8 Harvard Boys in My Bed

Growing up in a working-class neighborhood, we hated the North Side kids.  Their summer houses, their fancy cars, their birthday trips to Paris, their opera tickets, and especially their elitism, their snobbish disdain for my house, neighborhood, outfits, music, just about everything.

I still get upset when I hear snobbish derision of the Midwest, tv sitcoms, science fiction, or some other beloved region of my childhood.

Yet I love Harvard, the oldest and most elite university in the U.S., probably in the world.

Whenever I'm in Boston, I try to go to the campus, walk down Everett and Oxford and Divinity Street, across Harvard Yard.  I go into the Widener Library and Memorial Hall, down the corridors of the Law School and the Divinity School, pretending that I belong there, that I'm a student (or, more recently, a professor).

I am always shocked by how ordinary the buildings and classrooms and students look.  This isn't a shimmering otherworld of universal wisdom.  It could be any college anywhere.  It could be Penn State.

Ok, the freshman dining hall looks a lot like Hogwarts.

However, every Harvard student and graduate I've ever known has been crazy.  No exceptions.  Some are just quirky or eccentric, some are bona fide nutcases.

I've dated or hooked up with eight Harvard boys.  Each has had a fabulous physique or superb beneath-the-belt gifts.  Each has been certifiable.

In order, from least to most insane:

1. Jermaine, the Biggest Guy on My Sausage List, with an enormous Kovbasa++++.  He was remarkably kind and unfailingly upbeat, with just a few eccentric habits.  Like asking "Who's your Daddy" during the sexual act, getting offended at the suggestion that he might be a top, and skinny dipping in the icy Atlantic Ocean with his uncle.

2. Ari, the Linguist Who Wouldn't Shut Up, born in Israel, with Hebrew as his native language.  But he didn't want to talk about that.  He wanted to talk about the pronomials of Tlingit, a Na-Dene language of British Columbia and Alaska, and the gender categories of Jingulu, an Australian aboriginal language.  Yawn.  At least he was gifted beneath the belt, #6 on my Sausage List.

3. Hunter the Historian, an undergrad I hooked up with in the Widener Library while visiting Boston for a conference.  He was a history major who asked me an endless array of questions about life in West Hollywood in the 1980s.  Was I a Castro clone?  Did I go to the baths?  Did I use poppers? I kept trying to steer him toward the sexual encounter.  

4. Sammy Blowfish, the son of my old high school speech teacher, a new art history professor at a small private college in Iowa.  Other than his odd inferiority complex and his fixation on dalmatians (although he didn't own one), his only quirk was trying too hard, initiating sexual acts a dozen times in the 24 hours or so of our date.

5. Dr. Charles Bertan, professor of Restoration and Augustan literature at USC, uptight, conservative, so completely non-sexual that I couldn't imagine him with his clothes off, let alone actually having sex with anyone.  We went out on one date.

6. Ricky With a Y,  a cute twink with a hairy chest and a rather small penis, who spent our whole date psychoanalyzing me.  "Why do you think that is interesting?" "Why do you say that?"  "Tell me about your relationship with your father?"

Even in the bedroom: "Is your refusal to engage in anal really a failure to embrace your gay identity?  Do you subconsciously believe that if you don't top me, you're not really gay?"

He wasn't even a psychiatrist.  He ran a mail-order company that sold gay pride merchandise.

7.  Matt, Fred's Cute Young Thing, a recent graduate of Andover Academy and Harvard, who spoke with a nasal Boston accent, peppered his conversation with French and German, adored the opera, and complained that everything about me was bourgeois or jejune:  the Midwest, West Hollywood, USC, you name it.  Plus he gossiped about everybody and everything, providing the weird voices.

In the bedroom, he kept up a nonstop monologue of his progress: "I'm getting there...un peu plus, mon chevalier...a little more....je vais arriver...a little more...bien, bien...here I go..."

What did Fred see in this guy?

Well, he was cute.

8. Santa Claus, aka Bearnárd with an accent, in his 60s, chubby, with a white beard and a hairy chest.  He was actually David's hookup, not mine, but I tagged along to make sure everything was ok.

Bearnárd majored in biology at Harvard, but now he wrote fantasy novels about King Arthur and lived in a completely Medievalized apartment in the Castro. There were suits of armor, tapestries, halberds,and heavy oak tables.  He offered us "mead" to drink out of golden goblets (really).

It was Christmastime, so he explained to us the pagan origins of the yule log, the Christmas tree, the wassail bowl, chestnuts roasting over an open fire, and "Twelve Days of Christmas."

After all that, the hookup was rather a letdown.  I mostly watched and fondled a bit.

See also: My  Sausage List; 12 Teacher Hookups