The Only Circumcised Guy In Gym Class
This is a true account of my life in high school, primarily in my freshman and sophomore years. There is no actual sex beyond masturbation, but there is plenty of nudity and teenage high jinks. I originally submitted this story a couple of years ago, but I've added some material that I remembered later on, and elaborated on some of the incidents. Enjoy!
I was circumcised as an infant, I presume shortly after my birth, but it wasn't ever discussed in my family and I grew up unaware that I had been or of what was actually involved in the procedure. My father wasn't circumcised and I remember seeing him naked a few times when I was a child, but it certainly didn't register with me that his penis was different from mine beyond the fact that it was much larger. Same thing with boys my own age, I remember taking baths with friends and cousins and going skinny dipping a time or two before puberty set in, but again I never noticed anything really different about them.
In Sunday school we heard the term circumcision and knew it was something to do with the penis, but details weren't discussed, naturally. As adolescence set in and my hormones started acting up I started reading some of the medical books we had in our house, but they related everything in dry, formal terms with no illustrations so they weren't much help. So it was really in ninth grade, freshman year in high school in my small Southern town in the early 1970s, when I became aware that there was something different about my penis. I was a smart kid who wore glasses and wasn't very well coordinated or athletic so I wasn't very popular in school. I was tall and skinny and pretty shy about the whole idea of showering with other guys, which I knew you had to do in high school gym. I was well along in adolescence and had developed a lot of pubic hair and some on my arms and legs and in my armpits, plus some traces on my chest. As I matured I began to masturbate and naturally I was always getting erections at inopportune moments, so it really worried me that it might happen in the locker room. Of course now I understand that those are universal male concerns but at the time I thought I was the only one. I didn't have friends close enough to discuss things like that with, which might have made a difference.
So when school started and we went to gym and dressed out for the first time I was pretty nervous about the whole thing. The all male gym class was a big one, with probably 30-40 freshmen boys like me, about 20 tenth graders, and then 10-15 juniors and seniors who were taking PE as an elective to get out of an academic class. It was taught by two coaches, one older man who had seen so much adolescent goofiness that he ignored it unless it got really out of hand, and a young smart-aleck type who saw gym class as a place to train the real athletes, the rest of us not being worth his time. There were two locker rooms, one the freshmen used and the other for the older guys. After we all dressed out the older coach had us sit on the bleachers while he took role and then went over some rules. I was sitting with some other freshmen I knew, but directly in front of us and lower down on the bleachers was one of the junior guys, dressed in nothing but his gym shorts and lying spread out with his back propped against one of the bleacher rows.. He wasn't even wearing underwear, as my group of freshmen realized when he began to lift the waistband of his shorts whenever the coach wasn't looking his way in order to take a gander at his genitals. The way he was sitting or lying meant we freshmen got a look at them as well, lying there in a black cloud of curly hair. He shifted a little and his dick rolled a bit, exposing his balls too. All of us sitting behind him saw everything, and as his penis reddened and swelled a bit because he was looking at it our own penises tingled a bit as well, much to our embarrassment. We looked at each other uncomfortably but no one said anything. We were already feeling intimidated by being with so many older guys, and I know I and probably most of the others were thinking about the showers we'd be required to take at the end of class. I don't know for certain whether the guy knew that in admiring himself he was also giving some freshmen a view of his family jewels, but I tend to think he did know because of some incidents later in the year I'll tell about later on. Once the coach was finished with the instructions we had PE class, including calisthenics, some running, and a little basketball pitching. About ten minutes before the end of the period the coach blew his whistle and yelled "Hit the showers!"
I ran towards the locker rooms, stopping to grab a towel from the waiting bin like the rest were doing, and then went in, stripped down, and lined up to shower. We called them locker rooms but there were no lockers, just a tiled room with benches and hooks on the walls were you could hang up your clothes. The shower room was also wide open, with nozzles along the walls and an empty space in the middle where if necessary you could wait your turn. Between the locker and shower rooms was a short walkway with a trough urinal on one side. Guys would use it on their way in or out of the showers, standing naked alongside each other pissing. That was actually fun once I got used to it, it added to the sense of camaraderie or the spirit of male bonding to be naked and pissing with other naked guys. Occasionally some guy or guys might go by behind those of us who were peeing into the trough and piss across our backs and asses, which caused some cussing and meant everyone who had been sprayed immediately rushed into the showers to rinse off.
