This page has two overlapping purposes: (a) it gives you more background about me, to help you put the narratives in context; and (b) it's a summary of all the detailed narratives on the website, as well as some additional information that bridges the time-gaps between incidents.

Background

• Family: I grew up in the South (southern USA), in a working-class urban neighborhood. My dad was absent. My mom was an alcoholic and relatively difficult to live with; she loved us, but found it hard to deal with her own life. I had two younger brothers, as well as a large extended family living nearby. My grandparents were my rock of stability. My grandpa was fortunate to have a very prosperous local business, and actually became rather wealthy later in life. My grandparents helped our family stay afloat financially, paying for my military-school education among other things.
• School, Sports: People have told me I'm intelligent... I'll take their word for it. :) I was a solid B-to-B-plus student through school. I have dyslexia - a learning disability which causes me to reverse written letters, among other things - and so I'm a really slow reader. (I was a slow writer, too, until the miracle of WordPerfect QuickCorrect came along. :)) School-wise, my friends and sports were much more important to me than academics.

  I wasn't a jock in the stereotypical sense, but I was fair-to-good at most sports, except basketball (I'm short) and football (I'm skinny); and I was very good at the two sports I concentrated on - soccer and swimming. I played youth-league soccer ages 7 through 13 y/o, and was a city rec-league swimmer from 8 through 12 y/o. I played soccer in high school for just one year (the coach and I didn't get along), but I swam for our school from 7th through 11th grade. (My best event, for any swimmers out there, was 100 freestyle, and my lifetime best is 52.5. I set a middle-school record in... okay, okay, I'll shut up now. :))

  Very relevant to this story is the fact that I was sent to a military school for grades 7-12 (i.e., ages 12 through 17 y/o). I had an attitude problem, and the school was supposed to straighten me out. I guess it did - up to a point. I didn't get into major trouble, mainly because I didn't want to lose my athletic eligibility, but I had my share of detentions.

  This military school was all-male. All boys, and no girls. Predictably, the absence of girls, along with the intensity of adolescent hormones, led to alot of boys fooling around with each other, sexually - especially in the younger grades. In that environment, it was acceptable to have sex with your friends, as long as you made it clear that "I'm only doing this 'cause I don't have a girlfriend right now", and the like. I honestly don't think an all-male school is a healthy environment. At the time, though, for me - for a boy who liked, and actively sought out, sex with other boys - it was like the kid who gets locked in the candy store. I sometimes wonder how my life would have gone if I hadn't been sent there, and gone to regular junior high and high school instead.

• Friends: I'm extroverted and gregarious and not the least bit shy, and I always had a million friends. I made (and still make) friends quickly and easily. Example: in 4th grade, I transferred to a new elementary school. Out of the class of 25 or so, I knew one kid before school started: my friend Mac, who transferred with me. By the second week, kids were saving me seats at lunch; by the fourth week, when they had elections, I was nominated for class president, and nearly won. I know I sound like I'm bragging, but I'm not. I have no idea why people like me and think I'm cool. I've been told I have "charisma." I don't know exactly what that means, but I guess I'll take their word for it.

  I was different from most popular kids, in that I wasn't part of any cliques, not for very long anyway. I had friends in nearly all of them. Over the course of weeks, I'd usually sit with different groups at lunch, different kids on the bus - one set of friends for a few days, then another for a few days... I didn't have any concept of why I did that, and in fact I never gave it any thought whatsoever until the high school guidance counselor mentioned it. I just always had this hazy notion that there were too many cool kids around to stick with just one set. :)

  One of my most-compelling personality traits is loyalty to my friends; looking back, my relationships with them seem to be like extended family. Friends were one of my refuges when I got too much flak at home, for example. I think sports and my friends kept me sane though a difficult growing-up experience.

  I also think sports and my friends, along with being good-natured, kept me from getting a reputation at around 13-15 y/o, a period when others could reasonably surmise that I was gay or bisexual. It was normal for boys to experiment with each other, but I was doing more than experimenting by that time. Nonetheless, there was little stigma to my behavior, or at least I didn't notice it. Some of that was because I was an athlete - anyone who's been through an American high school knows all about that pecking order. And much of it had to do with the all-boys environment, where boy-sex didn't automatically get you labeled by the whole school. No one was openly gay, and consequently there wasn't as much concern about gayness. It wasn't an identity; it was just something boys did.

