story to paper because I wanted someone to know what had happened. I was tired of going through life with this hole in my heart that would never heal. I had ignored it long enough that I thought it was gone, but a single memory, a single dream, a single thought of Phillip made me know it was there and as raw as ever. From my point of view, this was not a positive development in my life.

Finally I was able to work the story out of myself. It was one of the most difficult things I had ever done. That had been one of the most exhilarating, joyous, gratifying and love filled times of my young life. I had someone who I knew cared about me and the sex had been unbelievable, teeth rattling, physical and, to me, sacramental. It was a release that we shared together, in pleasure, in confirmation of our maleness. Now I know boys will do just about anything to get their rocks off and Phillip and I were no different, but the dick to dick, body to body melting together that we achieved and received from one another was like transubstantiation. A conversion of our bodies into the fullness and power of shared energy and experience that made us feel wholly alive, in control of the force that made us who we were. In all of the time we were together, neither one of us ever came alone, except for my little incident the first time; it was always almost in unison. We became that attuned to each other's bodies and desires.

When Phillip's father found us out, when he told my father about us, he made clear his intent to insure we were kept apart. My father became part of this plan to enforce the separation. But he never told me, a sixteen-year-old, how I was supposed to handle it, to live through it, to bear the burden of having taken from me the one person I loved more than anything in the world. I wasn't equipped to cope with the loss of his presence, his person, the million little things that made him Phillip and each iota I mourned. I don't think my father understood this because I never told him how I felt, but I feared his reaction if I had. I think he was blind to my descent into depression and then illness because he didn't know that I was in grief, in despair for what had been taken. On top of this, I was sure I had lost the love of my father. No more smiles upon waking, no more kisses or hugs going out the door, no more affectionate touches, no more messing up my hair, just the suspicious looks and lack of trust. The devastation to my young life seemed complete, I thought God had made a mistake when he made me the way I was, abnormal and aberrant. I was fortunate Stephanie came into my life when she did because even though I had recovered from my sickness, I was still foundering aimless, still struggling with the loss. She restored to me that sense of being loved and being worthy of love. But with that restoration, I turned my back on the other side of me. I not only turned away from it; I condemned it and myself because of it. It was difficult to reconcile such a dichotomy in my heart so I chose to ignore it. I spent the next twenty-five years running from an image of myself as something less than a real man because I had crossed some unspeakable boundary in my relationship with Phillip.

I believe in my heart today that what I shared with Phillip was a normal, pure, and heroic love. There is nothing in this world or the next that can take that assurance from me. I know also that I share a love with Stephanie than is incomparable in its beauty. Her forbearance of my emotional reticence bespeaks a love without question. My good fortune is that I have been the beneficiary of two significant and unselfish loves, eloquent in their differences and stunning in their similarities. One I still have and I am blessed beyond my pitiful ability to comprehend because of it. The other is gone but the pain of its loss is tempered by the knowledge that through it I learned I had the ability to love. In this I realize I have been whole all along, having experienced a passionate love of a man and a woman. Perhaps it is a selfish desire to want both to be present in my life at once.

I remember standing in the San Ysidro Creek with Phillip the water pushing past our bellies never to be seen by us again, it was traveling to the ocean, and I know that the love we had is like that water, gone and not to be regained, like the present misery the memory causes me. Some day it too will be gone, less sharp. Memory does persist but it may yet be changed to something more gentle, benign or even joyous. There may be the day when I welcome the vision of him in a dream, the two of us together as boys loving each other. Just not today.