This is a true story of my growing up, learning about myself and my sexual orientation, and finding a place in this world with the person I love. Some of the names have been changed to protect the identity of people.
There is not much sex yet, but I'll get there. If you're looking for a quick sex story, this isn't the one for you.
"Not a Matter of Choice"
Part 1: Self Discovery
When I think of all the people who say being gay is just a person choosing an alternative lifestyle, I wonder if they've ever looked at their own lives and asked themselves questions of what they are attracted to and why. Why is it that some guys have the hots for blondes, and others brunettes? Why is it that some are particularly fond of members from a specific ethnic group? And why on God's green earth would a person choose to be gay when that means ridicule, rejection, and discrimination?
For me, it was not a matter of choice. I knew from my earliest memories that I was attracted exclusively to boys and not girls, even before sex was ever a part of it. I have always been fascinated with the male anatomy. When I was very young, probably in kindergarten, my brother and I were babysat by a Jehovah's Witness woman who didn't believe in birth control and therefore had something like six kids. Her youngest son Matthew was about my age, and we would play together. One day, we ended up in the bathroom together to pee. We both took our little willies out to pee, and of course, we had to do a bit of comparison. I remember to this day how fascinated I was with Matthew's little penis. It looked so different than mine. It was thicker, and the head was sort of large and bulbous. But what I found the most interesting was that I had skin covering the head of my penis, and he did not. We didn't do anything but compare our penises, but that was the first time I recall having seen someone else's penis.
Well, just to give you a background about myself. My name is Minh Nguyen. I was born in Vietnam in 1973, near the end of the war. My brother Tuong was born in March 1975, one month premature. That was a good thing, because Saigon fell to the Viet Cong in April of that year, and our entire family fled the country. If my brother had been born on time, we likely would not have been able to leave, and I wouldn't be in the place I am now. Our family of four, along with all of my large extended family, left Vietnam and one way or another ended up in the US. My parents do not talk about our harrowing escape from the country, but I have been able to piece the information together over the years. We left on a rickety old fishing boat to escape the bombs and mortars being blasted into the city. I was less than two years old, my brother one month old, and my parents having little more than the clothes on our backs with them. Once we made it out into the sea, the fishing boat died, so we were adrift in the ocean. We would have died if a navy ship had not come by and rescued us. I remember my mother telling me how I was a hellion child when I was young, and how I would laugh and run around, wanting to play with the fishies in the water as we were walking up the narrow gangplank to get onto the ship. Those "fishies" were sharks. My poor parents had to keep a constant watch on me, or I would have been shark food and never made it to the States.
After around six months in Guam at a refugee camp, we were brought to the mainland and docked at Port Aransas, Texas, where I first set foot on America. Our family was sponsored by my father's sister and her Puerto Rican husband who I think she met and married when he was in the service. Because they had sponsored us, we had to get to Florida where they were living, and we stayed with them for a length of time. We then moved to Chicago to live with my father's oldest brother. That situation did not work out well, but our family scrimped and saved enough for my parents to buy our very first house on Kenton Ave. It was while we were in Chicago that I met and compared penises with Matthew.
Because my father's side of the family did not provide much social support for us, my mother called her mother, whom I call Ba Ngoai, and she suggested we move to Houston. So, in the middle of second grade, we packed up our belongings and made the trip down to Houston in a 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass supreme. We stayed for a while with my grandmother, and I finished second and third grade at Poe Elementary. It was at Poe Elementary that I think I developed my first crush (although I would not have known to call it that at the time). It was to a boy in class named Will Stokes. I can't say I remember much about Will; I can't even remember what he looked like! But I knew that he was smart and funny and nice to me. I remember being invited to his birthday party, and I felt so special. I was pretty sad when we left Poe and my friend Will, and to this day, I wonder what ever became of him.
My family found a house in southwest Houston after several months of looking, and I started fourth grade. My elementary school years were a bit of a blur, but I distinctly recall one carrot top freckle faced boy named Alan. We lived not to far away from each other, so we used the same bus to get to school. I was always impressed at his self confidence and his "I don't care what other people think, I'm going to do what I want" attitude. I was the exact opposite. I was only concerned with what other people thought and was always trying to get people to notice me and approve of me in some way. At the start of fifth grade, Alan got on the bus, and I immediately noticed he had gotten his ear pierced. I was amazed, as it was very uncommon those days for guys to pierce their ears. I wondered if Alan liked boys, but I was too scared to ask. I knew even then that I had a definite attraction to boys, and this was frowned upon by society. But, I couldn't help it. There were just some boys that made my heart go pitter patter, and it never happened with girls.
