Friday, August 31, 2018

I Spend the Night with Calvin and His Four Brothers

Calumet City, Illinois,  February 1982

When I was an undergraduate at Augustana College, there was  no place to meet gay men except for Rock Island's only gay bar, the Hawaiian Lounge.  I was too young to get in, and besides, bars were scary to a Nazarene.  Of course, I met dozens of guys in class, at the campus radio station, and at my job in the Student Union, but how to tell if they were gay?

I obviously couldn't come out to them, and they would never come out to me.  So I tried a noncommittal reference to gay people, to judge their reaction:

"I visited Los Angeles two years ago. Very interesting. Sights you'd never see in Rock Island, like gay guys walking around openly on the street." 

Most of the time, my target said "Gross!  Those freaks should all be taken out and shot!  Fortunately, there aren't any  in Rock Island.  I couldn't stand being in the same city with one!" 

Straight.  Time to make an excuse and leave.

A few said: "I don't know...I mean, they're sick, they're disgusting, and all that, but, really, they're not hurting anybody. Why not just let them alone?"  

Straight.

But one guy in a dozen, or one guy in a hundred, abruptly changed the subject: "Los Angeles, huh?  So, did you meet any movie stars?"  

The hesitancy about discussing gay people at all meant that he was gay.


Calvin (not his real name) abruptly changed the subject.  He was a freshman physics major who somehow enrolled in my upper-division Eastern Religions class, tall and thin with gangly hands, a round face, unruly reddish hair, and smooth pale skin. A tight swimmer's build, but not particularly athletic.

I'm not particularly into redheads with pale skin.  I prefer black guys, Asians, Arabs, or dark, swarthy Mediterraneans.

But Calvin was probably the only other gay guy on campus.  You take what you can get.

But in order to ask him out, I needed an activity, and it was hard to find a common interest: he didn't like science fiction, comic books, languages, or the paranormal.  Actually, he wasn't much into anything.  He was taking an overload of 21 credit hours, mostly hard classes that required endless hours with textbooks and calculators.

It was also hard to find a time to ask him out.  Augie classes met Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday, leaving Fridays off, and every Friday morning at 7:00 am, he got into his car and drove home for the weekend.

After a few weeks of ruminating over how to get to stage 2, from "finding out that he's gay" to "asking him out," Calvin asked me!

I mentioned that I was applying to graduate school at the University of Chicago in linguistics and Byzantine Studies, and I wanted to go tour the campus.  But I didn't relish the idea of driving all the way to Chicago and back on the same day.

"Why don't you come home with me this weekend?"  Calvin asked.  "We can go up to the campus on Friday, and then see the sights on Saturday and Sunday."

A weekend, for a first date?  I was too naive to realize how risky that would be.

We actually drove to Chicago with two other guys, so Calvin and I couldn't have much of a conversation. I discussed my ex-boyfriends, Fred and the Priest with the Pushy Mom

The campus was beautiful, Medieval, like Oxford.

But then we started driving.  I thought Calvin lived "in Chicago."  He lived in Calumet City, a suburb 18 miles south, 45 minutes away during rush hour.

Stuck between 3 major highways and Indiana, its motto is "We Love This Town!"  It smelled   bad all the time, due to auto exhaust, overindustrialization, fertilizer factories, oil refineries and marsh gas from the Prairie and Marsh Nature Preserve.  It was once known as Sin City, for its taverns, brothels, and go-go clubs.

It was also known for its Catholics. Calumet College of St. Joseph, affiliated with the Missionaries of the Precious Blood, with 1000 students, in Whiting, Indiana. Across the street from industrial blight.

Calvin lived in a modest three-bedroom house with his parents and FOUR BROTHERS.

All in their teens or early 20s!  All ginger, with pale swimmer's bods.  It was like Ron Weasley's house.

Who cared about my date with Calvin.  I wanted a ginger-boy five-way!

Going down on two at the same time while a third goes down on me, with an additional cock in each hand.

Doing interfemoral with one while kissing another.

Kissing one while another was going down on me.

Watching one plow into the other while giving a blow job to a third, and me rubbing off against the third guy's butt.

Organizing them in a line, from biggest to smallest, and going down on each in turn.

The possibilities were endless.

We had dinner -- fish sticks -- with a "Hail, Mary" first.  Watched tv.  Discussed the brother's various girlfriend prospects.  Then bedded down, Calvin and I with the two older brothers in a room with two bunk beds.  Some hard smooth chests and well-packed underwear.

And...nothing else.

No five ways.  No kissing.  Not any beating off, that I could see, and I waited up half the night to see it.

On Saturday, we went sightseeing up in Chicago, mostly sights that I had seen before, like the Museum of Science and Industry.  Bedtime, the same: hard smooth chests, well-packed underwear, but no kissing, no sex, no masturbation.