  What I was doing wasn't all overlooked, naturally. I was always shunned by the religious kids (and down South, "religious" means "fundamentalist Christian.") And we had our share of redneck/macho assholes. I did get called "queer" by a small but determined group of kids, and got beat up for it on a couple of memorable occasions. (Those same kids, for various flimsy reasons, also beat up other boys who were totally straight. I don't think they were obsessed, target-seeking homophobes; just your classic high school alpha-dog bullies.) Despite a few incidents like that, I was generally a popular kid.

• Outlook: I was (and am) an optimist. I'm a leader, not a follower nor a bystander. I have alot of self-confidence. (I'll readily admit that from time to time I show the flip side of self-confidence - egocentrism and a touch of arrogance.) I don't passively accept the circumstances in which I find myself - I change them. I create my own reality. I guess that's a leadership thing; or maybe it's a charisma thing.

  Perhaps the best way I can describe my personality, is to tell you a little bit about a story on my Cometfire website. (For those who aren't aware, Cometfire is my first biographical website; the stories there are semi-fictional, although all are rooted in my childhood.) The story is called Nova. It's a true story, in terms of action. But in reality, I was the boy I called "Tyler," not "Danny"; I was the boy who went up to another boy in the cave when the lights were out and touched him. All of "Danny's" inner thoughts in that story are imaginary, because I don't know what he was thinking. I desperately wish I did, but I never will. "Tyler" was the kind of boy I was. That was me, then. (There's more about what actually happened in that cave, and how I feel about it now, in the narrative In the Dark on this website.)

  I don't think I'm very sensitive. I keep trying. That's why I deliberately reversed roles in "Nova" and gave the other boy my name - I very much wanted to see things from his point of view, to experience how he felt. I think I succeeded, because it made me realize that "novas" can be fiery-bright joy, while they burn - and then they can hurt people, when they burn out and go away. I hope I didn't hurt that boy. I hope it's the electric joy of that unexpected touch he remembers; I hope that in his mind's eye, I'm the fiery- bright boy with the dark hair. But I'll never know.

  I feel sympathy for those who are sensitive, people who feel rejection keenly. I usually didn't feel hurt when a boy or a girl said "no" if I initiated something sexual - we were still friends. (And despite how it may appear here, many kids did say "no.") But I understand how "no" can hurt; I can see how that would make one draw into a shell. A shell seems like a very hollow, lonely place to me. I hope nobody reading this feels trapped in that way.

  Incidentally, to any shy people reading this: many of us extroverts find shyness kind of endearing - I do. And besides, what kind of world would it be if everyone wanted to be a leader? :)

  Finally, I think I have a pretty good sense of humor. I believe in God, and one of the things that makes me think God exists is that humans have a sense of humor. I'm certain that God has a sense of humor. Why else would he create the platypus? :)

Summary

I wish I had time to write a full detailed narrative about every item, but I don't. I hope this summary gives you a decent big-picture overview of my life as a boy.

• Earliest memories: Like many kids, my earliest sexually-connected memories involve "playing doctor" with neighbor girls and boys. I can recall at age four or five pulling my pants down with friends and examining each others' anatomies, and giggling at our naughtiness. I think most, if not all, of those experiences were with both boys and girls present. There was some touching, but I am hazy on exactly what we did. I don't remember any contact except touching, with one exception: an isolated memory-fragment of another kid (a girl, I think) sticking something narrow and cold in my rectum. I didn't like that. Otherwise, my recollection is that I enjoyed those experiences.
• An Experimental Kid: My more-detailed sexual memories begin around ages 7-8. Around seven years old, I discovered orgasm. I don't remember how I found out about it; as far as I recall, no one else showed me how to masturbate. I know I was masturbating regularly from age eight onward, and reaching orgasm. I thought of it as "tickling myself until the little tickle turned into a big tickle."

