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longer with the other’s wife. Hasn’t this fantasy begun to sound not so much a playful game between boys and girls but a match between two rivals to see who is the most masculine of all?

In fact, Harvey’s absolute control over the whole proceedings – interrupting other people’s orgasms by calling time, arranging bodies on the floor “the way I like best” – reminds me of one of those whistle-blowing cruise directors who infuriate everyone on board ship. This control allows him to get as close to the other guy as he can tolerate – but no closer.

When Harvey mentions he can feel Dick’s bare buttocks against his own ass, it is very much
en passant
. Otherwise, the men in this chapter do not touch at all.

The scene being created is a veritable
Saturday Evening
Post
cover for swingers: nice married couples getting together with other nice married couples. The closest the men get to sexual contact is entering the woman while the other’s semen in her is still fresh.

In Allen’s fantasy, the rules are even more rigid: The main action is between the women; the men are largely restrained to masturbating on the sidelines. The unspoken emotion here is that while the other man is a partner, he is also a possible competitor – and if he got too close, he might even become a lover. The rules make sure that what the two men share are the pleasures of the imagination and the eye, not of touch.

Close, but not too close.

These fantasies attempt to solve the problem of sexual variety and fidelity at the same time. In real life, my contributors tell me, it is rarely so easy. The Harveys, for instance, find that sex without emotion is a turnoff; but they never found a swinging couple with whom they could have a deep and lasting friendship as well.

Mr. and Mrs. Harvey may feel hemmed in by orthodox marital fidelity, but their solution is not to try for individual space for each within the marriage. This would threaten the symbiotic bond. What they want to do instead is extend the symbiosis outward, to include four people rather than just Men In Love

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two. Since most people go into swinging scenes precisely to break what they experience as the suffocations of too close relationships, the Harveys never found what they wanted.

Symbiosis between two people is difficult enough; trying to do it à quatre is almost impossible.

16

Straight Men, Gay Fantasies

Parents worry about masturbation, but anxiety about homosexuality is so great that it isn’t even mentioned, lest the injunction itself “give the boy ideas.” Kids who learn to masturbate on their own are thrilled and relieved to find the whole baseball team has been engaged in circle jerks for months. Goosing each other in the shower, mutual masturbation in the movies, reading dirty books and magazines together when there are no adults around – it’s all just horsing around, breaking the rules – that’s how boys are. Contrary to popular superstition, such early homoerotic play can strongly confirm gender identity.
“All the guys do it.”
Note the number of fantasies that begin with memories of real sex play with other little boys. The statements come in the context of early erotic gusto, kid stuff given as proof of virility today. They couldn’t wait to get into sex and took whatever outlet was available.

This is not to say that these men feel no guilt or anxiety today about their homosexual memories or fantasies; after all, they’re now grown-up, and know what society thinks of such ideas. But in their heart of hearts, they call themselves – and think of themselves – as heterosexuals. Even Wade (below), who feels it might have been nice if he had been born a girl, has a strong sexual preference: If he had been born female, he could have been a lesbian and had sex with women. But isn’t that what he does in real life today?

Some men spend their lives “forgetting” early physical contact with their own sex. (Some men, of course, never had it.) The men in this chapter not only remember, but like to play around with fantasies that release those boyhood energies again.

Another researcher might have put them into the next chapter on bisexuals, or combined both sets with a third Men In Love

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group who name themselves homosexual. This school of psychology is almost theological in conviction of sin: Thinking it is equivalent to doing it. If these men call themselves

‘heterosexual, who am I to say I know them better than they do themselves? They have the courage to face the dark mysteries and alternatives Eros offers us all. Why should our response be a kind of flight from freedom, an automatic labeling that slams the door on further thought?

JOCK

I am a boy of thirteen and have enjoyed sex with myself from about the age of nine or ten. I remember back to when my sister and my friend used to play doctor and explore each other’s bodies in the privacy of the bathroom. My sister and I used to take showers together, and I (at the time I didn’t know what it was) got a sexual pleasure out of sticking my finger in her bare pussy when I got the chance.

My first sexual experience was at the age of nine when I was in the bathroom fantasizing about a girl I had a crush on in school. I placed a stuffed dog between my legs and was humping it – not knowing what I was doing – acting on impulse. Suddenly, to my amazement, I felt a strange, wonderful sensation pass through my body, and my penis began to quiver. Since then I was on my way to more wonderful years of playing with myself, which I do until this day – at least twice a day. I know that sounds like a lot, but I really dig it.

Since my first pubic hair sprouted, I was fascinated with pubic hair. I remember seeing a boy one summer with no hair under his arms, and the next year with an armpit full. I watched impatiently as the hair slowly started to sprout from under my arm. Every chance I get, I look under people’s arms

– especially boys and girls of my age. I just get some sexual pleasure at seeing their hair.

One of my fantasies takes place when I insert tampons in my anus, while I masturbate. I imagine one of my friends Nancy Friday

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really giving it to me good up the ass. I’m not a homosexual, but I would love to really make it in every way possible with a couple of my friends.

In fact, a friend slept over one night, and asked me if I still jerked off (we jerked off together on another occasion), and I told him yes. We agreed we’d do it at his house that night.

Well, I was all hot the whole day and in the back of my mind, I had the fantasy of us jerking each other off, then leading into blowing each other. When the time came, he was reluctant to jerk off (I was using suntan oil-the best). Well, let me tell you, that night my dick must have been a foot long, and I said to hell with him, I’m jerking off! Well, he watched as I slowly hand fucked myself and shot my come at least five feet in the air. Then he started to masturbate. His dick was so tiny – about 3 inches – he could handle it with one hand –

even two fingers – when I had my hands full! He marveled at my whopper and asked what I did to get it so big. “Just practice,” I told him. I really got hot watching him jerking off that little practically hairless three-inch jobber, and finally he came. He was inexperienced and asked if that was it. I told him I’d show him how to jerk off professionally in the morning, but we never got around to it. Next time we meet up, I’ll be more daring and offer to masturbate him.

