I Catch Cousin Joe in the Act

Rock Island, December 1976

When I was in junior high, I caught my friend Brian trying to erase graffiti from the wall of Washington Junior High, "Brian gives free LBJs."  He wouldn't say what it meant, and I had no idea.  It endured season after season, year after year, ghostly pale but still legible, stubbornly resistant to the generations of custodians who attempted to erase it.  It was the biggest riddle of my childhood.

During the summer after 9th grade, I learned that the term "BJ" referred to oral sex, but I didn't make the connection to gay people until a cold Friday at Christmastime in 1976, my junior year at Rocky High, shortly after I discovered what "gay" meant.

Aunt Nora was visiting for the holidays, with two whole carloads of relatives.  Cousin Joe, a 22-year old college senior, was staying in the attic room with Ken and me, and his girlfriend Sandy was staying downstairs with my sister.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, everyone was out shopping or ice skating, but I didn't feel well and stayed in to read.  Joe and Sandy came in, said hello, then vanished somewhere into the house -- I assumed they went down to the basement rec room to play pingpong.

They weren't playing pingpong.

Soon I got a throbbing headache, so I took an aspirin and decided to go upstairs to bed.

The door at the bottom of the attic stairs didn’t lock, but the clatter of shoes on the bare wood was usually an adequate early-warning signal, giving you plenty of time to stop watching late-night tv, reading comics, or whatever else you didn’t care to have witnessed -- but today I was wearing only socks, and the throb in my head made me go slowly, one step at a time. So they didn’t hear me.

When I reached the top of the stairs, I saw Joe lying on the floor on his side of the room, and Sandy kneeling over him.  My first thought was that he had fainted. Then I saw a thick, heavy shaft the color of putty.  Joe's penis!

I had seen it several times before -- while changing clothes to go swimming, once while skinny-dipping.  I walked in on him in the bathroom when I was five.  It was always breathtaking.

Suddenly Joe saw me, pushed Sandy away, and quickly zipped up. “Um...we were....we were just..."   He was blushing red.

"I don't care, I'm sick."  I walked the five steps to the bed I was sharing with Ken, fell down face-first, and covered my head with a pillow.  "It's no big deal. You’re not the first person in this room to give a bj.”

They were both silent. I peered out from under the pillow to see them staring open-mouthed.

“What’s your problem?”


“You. . .give bjs?” Sandy asked.

“Of course I  give them!” I said angrily. “You think I’m a virgin? I’ve given them lots of times.”

Joe laughed. “Gee, you're dumb! Boys don’t give bjs, they get them.”

“No, I give them. . .boys give them.” My head was still throbbing, making it hard to concentrate.   "Why do you think it's called giving a bj?  Because you give your penis..."

"The girl gives the b.j. to the boy, Boomer."

“Well. . .to be fair, it doesn’t have to be a girl,” Sandy said. “Sometimes guys do give bjs.  At least they're sort of like guys."  She flashed a loose wrist.

My face burned as I realized what she was implying.

"Be nice!" Joe commanded.  He patting my shoulder.  "Boomer just got mixed up.  Don't tell Mom about seeing us...you know...ok?"

"Don't worry, your secret is safe with me."

"And your secret is safe with us!" Sandy managed to say before Joe grabbed her and dragged her down the stairs.

I lay in bed, mortified.  But now I understood -- LBJ, BJ with an "L" added.  Long ago some bullies had accused Brian of being gay. No wonder he worked so furiously to scrub the graffiti off!

It turns out that I was wrong.  Five years later, in the spring of 1981, I would discover that the phrase LBJ had nothing to do with sex.  But it did have quite a lot to do with being gay.

Mouth to Mouth Resuscitation

Rock Island, July 1970

Looking back to my childhood in Rock Island, it's hard to believe that we crammed so much activity into the 12 weeks of summer:
Camping in Michigan or Minnesota
Nazarene summer camp
Visiting relatives in Indiana
My birthday excursion
Vacation Bible School
The Denkmann School Carnival
The Pow Wow, the Celtic Festival, and the Beiderbecke Jazz Festival
Summer Enrichment Classes in astronomy, Spanish, archaeology, and music.

And when we got a free moment, swimming lessons.

When you live between two rivers, you learn to swim.  I took lessons every summer from 4th grade to 7th grade at the Longview Park Pool.

It was great.  Boys and girls classes met at different times, so my group consisted entirely of cute boys, including my best friend Bill, Greg (the vampire boy who gave me my first kiss), Craig (who joined the swim team in high school, and invited me to "get down" at his graduation party), and eventually my brother and his friends.

And the teacher was always a cute teenage boy, tanned and muscular in red Rocky High swim trunks.

Unfortunately, I never got to see them with their swim trunks off,  so no glimpses of a penis (the adults called it a shame).  We weren't allowed in the bath house (where the showers and lockers were).  After the lessons, we had to sit on towels, sopping wet, while one of our mothers drove us home.

It was fun learning to jump into the pool, float on your back, and kick against those floating surfboards.  Then the dog paddle, the breast stroke, the back stroke, and the side stroke.

But when we had to jump off the diving board into the deep end and swim to the side of the pool, I balked.

"It's over my head!  I'll drown!"

"It's easy," Matt, the hunky teenage teacher, said.  "You already know how to swim.  This is just in deeper water."

"I'll sink to the bottom and drown!"

I watched from several feet away as my friends, one by one, jumped off the diving board, sank into the bright clear water of the deep end, then rose to the surface and kicked their way across the pool to the side, where Matt was waiting to pull them out.

His muscular arms rippling in the sunlight....I wanted muscular arms around me....

But...no!  "It's over my head!"