  Not being shy, I was anxious to show all my friends what I'd discovered. I knew it was a "boy thing", so I didn't bother trying to show girls; and in any case, by age eight most of my friends were other boys. My first sex-partner in a sense was my friend Ricky, when we ended up playing with each others' erections on a sleepover at his house. Neither of us came, and in fact our mutual exploration didn't last more than a few minutes, but it was intense for me. Ricky was curious enough to try that - but I was the one who initiated things. And that pattern, "Danny the ringleader," persisted throughout most of my childhood.

  I wasn't consciously aware of sexuality yet, but my awareness was there under the surface. When my friend Mike and I went out for the YMCA wrestling team in 4th grade, I remember getting turned on my seeing other boys and having body-contact with them. As noted, I was on a city rec-league swim team from ages 8 through 12, and got to see other boys in Speedo swimsuits quite often. Curiously, this wasn't erotic to me, not like wrestling; I think it was partly the lack of body contact, and partly that I was an intense competitor in swimming, and my mind was on racing and winning.

  There were other early experiments after Ricky: playing a type of "truth or dare," strip-naked game under the stairs with my friend Matt; and kissing a girl for the first time, and getting an erection from it - both at age nine. I was an experimental kid in many aspects, not just sexually. I first got drunk at eight years old, for example, with my friend Jeff in my mom's garage, and at nine years old I took the family car for a short joyride. But that adventurous trait, along with sexual curiosity, made it inevitable that I would lose my virginity early.

• Waking up at Y-camp My true sexual awakening took place at the end of my 9th year, when I went away to YMCA summer camp for two weeks. Those two weeks were one of the most intense experiences of my life, sexually and otherwise. The camp was all boys, no girls. We went skinny-dipping in the lake every day, and the mass nudity was exciting to me. Being around the boys in my cabin in our underwear was exciting - even though I'd been around boys in their underwear alot, in connection with youth sports, this was different. We had a sex-education talk at Y-camp; I don't think they intended to make us boys curious about each other, but that was one side-effect for some of us.

  The pinnacle of Y-camp was overtly sexual. On the final wilderness canoe trip, a bunch of us played a swimming game called "grab-the-weenie." And on the last evening of that trip, I went off in the woods with Joe, a 12-year-old boy in our cabin. Joe was the kid who taught us how to play grab-the-weenie, and among all the kids, he and I were the two most sexually curious. We were close to having sex, and then a stick snapped off in the woods and spooked us. I still wonder...

• A Prepubescent Boy's Sexuality: After Y-camp, I was very awake and aware sexually. About six months later, at 10-and-a-half, I found what I call my "Big 3" sex-education books, when the neighbors moved out and left them in the curbside trash. This was a major leap forward, because now I knew what to do sexually, in the technique sense. My books discussed both opposite-sex and same-sex details. I wanted to try both, but my opportunities with boys were greater, so I concentrated on experimenting with my friends, teaching them what I'd learned.

  I was incredibly horny for a prepubescent boy, looking back. I kept trying to get sexual with other boys, as often as I could and in any circumstance I could find. For example, on a youth-group campout, I jumped at the offer (along with two other boys) to show off our stiff weenies to the 25-30 boys watching.

  Other milestones during my 10th year were demonstrating to my friend Shaun how I "turned the little tickle into a big tickle" - the first time I masturbated to orgasm in front of another boy. Not long after, Ricky and I got curious, again, and we engaged in my (and his) first mutual masturbation to orgasm.

• Losing my Boy-Virginity: I finally lost my boy-virginity at the end of my 10th year. My friend Alex and I were up on the roof of my house (which was alot more private than it sounds), smoking cigarettes and bragging about all the girls we'd allegedly screwed. It was a hot summer day, so we stripped to our underwear, saw each others' erections - and ended up very willingly sucking each other to (dry) orgasms. That was the beginning of a true relationship. Alex was my boyfriend for the next 10 months, although neither of us would've used the term "boyfriend" in a million years. We were "just best friends" - best friends who happened to be constantly sucking each other off. All of this was pre-puberty for both of us. It ended abruptly when his family moved away the next summer. In some ways, I've never gotten over it, as you can plainly see if you read the "Inner Spiral" sequence on my Cometfire website. Alex was my first love, as well as my first sex-partner.