Some time around this age, I had an encounter with a potential child molester. I was in a hardware/ lumber store with my parents, like a Home Depot before Home Depot existed. I had to go to the bathroom. After I peed and went to the sink to wash my hands, a teenager, probably around 17 or 18 years old, came out of the stall with his dick hanging out of his pants. He came up to me, grabbed my hand, and told me to touch him. I was startled and scared, and I yelled out, "No!" and hurried on out. I told my mother about the incident, but the teen was not in the bathroom afterwards. However, as we were leaving, I did see him leaning against the entrance to the store. We made eye contact, but neither one of us did anything. Now, I don't condone child molestation in any way, and I definitely don't think what he did was right, but I know that if he had approached me a different way, I would have likely been a willing participant. He did have a nice average sized cut cock and a bush of black pubic hair. I was entering the stage of sexual self awareness, and I knew I wanted dicks.
Fifth and sixth grade were the ages boys started puberty. I didn't start until a little bit later, so I was envious of the boys who had the hair in all the right places, and their dicks were just so much bigger than mine. Living in Houston with Galveston only an hour away, all fifth-grade students were required to take swimming classes at the community natatorium. It was actually a class we took in school. Of course, that meant we needed to change in the locker rooms because no one would want to go to the rest of classes in wet swim trunks. Those swimming classes were torture for me. First, I was a terrible swimmer. I was in the second-lowest swimming level. Second, I was completely self conscious about my boyish body, when so many other people had started getting hair already. So, I didn't want anyone to see me naked and make fun of me. But I desperately wanted to look at the other boys and their dicks and bodies. But what if I looked at them and got an erection? Every day we went to swim class for a period of a month or so, and every day, I was filled with conflicting desires. I never really did get a good look at anyone then. I didn't want to be caught staring, and I had not yet mastered the art of casual glances to satisfy my voyeuristic desires without being discovered. So, I steadfastly got as close to the lockers as possible, looked straight ahead, and did my best to shuck off my trunks and get into my regular clothes as fast as humanly possible.
Not being able see my classmates prepubescent bodies didn't bother me too much, as long as I could get my fill of what I really wanted, and that was getting to look at full grown adult men. So, I looked for every opportunity to do so. By the summer after fifth grade, my swimming skills had improved to the point where my mother trusted me and my brother to spend our summer days at a nearby water park. There were water slides, a wave pool, and a water jungle gym. But most importantly, there were locker rooms with showers. I tried to spend as much time as possible in the showers without alerting my brother to any suspicious activity. I just loved seeing the men in the showers, which were nothing more than four shower heads coming out of each pole in the shower room. They would be soaping up their bodies and crotches, and I would lust after them. Oh how I wish I would have had the balls to reach out and touch one of them, but I was too chicken to do it. But at least I got a lot of eye candy.
I started getting a bit of hair around my dick at around 12, and I guess my dick did start growing, but I always considered my dick to be small and wanted a bigger one. In the middle school locker room when I was in sixth grade, I saw these huge eighth graders with full bushes and dangling dicks and balls, and I just wished mine could be like that, not small and skinny and unexciting. But, it was what I got, and there was nothing I could do about it. There was though one way I could make it grow, albeit temporarily. I guess I discovered masturbation at this point. I had no older siblings or friends, and I hadn't watched any movies or seen anything too teach me "the right way." I just knew that it felt really good when I rubbed my penis. I would lie down, and my little dick would flop onto my pubic bone. Then I would use the flat of my hand to roll my dick around. That gave me the most incredible sensations, and my dick would get bigger and hard. I don't know when I had my first ever orgasm, but I know it was dry. Still, it felt pretty darn good, so I wasn't going to complain. After using the palm of the hand against the stomach technique for a while, I came to the conclusion that I could rub my penis faster if I used both hands instead of just rubbing my dick onto my stomach. So, I held my dick in between my two palms and rolled it around like you would roll out a tube of playdough. Well it definitely worked better than the palm to the stomach technique, so that was my preferred method of masturbation for quite a long time. I had never considered making a ring with my fingers and going up and down on my dick until a good bit later when my cousin, brother, and I were messing around a bit, but I'll tell that story later. I am uncircumcised, so the head of my penis is quite sensitive. In fact, I think I derive the majority of my pleasure from friction on my glans. So, other than the playdough method of masturbation, I had one other. I would hold my dick in my right hand, with my fingers at the base of my glans. Then, I placed my thumb on top of my foreskin and moved it in circles, stimulating just the head of my penis. I also happen to produce prodigious amounts of precum, so with the clear slimy precum and my foreskin, I had the perfect combination of lubrication and friction to bring me to a mind-blowing orgasm. The method always took longer than the playdough method, but the orgasm was much more intense. So, I saved this method for those occasions when I had a lot of time on my hands (so to speak) and could pleasure myself without interruption. When I was really horny and wanted extra intense sensations, I would pull my foreskin off of the head and wait for it to dry out. The glans is moist under the foreskin, but it goes through a sticky stage that is very difficult to manipulate. After the air evaporates the moisture though, the head of my dick dries out and gets a bit wrinkly, and it feels like what I imagine a circumcised guy must feel like with his dick exposed to the elements constantly. With a dried out head, I would wrap my right hand around the shaft of my dick. Then, I used the palm of my left hand to polish my knob. Oh man, that's an exquisitely pleasurable feeling, almost to the point of pain. In fact, I've gotten so into the pleasure that I have been known to rub off the top layer of the skin on my glans, not realizing it until after I finished. When I got to my climax, I always had to stop rubbing because the whole head of my penis would get extra sensitive, and rubbing it is almost painful it's so much.
