Via Joe. My God., I see someone is having conniptions visualizing gay sex…

“Permit me to clarify the definition. Sodomy is one MAN inserting his genitals into the mouth or anus of ANOTHER MAN. Say it again. Say it out loud so your ears hear it. Picture it in your mind. Picture Barney Frank and Elton John in action. Barney Frank putting his genitals into Elton John’s. That is what they want to tell us is normal€¦no wait€¦tell our children is normal. Into that ‘union’ they are asking permission to place children. Would you let them put YOUR grandchild into a sodomy-based family? Why would you let them do it to someone else’s child? Have normal people lost their minds?” -Crackpot “Coach” Dave Daubenmire.

Normal people don’t obsess about the sex their neighbors are having Dave, particularly when it’s sex that turns them off.  You on the other hand, clearly can’t seem to get it out of your head.

You have issues Dave. Let me try to address one of them.  If you think opposite sex couples wouldn’t do anything that grosses you or “normal” people out then you really don’t know much about what other people are up to. Perhaps that’s for the best. All in all, I wish sometimes I didn’t know myself.

See Dave…when I was a young gay man, back in the early 1970s, there weren’t many places I could go to get my weekly copies of The Washington Blade or The Advocate. You may of course assume these are gay porn since they’re gay publications and we homosexuals don’t have lives, we just have sex. But they’re newspapers, classifieds and ads for various sexually graphic other publications notwithstanding. And being a young gay man living in a world which at that time was loath to admit that such as I even existed, I needed a source of news and information for my community.

Back then there were no gay publications to be found at the local bookstores and newsstands, let alone the public libraries. There was no Internet.  If you were a gay American back in the early 1970s and you wanted news and information concerning your community you didn’t have a lot of choice.  Luckily for me growing up in the Washington D.C. suburbs, there was Lambda Rising. But to get there I had to borrow mom’s car and drive downtown. The Metro subway system wouldn’t reach out to my suburban neighborhood for nearly a decade.

So I was always on the lookout for a place closer to home where I could find my gay newspapers. One day, running errands for mom, I drove past a small strip shopping center near Wheaton Plaza, and I glimpsed a sign: ADULT BOOKS.

Well we all know what “adult” means don’t we? So working up the nerve (and I must have driven around that block several times…) I parked the car nearby and strolled in. I think I had just turned 21 but I might have been only 20 and in any case in Maryland then I only needed to be over 18.

The bookstore was small, a tad rundown, but neatly organized.  There were a few customers inside.  The front area of the store was your usual newstand layout with various magazines and newspapers on the shelves.  As you moved toward the back you saw more and more straight skin magazines of the Playboy/Penthouse sort.  Your usual softcore men’s magazine stuff.  I don’t think Playgirl had yet started publishing.  There was a door in the back with a sign over it that said You Must Be 18 or Over To Enter and a nice older lady sitting at a counter beside it. It took me a few minutes of wandering close, pretending to look at the other magazines before I worked up the nerve to enter that door. I’m certain the old lady at the counter had seen first time customers doing that dance many, many times before and she wasn’t fooled. She knew where I was headed.

Oh look…another room…I think I’ll have a look inside… Inside the door was another room about the same size as the front one.  The light in there was a bit harsher and the shelves seemed starker somehow. Nearly all the titles were wrapped in plastic, presumably to make people pay to enjoy their contents.  But the covers…oh gosh…

As I said, I was 20, maybe 21 and I thought I knew everything there was to know about how to have sex.  Well…no.  As it turned out, there were Lots of other ways.  Lots and Lots and Lots of other ways.  Being a gay guy I felt somewhat enlightened and tolerant by the fact that the thought of heterosexuals getting it on really didn’t bother or gross me out.  But clearly what I had been imagining was only the Reader’s Digest version.  Here before my eyes was the unabridged, and little Baptist boy me was horrified.  No…I won’t go into details.  The details aren’t important.

Eventually I worked my way clear to the back where, in a corner, was the Much smaller gay section. Once more I beheld a universe of sexual possibilities I really had absolutely no interest in, and many of which to be perfectly honest grossed me out considerably.  But I must also honestly admit there were some magazines back there that definitely tweaked my interest. Unsurprisingly these were the ones that matched the imaginings of sex I’d had since my hormones started percolating. Some of the guys in them were beautiful. During later visits I would actually buy a few of these.  But that wasn’t my goal just then.  Mostly I just wanted to see if I could get my newspapers and be out of there.  And sure enough, right at the very bottom of one of those shelves, were copies of the Blade and The Advocate, and nearby, a couple gay softcore titles I’d never seen before.  Playboy could sit in the front, but gay softcore had to sit with the straight hard core porn because…well…it was gay after all.

I much preferred going to Lambda Rising, but for about the next decade, when I couldn’t get downtown, I made the trek to ADULT BOOKS and got my newspapers.

So…dig it Dave…for almost a decade I had to walk a gauntlet of heterosexual pornography just to get my damn newspapers.

I am so sorry for you.  I mean…a coach for goodness sakes…and here you are like a freshly minted teenage boy so fascinated, so completely preoccupied with sex, and yet blissfully naive about it all.  How did that happen to a guy your age?  The thought of one man having oral sex with another grosses you out does it?  I could tell you things that heterosexuals do that would curdle your milk Dave.  You poor sorry soul.  I have a suggestion.  Never…Never…order up one of those adults only channels next time you’re on the road without your wife.  You might have a heart attack.