  An interesting twist to my experience with Alex was my switch from briefs underwear to boxers. Alex was the first boy I knew who wore boxers. Ever since Y-camp at least, I had found boys in their underwear sexy, and seeing Alex in his boxers on the roof was a big rush and led directly to our blowing each other. I immediately associated boxers with sexual maturity. I never had an underwear fetish - the article of clothing itself did nothing for me, unless a boy was wearing it. But boys in their underwear (boxers or briefs) fascinated me. Luckily, I have never had much problem with involuntary erections, so the usual locker-room exposure didn't cause me problems.

• Boy-Sex-Crazy: After Alex left, I went through a boy-crazy period. It didn't help that I began puberty a few months before before Alex left. Even before puberty, I was becoming extremely promiscuous, and that lasted for several years. I seduced a 17 year-old boy at a pool party when I was eleven. That was another milestone, because Brandon was the first sexually mature boy I'd done anything with; his sperm was the first I ever saw or tasted. (He was puzzled when he found out I still couldn't ejaculate, and then shocked when I told him I was only 11 years old.) This time with Brandon, incidentally, was one of the few times I had any kind of sexual contact with a boy more than a couple years older than me. I rarely found younger boys sexually attractive, either.

  I was boy-crazy, as I said; and "crazy" is the right word. One of my fantasies was dressing up like a boy-prostitute and getting picked up at the mall. I tried to carry my fantasy out, but fortunately, I couldn't get a ride to the mall.

• Military School: As you might have noticed, I was a behavioral problem. :) My grandparents decided to send me to an all-boys military school (as a daytime commuting student, not boarding), and there I remained from 7th through 12th grade, or ages 12 through 17. As noted, I was the proverbial kid who got locked in the candy store: six hundred boys, adolescent hormones raging, and no girls within miles, literally. For three years, ages 12-14, I was in overdrive. I had sex (BJs) with dozens for my friends - usually but not always at my initiative. I liked sucking and being sucked equally, although they were very different types of enjoyment for me. The majority of my partners were willing to be sucked but didn't volunteer to reciprocate. That was okay; I really got into sucking. Most boys had sex with me only once or twice, but some were more ongoing, although I didn't have another full-fledged boyfriend until age 15.

  One reason I ended up having so many willing boy-partners, I'm certain, is that all of them thought it would be a cold day in hell before they found a girlfriend who would do it. And in those times, they weren't far from the truth - especially younger boys. Southern girls were mostly virgins until 11th or 12 grade, if not until marriage.

  There were numerous memorable experiences during this era from 12 through 14 years old. I never had true group-sex, but there were a number of classic circle-jerks. I seduced strangers, boys I didn't know, several times - a boy I met when my family was vacationing in Florida; a 16 year-old lifeguard at our neighborhood pool (who also showed me how to 69 for the first time); a boy I met skinny-dipping at the YMCA pool. I had the interesting experience of showing a friend how he could fellate himself. I learned some life-lessons, too: I found myself getting beat up for being a queer by some older kids, and I learned that being forced against my will to suck another boy is a lousy experience.

  I kept trying with girls, too. At age 11, I first tried to get the 14-year-old girl next door to have sex with me, but she wasn't interested; I realized that relationships with girls were alot more complicated than with boys, sexually and otherwise. Finally, just after my 14th birthday, I lost my heterosexual virginity with my 15-year-old girlfriend Julie, on the golf course one night. This was a life-lesson too: I learned that girls don't like it when you jump up and down and yell "awesome!" after sex, the way boys do. That night was the end of my relationship with Julie, and I can't blame her.

