We went along like this for a while, making love whenever the opportunity arose, and never talking about it. I went on seeing her mother socially, and was of course more disinclined than ever to make a pass at her. Although she preferred things this way, I suspect it would have grown awkward in time; no matter how much a woman may want to keep a relationship platonic, she will eventually come to resent the fact that her partner in the relationship doesn’t try to change her mind, seeing his acquiescence as a negative comment on her desirability. I managed to eliminate that possible trouble spot and preclude suspicions of my friendship for her daughter by one neat conversational ploy. Through spontaneous inspiration, I confided to her, rather haltingly, that I was a homosexual, that I was unwilling to risk exposure where I lived but went periodically to New York to meet like-minded chaps. Instead of putting her off, it made her feel easier with me than ever, and certainly let her think her daughter was safe in my company.
Linda’s father had remarried and moved halfway across the country. Accordingly, her mother was happy to have me play a paternal role, and I was able to take the girl to zoos and movies now and again. Nor did we always actually go to the zoo or the movies.
I began to meet her after school. I would park my car at a certain corner, and she would come to me if she could. If she wasn’t there by a certain time, I would drive home again, and if I was unable to show up, she would wait for a certain amount of time and then go home herself. At first I took her to motels. That was less than ideal. Then I rented a house on the far side of town from where she lived.
After we finally separated, I went on paying rent on that house for six months. There was no lease. But it was a link with her that I was not quite willing to sever, and it seemed worth the hundred and fifty dollars a month it cost me to maintain it.
• • •
Linda was the youngest partner Keith had ever had, with the other four ranging from thirteen to fifteen. She was also totally without experience of any sort before their meeting. For a long time their sexual relations were confined entirely to his performance of cunnilingus upon her, and he was perfectly willing to maintain that type of relationship permanently. At times his excitement in the act was sufficiently keen so that he ejaculated spontaneously in its course. When this did not happen, his pleasure was in no way impeded, nor was the lack of a climax physically or mentally frustrating to him. While he found thoughts of coitus or fellatio with the girl attractive, his contentment with the relationship as it was, and his disinclination to introduce any activity she might find distasteful, kept him from moving to enlarge their sexual repertoire. When they began to experiment, it was more at her suggestion than at his.
• • •
It was not long before she was having complete orgasms. She was always an extremely sexual person and soon became accustomed to having frequent relations, to the point where she felt deprived if we were apart for more than a few days. She also enjoyed talking about sex, not so much in a provocative way, but in order to gain information.
One day, after we had made love, she told me how much she had wanted me the day before and how her excitement had made her feel jittery. I told her that when one was in such a state one could take matters into one’s own hands. She had never masturbated and didn’t know anything about it, so I fingered her elaborately and then taught her to finger herself. She thought it was deucedly clever, but confided that she liked my finger better than her own, and my tongue best of all.
Then she asked me if that was what I did, if I touched myself. I said that I did sometimes, but didn’t always feel in need of it. She asked if I would show her what I did. I was oddly embarrassed but strove to comply but couldn’t become erect. Then it was her suggestion that, since fingering had felt better for her when we used my hand instead of her own, perhaps I would enjoy it more if she used her hands on me. I showed her what to do, and it was very pleasant. She was thrilled by the ejaculation, then licked a stray pearl of semen from her wrist and enthused over the taste.
This became standard procedure—I would eat her, then she would jerk me off, unless I had already come, in which case she would be disappointed that there was nothing left for her to play with. She was quite delighted with my penis, and one day after school presented me with what she had produced that day in free period, a surprisingly lifelike drawing of my sexual apparatus in a state of preparedness.
We tried new tricks, and by the time she was fifteen had run the full gamut of noncoital pursuits several times over. We often mimed intercourse, with my penis rubbing over her downy mons or nestled between her thighs; in this fashion we tried out all the usual postures of fucking without ever having penetration. She became a very adept fellatrice and teased that she would grow fat from swallowing so much of my discharge.
All so lovely. And yet, if I had never done more than play the bee at her blossom, I would have been utterly content forever.
We finally started fucking when she was fifteen. We had made up our minds sometime previously that we ought to do it. She had girlfriends who were already fucking their contemporaries, and she felt it was silly for us to be missing anything. I managed to obtain birth-control pills for her, and subsequently we began to screw. The first several times we tried it, I was impotent. I had a very great fear of injuring her, a fear that had probably been very much warranted when we had first met, as she had been much smaller then. Finally we did manage to get it all together, as the children say, and she had no pain at all, not even the first time we did it. Yet in the years that followed we were more likely to have oral sex than coitus. We both seemed to enjoy it more.
