I first heard about sex when I was seven. This was when the family pet rabbit, Timmy, first moved into our house. Timmy, or as we should have called him, Timmy the humping wonder, was given a small white cotton polar bear as a friend in case he got lonely while we were at school. Every morning while we were at breakfast, Timmy would start his multi-daily routine of humping the poor polar bear.
One day i, or one of my sisters, asked our mother what Timmy was doing. Mum, being a nurse, had no internal struggles announcing that Timmy was trying to have sex with the polar bear. And in the grand tradition of her craziness began relating it to human reproduction and how exactly that works. Apparently she felt that it was now time that we all had “the talk”. My sisters and i were in the car for school very early that morning.
In the several years since then, and a few male pets (and later, boyfriends) with just as much joy in humping things as Timmy had, I feel that I am no closer to the real meaning of that word. And lets just say that I have also studied with the help of TV and 80’s flicks much more so that the Catholic School Allowed Curriculum ever taught me. Ally Sheedy in St. Elmo’s Fire certainly explained it best (and possibly a little too late) when she said, “Kevin, Sex isn’t love.”
I’m not at all certain if growing up Catholic and attending Catholic school in Salt Lake got me ahead, behind, or somewhere in the middle of sex education. I do know that i spent far too much time trying to prove that I wasn’t LDS as many of my friends did in high school. We did this by swearing, drinking, drugging, peircing, and (for some but not me) tatooing and having sex. It was a moment wasted if you weren’t proving to yourself and everyone else that you weren’t mormon. The LDS population that i ran into did the exact opposite of us.
When I hit college i realized that things weren’t so black and white. I met mormons who drank, smoked, peirced, and had sex. I had mormon friends who didn’t drink but swore. I had non-mormon friends who didn’t drink, didn’t swear, didn’t do anything “bad”. And ones that did. I learned quickly that the world could not be divided into mormon and non-mormon. And it was time to stop categorizing myself as such.
I quit drinking for a time, definitely quit drugging, never got the tatoo i thought i might, and started hanging out with anyone who i liked. This lost me some friends but it didn’t really matter anymore. They are still playing the “I’m not mormon” loud and clear game. I have friends who don’t judge me.
I don’t know if it was college, common sense, or both. But i’m glad it happened.
This blog is about my trial and error in sex and salt lake city. I can’t promise that everything on this website will be appropriate, tasteful, or without swears. and like the billboard says, “If you just said, “Oh my heck” this probably isn’t for you.”