Matt put a strong hand on my shoulder.  "Tell you what, Boomer.  I'll get into the water with you.  That way if anything goes wrong, I can carry you to the side."

Carry me?  "You promise?"

"Sure.  And even if you do drown, I know mouth-to-mouth resuscitation."

I didn't know what that meant, but I liked the mouth-to-mouth part.  I climbed onto the diving board.  It felt hot in the sun, and a little wobbly.  Matt, floating upright in the water, motioned me in.  He was smiling.

With a gulp I jumped off the board.  Cold, bubbly water enveloped me.  I couldn't hear, couldn't breathe.  The surface was miles away. How could I ever get up again? It was over my head!

Springing to the surface, I yelled "Help!"

Instantly Matt had his arm around me, and with two kicks had us on the side of the pool.  He lifted us up.  I felt a surge of joy as I clung to his chest, my hands clutching his thick hard shoulders.

I wrapped my legs around him.  Our swimtrunks pressed together.  I felt the thick mass of his shame beneath.

"See?  That wasn't so bad," Matt said, disentangling me. "It was actually kind of groovy, wasn't it?"

Flushed with a weird, tingly excitement, I nodded.  "Are you going to do mouth-to-mouth resuction?"

He laughed.  "Not this time, buddy.  You're fine."

I wouldn't figure "it" for years, but in retrospect, that was a major coming out moment.

Seeing a Father, Son, and Grandson Naked

Plains, April 2017

I see the Geezer in the gym a couple of times a week: in his 70s, tall, ugly, and out of shape, with thin arms, no chest, and a sagging belly.   He never lifts weights or does cardio; he hangs around the pool and sauna, reads newspapers in the lounge, and talks to his buddies about the deadly dull things heterosexuals talk about, the game last night and the bathroom remodeling and the new job of the grandson.

I could not be less interested.

But one day we were stripping down at the same time, and I got a nice view of his penis.

Horse-hung!  A good 5" soft, uncut, veiny, as thick as a beer can.  It must be a thick 10" aroused.

The best sausage sighting ever!

And, I thought, the Geezer must have had a lifetime of admirers, men and women who wanted his penis, and more, who wanted the person he was before bitterness, disappointment, poor health, and the awareness of his mortality dimmed his days and nights.

So I struck up a conversation, said I was doing research on the older guys who went to the gym (which was true), and looked for a gay connection in the Geezer's biography.   Later I did some online research.

The Geezer

In 1964, the Geezer was a University of Nebraska jock named Dave, a farmboy from a small town near Lincoln.

He was on the swim team, and won some awards.  Swimming was a lifelong passion.

There must have been homoerotic hijinks in college.  Frat parties, late night bull sessions, romantic friendships.  

The Geezer didn't mention any particular close friends.

He graduated in 1964, but was never part of the youth counterculture.  Quiet, driven, conservative, he went to work for Mutual of Omaha, the insurance company. He married his college sweetheart, and had two sons and a daughter.

Was he sneaking into the gay bars, or going to the tea rooms? 

We were neighbors!  Dave was living in Omaha in 1980, when I moved there with my first boyfriend Fred.  A 38-year old householder with a wife and three children.

But our paths never crossed. 

Apparently nothing else happened.  A life of heterosexual monotony.  House, job, vacations, holidays, kids' piano recitals, watching them, one at a time, marry and leave the house.

He retired in 2007, and moved to the Plains to be close to his grown daughter.

"What about your sons?" I asked.

"The oldest got a job in marketing.  He lives in Des Moines.  The other wanted to be an actor or a model or some such nonsense, so he moved to California.  We see him maybe once a year."

My gaydar perked up.  That was my story, too, fleeing from the cage of heteronormative expectations -- wife, job, house, kids -- for the freedom of West Hollywood. Maybe this was the Geezer's gay connection!

The Geezer's Son

The Geezer's Son, Rich, was not hard to track down.  I told him I knew his father on the Plains, and we lived in L.A. at the same time, so he was happy to reminisce.

Rich graduated from the University of Nebraska with a degree in dramatic arts in 1988, and immediately moved to Los Angeles.  He did some bodybuilding work, and some modeling and commercials.

In 1988 I was living in Los Angeles, and working for Muscle and Fitness.  Had our paths crossed?

No.  He never appeared in Muscle and Fitness.  He never posed for Mandate, or Advocate Men.  He never went to the Rage, or Basgo's, or the French Quarter, or Gay Pride Festivals.

Rich is straight.

But...he did pose for Playgirl in the early 1990s.  You can see his photo on the Adonis Men database: heavily muscled, flexing, his dark, thick penis hanging down, a good 5" soft.

He inherited his dad's beneath-the-belt gifts!

The Geezer's Son married in 1993, and abandoned his dreams of stardom.  He and his wife moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where he went to work in real estate  They had two sons and a daughter.

Nothing else happened.  Like his father, the Geezer's Son has lived a life of heterosexual monotony, with houses, yards, dogs, vacations, kids' piano recitals and football games and high school graduations.  He just celebrated his 50th birthday.

No gay connection!

Um...maybe the Geezer's grandsons?

Rich's oldest son got married right out of high school, and now has a job in construction, a house, a wife, and two kids, aged four and two.

The other is going to Augustana College in Rock Island!

My alma mater!  But why did he pick a small Lutheran college 2000 miles from home?

"I couldn't tell you," the Geezer says. "Maybe to be near family -- he's got cousins there."  

"What is he majoring in?"

"Oh, music or some such nonsense.  He's a dreamer, like his father.  Wanted to be a pop star like...what's her name...Adele?"

My gaydar goes off.

More after the break