For a very long time our relationship was a completely private matter. I spoke about it to friends, yourself included, but this was largely a matter of using them as a sounding board. They didn’t know Linda, there was no way they could come to know her, so it hardly was significant that they knew. Linda did not talk to anyone. I find this quite remarkable. Girls that age tell each other everything; an act isn’t real for them until they’ve confided it to a chum. Yet she seemed at least as aware as I of the need for secrecy.
I gradually saw less and less of her mother. It surprised me that I was as much at ease with the woman as I was, in view of the relationship I was having with her daughter.
I found out, some years after the whole thing started, that at the onset Linda had taken it very much for granted that her mother and I were having an affair. She never mentioned it or alluded to it, but merely assumed it and kept it to herself. No doubt that was part of my attraction; the perfect oedipal triumph of taking a man away from her mother, without the incest-guilt of having sex with her real father.
Sometimes I wondered if I would lose interest in Linda when she matured. Since her youth was such a large part of her allure for me, would what captivated me at eleven pass its peak at fourteen? Would Linda at seventeen be over the hill in my eyes?
This did not happen. I wanted her as much the day I ended our relationship as I did the day I began it. Her approximation of a physical ideal may have engendered the whole affair, but her maturity did nothing to diminish the attraction.
By the time she was fourteen or so, there were a few friends of hers to whom she introduced me. They were charming girls, and I might have been interested in them had I not grown so utterly monogamous as Linda’s lover. I don’t know just how much they knew of our relationship. They knew that I was Linda’s special friend, and a secret friend, but just what they guessed about our sexual relationship I do not know. I had dreaded meeting her friends, thinking that I would feel my age in their company. I was happily surprised to find myself very much at ease with them and able to talk their language well enough. Nevertheless, Linda and I spent most of our time alone together.
She began to date boys her own age about the same time that she and I began to screw. I was honestly never jealous, and she assured me that she was not interested in any of the boys she dated. I don’t know to what extent she had sex with them. She
never went out with one boy to the exclusion of others. I’m sure she kissed and petted, but I don’t think she ever had much heavy sex with anyone but me. This may well be a conceit on my part, however. I can’t know for sure, nor did it very much matter to me at the time, and it surely doesn’t matter to me now.
I must confess that there was a time, during perhaps the final two years of our relationship, when I rather hoped that Linda would become very much involved with someone her own age. I had already begun to realize then that this relationship of ours could not possibly go on, that in Linda’s interest it would have to be discontinued. I was by no means ready to take steps to end it, and indeed could not help wanting us to be closer than ever, to spend more and more of our time together. I felt, though, that if she found someone else she could be the one who broke things off, and that I would prefer for it to happen that way.
There’s much about our relationship I cannot get across, either because I can’t put words to it or because I don’t much want to. I can’t convey the pleasure we took in each other’s company both in and out of bed. I can’t explain properly just how close we became, how important each of us was to the other. Nor can I convey the special delight of being a girl’s lover over a period of years, in the course of which one watches as she blossoms from girlhood to young womanhood. It is a special pleasure, and one which defies description.
I find myself wondering seriously just where I will go from here. I’m sure it would be very easy for me to find a replacement for Linda, some other eleven- or twelve-year-old angel. I know how to go about it. Oddly—or is it odd?—I haven’t tried to pick up a young child since then. I’ve noticed girls who look eminently approachable, and I feel a quickening within myself when this happens, but I do nothing about it.
I like to think that, in a few years’ time, I might run across Linda, or might actively seek her out, and she’ll have had time to become her own person, and then we can, oh, take up where we left off. It’s an appealing fantasy, as unlikely as it may be. The haunting companion to this fancy, though, is that I’ll meet her only to discover that we’ve grown too far apart over the years, that there’s nothing left for us. I would think that would be very disturbing, probably disturbing for both of us.
Families That Play Together
The letters that follow comprise either an exceptional case of polymorphous perversion or an equally interesting case of literary exhibitionism. My inability to determine precisely which is the case has kept me from making use of this material for some time; The Lady and the Tiger worked nicely as fiction, but in factual writing the reader shouldn’t have to write his own last paragraph.
Further reflection has convinced me that readers might enjoy trying to determine whether Roger’s letters are a record of an unusual life or the invention of an unusual mind. It seems to me that, whether the whole thing is gospel truth or a pack of lies, it is in any case interesting and relevant.
One calls to mind a pivotal incident early in Freud’s career. As he pioneered in psychoanalytic research, he was struck by the fact that an astonishing proportion of his analysands reported to him that they had been seduced in early childhood, generally by the parent of the opposite sex. He thus began to theorize that this was a leading cause of neurosis.
Then he came to discover that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, this seduction had not taken place at all. His patients were lying to him. He was appalled, and immediately thought that all his research was wasted, that any theory stressing this seduction was nonsense, since the seduction had not taken place.
It then came to him that the fact that this identical fantasy occurred in case after case had its own relevance, and that the discovery he had just made had enormous implications.