• My Boyfriend Kenny: At 15 years old, I found myself in my second and last real relationship with another boy. I don't know exactly how or why I drifted from promiscuity into wanting a relationship - I think basic maturity, and the accompanying realization of how empty casual sex could be, was a factor. I met Kenny in 9th grade, but we didn't know each other well until fall of 10th grade, when we were on the school soccer team together. Kenny was almost certainly gay, although he never talked about it to me or anyone else; I don't think he was fully aware of it himself - like me, he wasn't at all self-analytical. He was moderately good-looking, but his most interesting feature to me was his extremely large penis. I am not all that concerned with size, but the novelty of a big one made for some interesting sex. (Incidentally, my own penis is a little smaller than average, for anyone curious. I'm perfectly okay with that, too. :))

  Our relationship began as friendship, soon became sexual (he very willingly responded to my moves on him during our first sleepover), and then deepened into love. I refused to acknowledge that it was love at the time, or that Kenny was my boyfriend; he didn't acknowledge it either. I guess it was obvious to others, since we got hassled about it - both of us ended up in a couple of fistfights with other kids about the issue. Clearly I was in denial. I was telling myself, as I had since my time with Alex, that "I'm just doing this because I don't have a girlfriend" - ignoring the fact that I had been enjoying boy-sex and seeking it out; and despite the fact that I'd fallen in love with two boys - and zero girls - from age 10 through 15.

  Kenny and I spent eight intense months together. The sex was intense. There were some crazy times, like sucking each other on the school bus, coming back from a soccer away-game, with other boys all around us (they were all asleep... I think. :)) We had sex as often as we could - I would guess over 200 BJs, either sequentially or 69, over the eight months we were together, which is alot considering we didn't get much chance to do it at school, and didn't even live very near each other. I didn't like the taste of semen and disliked swallowing, but for Kenny I swallowed. (So did he, but he didn't mind the taste. :))

  Kenny was the first and only boy I had anal sex with. We did it just one time each way, once giving and once receiving. I was never too interested in that aspect of sex, but I wanted to be as close to Kenny as possible. In one sense it was awful - I don't recommend receptive anal intercourse with a very well-endowed boy after almost zero preparation. :) But emotionally, it was a big milestone - one of the most intimate experiences I've ever had in my life. I am sure we would've done it alot more, if my first time had gone better - he wanted to do it again, but I didn't overcome my reluctance, to my later regret.

  The end of my relationship with Kenny, as with Alex, was abrupt - and unlike with Alex, it was avoidable. The event was totally stupid and pointless. We got into a huge argument over his new haircut, of all things, and both of us were too stubborn to apologize or admit fault. Over a few days it escalated to a major fight - no hitting, but plenty of screaming. We got to be friends again, eventually, but the relationship was destroyed.

• Turning Point: After Kenny, I floundered for a few months. I had sex with a couple of other boys, but it wasn't the same - just emptiness and loneliness, even with a close friend. And I kept nagging myself with thoughts like, "Isn't it time you got more interested in girls?"

  Finally, a few days after my 16th birthday, I reached a crisis. One night, I went outside and sat on our patio in the pouring rain, and prayed to God to change me so I'd like girls and not boys from now on. My story Ninety six on the Cometfire website, which is not fictional at all, gives the details. I don't know how to characterize the outcome, internally, but my behavior definitely changed. I willed myself to quit liking boys. I have a strong will, so that worked. After that night, I began dating girls regularly, having sex with those that were willing, and in general convincing my self that this whole boy-thing was history.

  This change was probably inevitable, under the circumstances. At 16, my friends and I were all getting drivers' licenses, and dating girls became alot easier, despite their absence from school. Besides making my own social life more heterosexual, this also meant that boys my age weren't nearly as willing to experiment. The 12-14 year-old boys were just as horny and curious as ever, I would guess, but that was just too young for me. And older guys were not even on my radar screen. I was approached by an adult man only once, when I was 15, and I literally couldn't understand why he'd even want to have sex with a boy. I had read about chicken hawks in my Big 3 sex-ed books, but the idea struck me as bizarre.

  At any rate, from that rainy night at age 16 onward, with a single exception, I never had sex with another male. The exception was when I was 21 years old, traveling out West. A 40-something guy hit on me, and, out of curiosity, I had sex (69) with him. It wasn't erotic in the least - I couldn't even stay erect, much less come. At the time I figured that was evidence I wasn't gay or bisexual.

So, as Kevin on "The Wonder Years" always said: "And there you have it." :)