I always have dreamed of my girl friend and girls I know fucking, sucking, blowing and kissing me. Sex is on my mind constantly, but I’m still a virgin – not for long I hope.

CONNARD

I don’t know if I had any sexual fantasies when I was younger-I’m twenty – two now. My dad left us when I was a kid and for most of my life, it’s been my mother and me and a younger sister. We were raised kinda strictly in church with the hell – fire and damnation stuff, and it might have inhibited my sexual thoughts. I do remember an experience, though, that really happened to me when I was about seven Men In Love

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years old. One day my mom took my sister to get some shoes in town, so she had the next-door neighbor baby-sit for me. I guess she was about thirteen or fourteen. She and a girl friend played some games with me, and then she asked if I wanted to play a very special game. She and her friend took me out to their garage and took off my pants and tied me to the floor.

They both played with my penis, and tickled the daylights out of me, and I got a little seven-year-old erection. I guess it wasn’t good for much of anything at that age, but she took off her underpants and sat down on it for a little while. I guess it gave her some funny sensations (the same it gave me?), but she didn’t say much; she just had a smile on her face the whole time she was touching me and playing with my penis. She kept me tied up for an hour or so; and when she let me go, she told me never to tell my mother or anybody what had happened. She told me it was wicked, a sin; and that if anybody knew I had done it, I would be damned in hell forever. Being a churchgoer, that scared me, so I kept my mouth shut and never told my mother. The girl never did anything to me again, and neither did anybody else that I remember, but it must have made me feel a little uncomfortable or I probably wouldn’t have remembered it.

I don’t think I was too much a sex fiend in my high school years. At least my friends tell me I was retarded in that area. I dated some but never pressured a girl too much, and it was an older woman who taught me the early pleasures of sex and balling.

I’m a singer, trying to make it from little clubs to the big time. If I had a fantasy now, I guess it would be to be Elvis Presley. Ever since I can remember, I wanted to sing like him and have people love me the way they loved him. I watched his TV special in 1968 and I wanted girls to scream for me like that and go crazy when I performed. I wear jumpsuits in my shows and since I already have long black hair and blue eyes like him, sometimes I do have people tell me I look like him. A couple times when I’ve walked from the stage to my dressing room, girls have reached out to touch me and some Nancy Friday

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of them don’t touch your hand or face, they reach for the crotch. I don’t know if they get a thrill from it; but I must admit that sometimes when I get back to the dressing room, they have given me a nice erection!

I saw Elvis in Las Vegas a couple times, and I also saw him once at his Hollywood house. My girl friend and I drove up there one day and he did come out, and he did stop and talk for a minute. I feel funny admitting it, but I half wanted to make love to him, even though we were both guys. On the way home, my girl friend said she’d like to ball him; and before I could stop, I blurted out that I’d like to ball him, too.

I have never had a homosexual experience before, but he was such a good-looking man, really almost beautiful, yet masculine, too, that I just wondered what it would be like to go down on him or feel his body pressed up against mine.

When I’m with a girl, I don’t really fantasize, but sometimes when I’m alone I do daydream about fucking Elvis and how it would feel. And I daydream about being him, and having millions of girls in love with me and wanting to ball me all the time.

WADE

I am twenty-five, married two years. Both my wife and I have college educations and enjoy a good open marriage. My first awareness of sexual impulses came when I was about nine. I would get a sexual feeling of excitement whenever I changed into my bathing suit at the beach change-houses.

The feeling of the sand on my feet made me feel hot and I would also fantasize about urinating with my swimsuit on and feeling the hot, yellow liquid run down my legs. I also thought about this while on a teeter-totter in the summer.

Usually it was with this one boy in the neighborhood on whom I developed a crush. We would be wearing our swimming trunks and I could feel the hot, wooden board of the teeter-totter under me, and I would wish he would let go and Men In Love

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pee when he was in the high position. I weighed more than him, and so I could hold him up there and the warm stream would then run down, and over my extended legs. This same boy was also the subject of some unconscious sexual feelings which were altogether too vague and wonderful.

A couple of years later, I developed a tremendous crush on a girl at school, for the simple reason that she wore nylons in class, and I could see her legs. I guess I have always been a leg man. I would stare at her legs all day. At this time I began to masturbate regularly and fantasized from a list of about ten girls in my class. I would imagine a different girl every time.

Then I would write their first names on the palms of my hands in ink, five on each palm, sometimes one to a finger tip, and masturbate about the one I could most easily recall at that particular time. Also, the cigarette played an important role in these fantasies. I would always look at the back of
Time
magazine to see the pretty girl smoking her cigarette.

This aroused me. Although I did not know what girls’ cunts looked like then, I would imagine my fantasy partner wearing a bikini, and wanting to hide her cigarettes from passersby, she would put them up her cunt. I would imagine myself walking along the river bank and finding her alone, I would proceed to feel her up and then I would discover two cigarettes in her cunt. The two of us would then enjoy a smoke with the permeating aroma of her love juices among the to-baccos.

Nothing much happened during high school, except that I continued to dream about this particular girl who wore the shortest skirts in the entire school. The next significant development was at university. A group of us guys decided to go to a movie. It just happened that there was a lesbian scene in the movie. This aroused me tremendously and even to this day, I fantasize continuously about lesbians. Before this movie, I had never even thought about homosexuality. Its existence had never even entered my mind. I began to read up on the subject, and I learned a great deal. It was only a short step before I began to imagine myself involved in male-toNancy Friday

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