In a somewhat similar vein, though surely on a vastly less consequential scale, the material which follows is as useful if false as it is if true. While it would be nice to know for sure one way or the other, the reader can have fun—as I have had—working it out for himself.
January 19, 1969
Dear Sir:
I have just finished reading The New Sexual Underground and found it to be very interesting, particularly those chapters dealing with oral sex and incest.
However, in the several books I have read that deal with sexual variations, I have never found mention of the male bisexual in any detail, and only casual reference to them in yours. Usually a man who enjoys fellating another man is referred to as simply “queer,” and the act is not described in the same detail that cunnilingus is.
Personally I have found that most men are interested in being fellated, regardless of whether a man or woman does the honors. There are very few who will admit liking a man “go down on them,” although the same ones will brag about having a woman do it.
My brother and I are both bisexual and have been for as long as either of us can remember. We are both married and have been doing a lot of so-called “swinging” for almost ten years. That’s why I can’t quite believe the usual story of a fellow who goes to these sessions and then expresses revulsion for having a man “blow” him. I never ran into one, and I know a lot of swingers who are anything but “queer” that I have “frenched” right out of their mind.
We are in a similar class with your “Harrison family” in the book. I still have intercourse with my mother, who is now seventy-three, and have performed every variation of sex with her over a period of forty years. This applies to every member of our collective families, including the in-laws. We never have found reason to be ashamed of our relations. It’s quite interesting when we have an addition to the family by marriage.
Like the Harrisons, they know the story coming in, but my son-in-law of three years is still in a state of shock. His parents are the only in-laws who are not a part of our group.
I have been a fellator since I was six years old (and a good one, so I’m told). My brother was the first, and we still do a 69 at parties. Like the “Judy Wheeler” in your book, I get a terrific pleasure from sucking a penis, although I’m a man and certainly not a homosexual exclusively. I simply like the feel and taste of a penis, but I can also enjoy intercourse with a woman, as well as cunnilingus.
I have made a practice of spending a night once in a while at a local Turkish bath to find men and boys who are there for the sole purpose of getting a blow-job. It’s surprising whom you run into with their hair down and other things up. This is why I’m convinced that most men are phony when they express a distaste for getting their kicks off with another man.
If factual experiences such as these are of interest to you, I would be glad to give you details and, truthfully, get a lot of pleasure doing it.
Sincerely,
Roger
The Harrison family Roger refers to was discussed in The New Sexual Underground. Briefly, the Harrisons consisted of a widower, his two daughters and son, and his second wife, an accomplished swinger. The wife, polymorphously perverse, first introduced her husband to swinging in general, then in turn seduced both daughters and the son. Subsequently she arranged things so that her husband had relations with his daughters, and the daughters with each other and with their brother. When the daughters married, their husbands were introduced into the family circle.
At the time, I had no particular doubts concerning the veracity of Roger’s letter. While the life style he described was obviously not something that had leaped out of the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, I have come to learn over the years that the infinite variety of human sex lives is literally beyond belief, to the point where no one can truly invent anything that someone somewhere is not already doing.
I did doubt the precise truth of certain observations; male bisexualism is by no means universal in practice, and among swingers has always been considerably less common than lesbian activity. And while it is true that many male swingers will permit another man to fellate them, while refusing to return the favor, there is also a substantial portion who will refuse any bisexual activity whatso
ever.
However, it is also true that the incidence of male bisexualism is much higher among older swingers, to the point where many circles consider the practice virtually universal among couples over fifty. Without going into possible explanations of this phenomenon, let me just say that it, plus a natural enough human propensity for exaggerating the incidence of one’s own thing, led me to take Roger’s argument as at least truthfully intended, if not absolutely true in point of fact.
I answered Roger’s letter a few days after I received it, mailing my reply to the post-office box given as his return address. It was in a small Midwestern city that I never have occasion to visit. Since Roger was quite articulate and seemed willing enough to put any sort of details on paper—indeed, he had stated openly that he would get enjoyment out of such correspondence—I invited him to report to me at greater length.
I replied as follows:
28 January 69
Dear Mr. ———:
Thanks very much for your letter of 19 January. I found your remarks on male bisexualism most interesting, and would suspect that the manifestation of male bisexuality among swingers will come into increasing prominence in the coming years as more and more persons find themselves able to acknowledge heretofore forbidden desires. I do think, though, that a preponderance of swingers at the present time either repress these desires or tend to deny them after the fact.
I was also extremely interested in your statements regarding your family circle. It is my conviction that incestuous relationships in general deserve considerably more attention than they have been getting in the popular media, and have for some time considered doing a book on the subject; I have hesitated for two reasons—the relative unavailability of case material and the suspicion of my publisher that the audience for such a book would be severely limited. I rather doubt this second point, and would hope that the first could be overcome.
Beyond Group Sex: Doing Their Own Thing (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 9