On Sunday, we went to a Catholic Mass, had lunch, and drove home.  I had never been alone with Calvin for an instant.

I was too frustrated to bother with Calvin again.  Besides, spring break was coming up, and I was busy with classes and grad school plans.

NOT Byzantine Studies, which would forever be associated in my mind with the three guys asleep in bunk beds, with me not being allowed to kiss, cuddle, or go down on any of them.


I recently looked up Calvin on the internet.   He lives in Portland Oregon, with his wife and five kids.

Was I mistaken about him being gay?

Oh, well.  His sons in their 20s and 30s.  One of them has got to be gay.

Monday, August 27, 2018

The Truth about the Formosan Penis

Montreal, July 1998

My doctoral program in New York (1997-2001) was not only about studying sexuality.  I spent a lot of time seeking out ethnic groups with legendary penises:

The Basque, reputedly the largest in the world.

The Bushman, reputedly always in a tumescent state.

And the Formosan of Taiwan.

When I first moved to New York in 1997, I had to live in a grad student apartment, where I was assigned 3 roommates: Max, the most obnoxious guy on the planet; a beefy Turkish guy who mostly kept to himself; and a Taiwanese guy named Huang, who also happened to be a fellow grad student in the Sociology Department.

Huang was not nearly as muscular as Max, but also not as obnoxious.  His only faults: he occasionally had a girl over to giggle in his bedroom, and he called his family back home every Saturday at 4:00 am.

In each case I could hear him quite clearly through the wall.

My Mandarin was limited to Wǒ xǐhuān zhōngguó rén, "I like Chinese men,"  but at least I could recognize the language.  And when Huang spoke to his family, he wasn't speaking Mandarin.

Turns out that he was fluent in Mandarin (and Hokkien, French, and English), but his native language was Paiwan, from the Formosan family, related the Tagalog of the Philippines and the Javanese of Indonesia.

There are about 400,000 Formosan aboriginals in Taiwan, about 2% of the population, mostly living in the mountainous south.

"We get discrimination," Huang told me.  "The Chinese think yuánzhùmín are uncivilized, barbarians.  Like the Indians in America."

There are statues of muscular, half naked Formosans all over Taiwan, like the statues of Native Americans in the U.S.

The Formosan Aboriginal Cultural Park in Yuchi, about 150 miles south of Taipei, invites Chinese tourists to see aboriginals performing traditional arts and native dances, like the pow wows in the U.S.

"But the Chinese woman like us," Huang added with a grin.

"Oh, why is that?"

"Yuánzhùmín men are bigger than Chinese men." He pointed to his crotch.  "Dá jībā!"  Apparently that meant big penis.  

I reddened, shocked that a straight guy would be comfortable enough to discuss his penis size with me.   Or maybe he was bisexual, and expressing interest.  "Well -- I'm sure some of the Chinese men like Formosan dá jībā, too."

"No, they are jealous."

Not bisexual!

"When you tell a woman you are yuánzhùmín," Huang continued, "She always ask if the stories are true, and she want to see it."

"Well - are the stories true?"  I asked.  "Can I see it?"

"No, no, not for gays." He giggled. "Just for women."

I'm not usually deterred so easily, but after Huang's startling display of confidence, I felt guilty about plotting any complex schemes to get a glimpse of his jībā.  

Maybe I could see it by accident?

No -- he didn't go to the gym, and he didn't strut around the apartment in a towel.

When I moved out of graduate student housing to a place in Manhattan, I lost hope of ever finding out if the stories about Formosan men are true.

But my hope was restored in July, shortly after I returned from my trip to Estonia with Yuri and Jaan.  Some of the sociology students drove up to Montreal for the International Sociological Association World Congress, and Huang and I shared a hotel room.

Surely he would change clothes in front of me, or sleep in revealing briefs.

No -- he changed clothes in the bathroom, and slept in pajama bottoms.  Not even a bulge was visible!

One night I was planning to go to the Keynote Speech, then "out" (actually to the Oasis, where I met the Muscle God and his Wingman).  I told Huang I would not be back until after midnight.

But after the Keynote Speech, I realized that I had left my jacket in the hotel room -- it was rather chilly in Montreal -- and rushed back upstairs.

I slid the key card through the slot and pulled the door open.

The first thing I noticed was cheesy 1970s music.

The second was the heterosexual porn playing on the tv.

The third was Huang lying on his bed, naked, doing what heterosexual men do when they watch porn.

He yelled and pulled the covers over himself.  But he was still tenting.

"I forgot my jacket," I said, stepping forward to grab it from the coat rack.

"I'm sorry...I'm sorry....I thought you are not coming back until very late."

"Don't worry about it.  By the way, you're right -- it really is a dá jībā."

I'm certainly not going to make a joke about Huang and hung, but he was.

See also: The Secret Identity of the Elevator Hookup

L

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