"This Made Me Smile..."

This reminds me of a funny experience in my life...

Today is the anniversary of meeting the first man I ever fell madly in love with and then actually made love to.  It was a romance that blossomed out of the grief of my mother's death and my realization that I was free to choose whether I would continue to live a life of fear and self-loathing, or whether I would be brave enough to act on a lifetime of repressed longings and desires.  I'll probably write more about him one day soon, but for now, on to the reason this makes me smile...

His name was Billy, and our love affair began as many did in those days, as a long-distance "friendship" on the internet.  Shortly after we became acquainted, a business trip brought me to his city for a week, and we arranged to meet and the chemistry was instantaneous.  Later that week, I fearfully lost my "gay virginity" with him and then I was certain that I was in-fact gay. When I returned home, there were long phone calls everyday and our love for one another was apparent to us both.  With my mother's passing, I was free of caregiving and could truly do as I wished for perhaps the first time in my life... Later that summer, as I promised him I'd do, I arranged to take vacation time from work during the week of Independence Day, and I flew into town and he met me at the airport.  He was in the closet and lived with family at the time, so I took a room in a long long-stay hotel so that we could enjoy a suite with a kitchenette and I could cook for him and we could spend some "normal" time together.

That first night, when he came to the hotel to stay with me, I'd prepared him dinner and we enjoyed each other's company and love was just in the air that evening.  After dinner we fell into each other's arms and soon we were making love for the second time in our relationship.  The passions we felt for each other were incredibly strong and without even realizing it, our lovemaking had become quite raucous and in the midst of these passions the phone began to ring persistently Finally, we paused for a moment and I answered it and it was the front desk calling to say there had been complaints from the neighboring rooms about the "noises" we were making.  I was at first mortified as I apologized to the poor desk clerk, but as I shared what the call had been about with Billy, we both laughed and realized that the interruption had made our love making all the more exciting...  We got up, pulled the bed away from the wall and went on to enjoy the pleasures of love (a bit less loudly) well into that night and every night of what I still remember as a magical week of love and freedom.

Sadly, Billy didn't become my long-time companion, for despite our love, there was still a great deal of fear in our lives, but I've never forgotten that night of passion and love when the world outside that room didn't matter to us (at least until that phone call) and we made love with passionate reckless abandon.  Although for various reasons, we both thought we couldn't carry on our love affair, to this day, we remain friends and have stayed in touch with each other for nearly 20 years now.

"Fear Eats the Soul"