Posted by Terry on December 29, 1998 at 16:18
In Reply to: Re: Rosebud! posted by J on December 28, 1998 at 20:05
Thanks for the cordial reply. We seem to have about the same "take" on the 60s. I do think lasting progress was made, if one thinks of progress in terms of social liberalism as I do, and I doubt that the war would have ended as early as it did without the wave of protests that rose from the campuses to the halls of government. I would not want to have been born too early or too late to have been a young adult then. Like all generations that sail out beyond where their parents and grandparents have gone, we were on uncharted waters and often behaved with understandable confusion and hesitation. But we did extend the bounds of socially acceptable discourse, and the expedition continues.
My own life "at Murphy's," if I may use that phrase to cover the years of graduate school when I stopped there nearly every night, were complicated by the fact that I was groping my way out of two closets, one as a gay male and one as an avid wetter. As I indicated in my intro, I assumed for many years that my queerness and my penchant for wet pants were at root the same thing. I was led to this assumption by early theories, back in the 40s and 50s, that homosexuality was a phase you would outgrow if you matured normally. Homosexuality was a form of arrested development, of psychosexual infantilism. Naturally, I thought that my clinging to the pleasure of wetting had something to do with it. From the very beginning of school, when I was six years old, I had my eye on other guys, checking out their crotchs and asses for wet spots. My attraction to them, my interest in them, seemed to be one and the same thing as my fascination with wet pants. Only very gradually, through thousands of observations in adolescence and early adulthood, did I disengage homoeroticism from the joys of wetting. The process of understanding just how one relates to the other, or how independent they are, is still going on and is the reason I keep coming back to this board.
Case in point: One of my friends in high school was a guy who often seemed to be doing the "pee dance," -- shifting his weight from foot to foot, acting like he had to go "real bad." Suspicions were confirmed when we were assigned to neighboring lockers in PE and I got to see his "white" briefs every day. The pouch and the upper fabric, halfway up to the waistband sometimes, were imbued with an unmistakable dark amber stain, the strata of multiple wettings. A little different from time to time, depending on how recent the wash, but nearly always present. He was very intelligent, the son of a prestigious academic, and had a great sense of humor. I was not physically attracted to him, as it happened, which was a good thing, because he was straight. The young woman he dated in high school was a friend of my family, and I had occasionally noticed a smell of stale urine about her when we sat close together in classes. It occurred to me that she might get the same visceral kick out of peeing herself that I did. Wow, so girls might like that, too! There were all kinds of inhibiting factors that kept me from confiding in her, in him, in anybody, but I wasn't stupid. I figured out that the two of them had more in common than the officiating clergy at their wedding likely guessed. I haven't seen them in decades, but I've heard they're still married, which means they're pushing thirty years together. We all should be so lucky.
In college, my roommate Jesse and his "wench" Annie (his word, not mine), about whom I posted earlier in "Letting Go Slowly," were another case in point and helped me separate my sexual orientation from my wetting fetish. Bars like Murphy's, in college and grad school, along with hundreds of after-hours parties that make me wonder how I survived, were theatres of observation and experimentation in two fields that I dared not discuss openly. My eyes were wide, my mouth was shut. You will understand, though, that I noticed men more than women and that most of my "sightings" therefore involve men. Not all, just most. There was one heterosexual clique in particular that I found intriguing at the time and have thought about often in the twenty-one years since I came out. They introduced me to the expression "warm beer" -- well, to more than the expression, actually. I'll tell you about them in a new thread and see what you think. This reply is already way too long. I apologize for not addressing your main question directly. I'd start over, but it's rather late in the afternoon here in San Francisco, and I'm too tired of staring at the damned monitor.
Email: terry@wetjeans.com