I had a lot of sexual desires and fantasies as I was entering puberty, and they were exclusively of men. The few glances at the water park were clearly not enough to satisfy my craving for seeing fit, hung men. Fortunately, I discovered another method of fueling my lusts. I found gay magazines. My grandmother lived across the street from a movie theater that was converted to a book store. The store was like your average Barnes and Nobles (and was in fact taken over by them later on) but it also had a section of gay porno mags. The store was very close to the Montrose District, Houston's gay mecca, and I'm sure they knew that and catered to the gay crowd. I didn't know any of those things at the time; I just knew they had magazines full of beautiful naked men. I didn't have any money of my own then, and I certainly couldn't go up to the cash register with gay porn in my hands at the age of 12, even if I did have money. So, I did a bad thing and shoplifted. I found secluded areas in the store, put a regular magazine on the outside, and sandwiched the porn on the inside. That way, I could look at the pictures and read the stories, and from a distance, it would look like I was reading Time or Newsweek. Usually, I would look at the pictures for ten or fifteen minutes and head back to my grandmother's house, just long enough to keep my parents from looking for me. And when I found a particularly hunky guy, I ripped out the pages and stuffed them into my pants, sneaking out the store. There was an abandoned house by my grandmother's, and I found a way inside to stash my small collection of pictures. I masturbated many a time to those pictures I pilfered.
One night, when I was 12 or 13 years old, our entire extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins met at my grandmother's house for dinner. We got there a bit early, and I was bored. I knew that we always tended to eat later because it took so much time to get all the food ready, and everyone would be helping to get things together so it would be unlikely that they would miss me. So I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to spend just a little extra time at the book store. I ran across the street to the book store, and I picked up four or five porno mags, along with a regular magazine for cover, and I found a great spot to hunker down and enjoy my guilty pleasure. I didn't plan on staying for too long, maybe half an hour at most. Well, I completely lost track of time. I ended up spending more than two hours at the book store. By that time, not only had the food been prepared, but also eaten. Then, my family started getting worried about me since they couldn't find me anywhere. Search parties were formed to find me. As fate would have it, my father was the one assigned to look for me at the book store. I was leaning against a bookshelf, oogling the hard cock in the picture, when I saw my father approaching me from the other end of the row. I panicked. I ran from him with my magazine and stuffed it behind a row of books. Unfortunately, he had already seen that I had been reading something, so he came up to me and in a stern voice said, "I want you to give me what was in your hand." I'm used to being obedient to my father, and I'm a terrible liar. So, knowing I was dead meat, I decided to fess up and got the magazine behind the shelf and gave it to him. Well, he didn't believe me that I had given him the magazine I had been looking at. And to make things worse, I proceeded to convince him that I was telling the truth!
We marched back to my grandmother's house, neither one of us saying a word. I went into the kitchen, and all of my relatives were silent as they sat there with their after-dinner fruit, watching me mechanically shove food into my mouth. I don't think I tasted a thing. Right afterwards, my parents loaded me and my brother into the car, and we drove the half hour home in complete silence. My parents sent my brother to bed, and they called me into their room. I sat on the bed, looked at my parents, and calmly said, "Mom, Dad, I'm gay."