It’s sad for straight guys. I did not like straight guys when I started writing a sex advice column. I started feeling so sorry for straight guys after about two years of reading their letters. If there is anything girlie or gay that intrigues you or interests you, it can undermine your heterosexual bona fides with other straight people, other straight guys. It induces a kind of paranoia in straight guys, that they are not sort of comfortably straight. Not all of them—individual results may vary—but they are sort of paranoid.
I used to pretend to be straight when I was fifteen years old, and really try to perform straight. I see so many straight guys who are adults who are still doing that: still trying to convince the world that they are straight. Nobody walks around once they are out of the closet and gay going, “I have got to convince everybody. I have to walk this very careful line with my playing gay, so that nobody thinks I am not gay.” Straight guys have to walk this line all their lives.
JUDY GOLD—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
People ask, “When did you know?” I knew when I was three that there was something different about me. That I wasn’t like everyone else. Three.
I was cutting my hair. I wanted to look like a boy. I made everyone call me Ringo. My grandmother’s like, “Judith, why are you cutting your hair off?” I just wanted to do boy things. I had no desire to play with dolls. I knew that there was something different about me, and I had different feelings about the girls. You don’t know until you’re an adolescent, and you become a sexual person, “That’s what it is.” And in the 1970s, you do not tell anyone.
My first big crush was Barbara Eden. I just loved her, I thought she was the most beautiful thing. Then, of course, teachers, and then of course Barbra Streisand, and I loved Joan Rivers too. I loved outspoken females. Phyllis Diller and Totie Fields, I loved those women.
KEVIN ALLISON—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR, PODCAST HOST
I’m about three and a half years old, when I’m looking at this statue, this Hummel statue of a boy with his pajama bottoms falling off. You can see his butt. I’m thinking, “Oh my God.” I grabbed that statue and started running around the house, saying, “Look at this! You can see his heinie!”
And my brothers and sisters laughed, and then I thought, “Well, the neighbors, they ought to know about this too,” so I start running out of the house to be like, “Look! Look! You can see his heinie!” All of the sudden, I feel my mom grab my collar from behind and bring me back into the house.
She said, “I’m just going to take this and put it where it will be safe,” and it was gone. It was never to be seen again.
I could see a look in her eyes that was like, fearful. Put the kibosh on this.
JIM NORTON
My first turn-on was pee. I can remember being a kid and there was a brother and sister. I was either first or second grade. I lived in Edison, New Jersey. He was my age. She was a year older. I would get them both at different times. I would lay behind the shrubs and convince them to sit on my face because they both had pissed their pants a lot. I would just breathe in the urine smell through their pants. That was one of my first turn-ons as a kid, the smell of piss.
It’s animal on some level. We’re probably supposed to be turned on by it. When you look at it, animals mark territory. It’s used for something. It would turn me on. One girl I dated used to piss her panties for me. I was like in my midtwenties. I would tell her, “I want to smell it,” and just fucking lick her pussy after she had pissed her panties. I’m not into cross-dressing, but one time she pissed her panties for me, then she asked me to put them on, and I did. It was the dirtiest thing I had done until that point. She kind of blew me through her own piss panties. I know that probably has really ruined her since then, but to me it was just the start of really enjoying piss.
KEVIN ALLISON
When I was five, I convinced the boy next door, who was also five, to take our clothes off. I said, “Wouldn’t this be funny if we took off all our clothes”—I had this all planned out—“and ran around your basement listening to Walt Disney’s Cinderella soundtrack?”
“Cinderelly! Cinderelly!” And then at one point, I said, wouldn’t it be funny if you bent over and spread your butt so I can see what’s inside there, and that moment was like a holy grail moment for me.
He turned around and I had an erection. I was not familiar with that. He was pointing at it, laughing, and I was like, “Oh my God! what the hell is this?” And soon after, his mom came down and discovered us. And I was not allowed to hang out with the kid next door anymore.
Marc
So, no Hummel figures, no neighbor kid.
Kevin
Yeah.
JIM NORTON
I can count ten sexual partners before fourth grade. I’d say almost all of them boys, a couple girls. Oral sex. I vaguely remember someone trying to fuck me in the ass. I think they were my age. I don’t count it as abuse because it was consensual between kids.
I didn’t get an erection at that age. I didn’t know what they were. My friend Shawn got hard-ons. He would blow me and I wouldn’t get an erection. I would do him and he would get an erection. I had no idea why his penis did that. It felt good and it was secretive. We love the secretive nature of it. Girls scared me because they had something different than me.
I kicked a girl named Sue in the pussy when I was a kid. She stole my tire. I was rolling a big car tire and she took it because she was one of the dyke girls in the neighborhood. I kicked her right in the crotch and she bled. I think that fucked me up with the vagina for a while. I’d never forget her. She might have just pissed, but I know there was wet in the front of her pants. That whole area became horrifying for me.
KEVIN ALLISON
I was the space cadet, the black sheep, the gay kid in the family.
My brother Peter said to my mom, “He has got to sign up for football or he’s going to become a fucking fag.” Second grade, I’m eight years old and I’m taking football practice, and after like eight weeks of practice or whatever it is, the season’s about to begin and I still don’t know how football is played. I asked the coach, “Excuse me, before we have the first game, could you just lay out on a chalkboard, like, how does this game work?”
He said, “One team is trying to get the ball to this side of the field and the other to that side of the field,” and I was like, “That’s it?”
My father loved opera and football. And he would take my brothers to the football games and take me to the operas. So I just assumed that football was as meaningful as opera. Like, if you understood it, it was going to be like understanding Wagner.
JIM NORTON
I’ve always felt fucked-up. I know I am. It’s not normal, dude. It’s not normal. You know what I mean? Normal people don’t do that. To me, normal is not a judgment. Normal just says it’s the norm. It’s common. I don’t judge. For me to like piss, it is abnormal, but I don’t judge it as terrible. I don’t judge what I consider abnormal. It’s just not common.
SACHA BARON COHEN—COMEDIAN, WRITER, PRODUCER, ACTOR