I have to do this everyday: I am senior bear and if you had told me when I was a kid, that I would one day March in a Gay Pride parade, I wouldn’t have been able to get my mind around it. Brought up in the twisted world of Fifties wacko Irish-American Catholicism, I thought I shouldn’t be gay but was wracked with the intense charge of my deepest desires. I was very smart and read all the books that proved that gay love was, if not a sin, a disease to be cured. I wasted the next twenty years of my life in a vane attempt to become who I wasn’t and pouring large amounts of alcohol down my throat to kill the pain. My penis was a lot smarter than my head and right from the get go I was telling me the truth about myself. My first wet dream: I am standing by the stairs that lead to the door of the Basement Chapel of St.Mary’s. My brother’s friend Leo walks up to me; he is naked. I am naked. Our hard penises kiss and I wake up to find my pajamas sticky with sperm. Forty five years ago and it still makes me hard! I dated girls. They were nice girls. I ran on the fantasy that if I got laid it would prove I was straight and I would be all right. I later found out that for me sex with a woman was a trick I could pull off and so what. The sad truth is that, in my case, whether I was dating in my young manhood or fucking a couple of women or using some poor soul as an unwilling  beard, I was using these people to fix me. Not a good way to treat anyone. I have a friend from hight school days. In college we used to double date. He asked me one Saturday night why I was always so depressed when we were going out. I couldn’t tell him  that  when I was sitting behind him as we drove off with the girls I wanted more than I can describe even now  to lean forward and cover the muscular white ivory of his neck bites and nibbling kisses. One of the worst nights of my life was spent in the same bed with him inches from me and unable  to be touched. And in the midst of all this I was cruising the bushes and the block, where men fished for sex, for hours and days on end.

Occasionally I got lucky but never happy. When I finally fucked a woman I added two and two and,as usual,came up with twenty-two! Since I was now cured of being queer I would enter the seminary, live with men,  and wear a long black dress. But my prick was still smarter than I was and had a plan of its own. At the end of summer recess I decided to “go for a walk” in the woods near my mothers new house. There were often trucks and cars parked along the road. Eventually I spied a neighbor hood beauty I’ll name Paul. He was lying sunning himself wearing as near to nothing as I had ever seen. Perhaps twenty, long spare body, black hair,a face as Irishly handsome as his other brothers. He new I was cruising him. He wanted to be cruised. Was he getting hard? I was. My shyness made me slow to come near. (I later learned how important this is in building explosive sexual tension] In my memory the details become blurred in what I know was a storm of hungry mouths, groping hands, naked flesh: years of longing tearing the sky apart. We were both too trapped in the Big Closet America was then to capitalize on what the God Eros had pulled us into, but I look back an say what a start, There follows many years of therapies, jobs, lots of sex, lots of Bourbon, all enhanced by a talent for self pity. I often say living those years was like riding a bicycle with no chain gears. Then a great blessing: Stonewall and I began trying to come out. Next I was forced to put down the booze. That first summer sober I was in a daze most of the time but, Eros be praised, that Summer they were relaying all the water and sewer pipes in the town where I was living. The work was being done by a Syrian owned company. Most of the workers were Arab, Italian or Spanish. I was defenseless against the strength and beauty unselfconscious erotic power of what I saw. I would go down town for lunch, see  a few more of these glorified bodies, something would light up inside of me inside of me and I had to accept that my deep love of the male was my gift from that erotic God. A few more brain cells would come back on line. That the spermy kiss of Leo’s penis was a blessed gift from god. Andy Mc