The birds, the bees, and how my best friend shattered my innocence

     I was the child with semi-permanent hearing loss, and an addiction to Barney far past an acceptable age, so it's no surprise that my childhood was filled with shocking revelations. My best friend Carolyn was a little more "street smart," which was a word we agreed on because her family was from Brooklyn, so she must be. My parents on the other hand, were in a comfortably platonic marriage and had no roots in on the hard streets of the big apple. Now, let's be clear. I of course had heard of the word "sex," but compared it to the questionably straight reenactments of TGIF's Step-by-Step that my cousins and I would play while our parents had Sunday dinner. This included suggestive grunting and rolling around on the floor pretending to make out. Any dummy knew that Frank and Carol's date nights ended with s-e-x, it was just the specifics that I was fuzzy on.

     So, when Carolyn explained the whole touching of parts to me, I, as I had with the Easter Bunny and Santa, insisted that she was mistaken. My parents would never do that. They are PRIVATE parts. Street smart, my ass. Still, curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to confront my mother while she was washing dishes the next day. Then came the lengthiest conversation that ever took place about the birds and the bees. I was warned that boys would tell lies about their balls turning blue if I didn't have sex with them (true-ish), and was only something you did when you were married to make babies, it did not make people like you (also true-ish), and no, it did not feel good (unfortunately, sometimes true-ish). Functional private touching made sense to me, so I left the conversation feeling very informed. At least they had a reason to be doing it, and I liked babies as much as the next guy, so I accepted this to be true and carried on with my 7 year old life.

     Carolyn and I decided to start working sex into our conversations as to make us seem more mature. Seeing as we only hung out with our siblings, the first casual slip was in front of my older brother. We had also learned recently what being gay was. Upon discussing theoretical gay people we proclaimed that they, of course, could never have sex. Can open. Worms everywhere. WHY would anyone put a private part in a poop chute? Don't these people know that sex doesn't even feel good? It's for making babies, and you can't make babies out of butts! Maybe they said their balls or their ass would turn blue, which was clearly for sluts who wanted to be popular. This concept of butt sex angered and disturbed me, and that feeling continued into my adulthood, but that is for another day...