Diverse Membership

On the evening of my seventeenth birthday, I lost my virginity. I was a junior in high school, and had been dating the perpetrator of the act for a number of months; as high school romances go, we were lifers. We were in loooove. We spent hours on the phone. We spent all our time between classes and at lunch together, every possible second of extracurricular fraternization was wrung from each and every day. We drove to school together, we went to church together…it was an affair straight out of a John Hughes movie: New Romantic girl with money meets Punked-Out working-class boy in a Theater course, wacky hijinks ensue.

Months and months and months of making out, of getting all hot and bothered in the back seat, all while holding a symbolic dime between my knees…it finally proved to be too much for Queenie’s burgeoning young womanhood. I gave it up, after much agonizing. I capitulated.

My boyfriend and I drove out to the river side, out in the country, to a sweet, dark bower made of kudzu and tree-roots. He’d picked the spot earlier in the day – knowing that he was about to finally lose his, too - and he’d made sort of a nest there, with layers of blankets and pillows, ringed with candles. Really, as feminine virginity-loss tales go, it was pretty fucking cool. I won’t get graphic – who, me? never! – but there was no blood and very little pain and the whole experience was one of those “the earth moved!” things that puts you in a goofy daze and makes you walk bowlegged for days afterwards.

Although that boyfriend and I broke up when he went off to college, I never regretted the experience. I wasn’t an especially promiscuous person; I only throw in the “especially” as a nod to those who will be horrified by the idea that I lost my virginity at seventeen. By modern standards I was practically a nun; it was some while before I went out and found myself another boyfriend to love on. Until my marriage in 1998, I was a serial monogamist.

At any rate, up until I was nearly twenty, this young man was the only “grown” man I had ever seen up close, naked. Ever. So understand that my, erm, perceptions of reality were somewhat shaped my that one unique experience. Also, remember that this was in the eighties; porn wasn’t everywhere the way it is today. There was no internet to see this shit on. I had no brothers, my father was an exceedingly modest gentleman…and we were churchy people, anyway.

Two years pass between the first penis and the second one. When I am presented with the second one, only the years of friendship with its owner and months of heavy-petting horniness kept me from hollering out loud from shock at the sight of it. What the hell was wrong with the boy? Did he hurt himself, or something? Where’s the rest of it? I was upset. I went through with the act, and everything was fine and dandy, but my mind wasn’t there at all. I went through the motions, mind running in circles, making cartwheels, training for the Olympics, stunned at the penile diversity that had just now, at the age of twenty, occurred to me.

Only by puzzling out this deeply personal topic with my best girlfriend did I understand what was going on, much to the merriment of the girlfriend in question. Boyfriend A was uncircumcised, and, apparently, Girthzilla to boot. Boyfriend B was cut, and just a nice regular size. I’d had no idea; I had no frame of reference, no clue what either one looked like, and, contrary to popular belief, girls don’t come pre-equipped with a mental sizing chart. I just could not believe that two penises could be that different. Penises sure were funny things.

Lo these many years later, I reflect on those early sexual experiences with not a little humor, as well as with a small measure of pride. I was sheltered, dammit. My parents did about as good a job protecting the Flower of Southern Womanhood as anyone could have, especially when that flower was dangerously determined to swing from the rafters. My girlfriend has been telling this story, laughing at me these twenty years, for having to ask her about it, and I am still grumbling with every retelling, and calling her a slut for knowing.