On that first day it felt a bit awkward first pulling my shorts down and off and feeling my genitals exposed to mass public view for the first time, but my fears of getting hard in front of the other guys didn't materialize. Of course there was a lot of yelling and swaggering around as everyone tried to bluff out their own nerves about the whole thing. Naturally you didn't dare show too much interest and look straight out at the others' crotches because you'd get teased for being gay, but there was plenty of opportunity to sneak peeks and look sidelong, and everybody was doing it along with the usual teenage male things of pretending to punch someone or watching for a guy who wasn't looking and quickly pinching his nipple or a quick slap to an ass cheek and of course the accidentally-on-purpose brush up against and quick squeeze to a friend's genitals. There were still some guys who hadn't hit puberty but most of us had. And it was very clear to me that my penis was different from the other guys' right away. They all had that extra skin covering that I didn't have, and my glans was fully exposed. And not having that extra skin made my penis look a little smaller than average, which of course is a universal male worry. I don't remember any one else who was circumcised in that whole class. It was a small town and nearly all the others had been born there, while I had moved there several years earlier from a larger city where evidently circumcision was routine. No one said anything directly but they must have seen me and wondered why my dick looked like that. I doubt that most of the guys understood that I was different because I was circumcised any more than I knew the reason for my uniqueness because someone surely would have said circumcision or cut or some other term. They must have all thought I was deformed or weird or something. It was embarrassing and one more thing to make me feel different.
I developed real concerns that perhaps my penis was deformed and would not function properly, though I had enough sense to dismiss this as after all I was able to urinate the same as other guys, and I had enough experience with masturbation to know that my penis did what it was supposed to in those situations as well, and moreover did it very well and gave me a lot of pleasure. And the whole idea of my being deformed in some way just didn't make sense, because quite frankly my penis looked neater and more functional than anyone else's in those showers. The idea of circumcision came to my mind when I looked at one boy in particular. His foreskin was less wrinkled and smoothly covered his glans so that it wasn't visible at all, and I wondered whether he was circumcised. There was another guy whose foreskin was especially long and hung down like an elephant's trunk, and I thought for sure that he had had some terrible accident!
Sometime during that year I had to have a physical examination done by a doctor, the first time I had had one since hitting puberty. I thought to myself that if there really was something wrong with me down there the doctor would be sure to mention it. In the event he said nothing as he felt up under my balls for a hernia then went on with the examination so I felt somewhat reassured, though still confused about my penis's difference. Had I not been so diffident and actually asked him about it I'm sure he would have explained things, but I kept my mouth shut and so did he. Normally a boy with this sort of questions could go to his father for answers, but my father was dealing with depression and emotional problems and it was difficult discussing ordinary matters with him, let alone anything so personal. In retrospect I could have asked the PE coach some questions in private, because he was an affable older man who knew my family. He was kind and patient most of the time and would probably have explained briefly but thoroughly, but I didn't talk to him about it that year. In other words, my confusion over my genitals was exacerbated by my lack of male support, either my age or older.
Throughout that freshman year gym class continued and so did the showers. There was a good variety of guys all in all, mostly white though there were some black guys as well. Most of us were like me and were well along in adolescence. Our genitals were developed, we had hair in our crotches, our arms and legs, and under our arms, and some like me were beginning to display signs of future hairy chests. Some of the guys were athletic with well muscled bodies, while others were heavy with big bellies. I was in the majority falling somewhere in the middle, healthy with some muscle tone. Naturally there were some who liked showing off and drawing attention to their naked bodies, doing things like strutting around and stretching, or pretending to be modest and covering their crotches with their hands so they could pull them away and show themselves and enjoy the tingling they obviously received in their dicks when they did so. The guys who were still pre-adolescent pranced around yelling with their unbroken voices and showing off their hairless undeveloped bodies, bragging about all the girls they had fucked the night before. The rest of us knew from seeing their hairless crotches that this was absurd, and we ignored them. On the other hand there was a guy who once a week or so showed up in class sporting a hickey on his neck. He never said anything about it and dressed and undressed without comment, packing his large hairy genitals into his pants without ever wearing underwear. He was a bit intimidating, to say the least, his self-confidence allowing him to strut comfortably through class without ever having to say a word to demonstrate his obvious abilities. The most intimidating guy of all, though, was about 6 and a half feet tall, heavy set with a pale body accented by pink nipples and large pink genitals cradled in a thick bush. He was quiet and sort of placid-seeming, but it was obvious that he was quite the exhibitionist, usually being the first one out of his gym suit and the last to get dressed, spending a lot of time in the showers laundering his genitals over and over and rubbing his white ass. He liked to walk around glancing at other guys' crotches, never saying anything but always seeming interested. When he looked at my crotch that way it always gave me a tingle but also unnerved me a bit.
When it got to be colder weather some of the guys started skipping showering but I rarely did now that I felt confident my dick was going to behave itself and not harden in front of the others. It was refreshing to pull my clothes off in the middle of the day for a quick shower and more importantly, like most males I had an exhibitionist streak and I really enjoyed the feeling that I was on display and felt superior to guys who were skipping getting clean and not exposing their bodies to others' gaze. I always got a little tingle when I pulled my shorts down and off and felt the air hit my genitals and ass. I enjoyed having other classes with guys that I had gym with, first standing next to them showering in gym, then twenty minutes later sitting next to them in English or math and knowing what they looked like naked and knowing that they knew what I looked like the same way. We never talked about being naked but it was something we had in common and was a bonding experience. The locker room and shower area wasn't very large and there were a lot of guys using it, so when you were naked and walking back and forth to the showers there was usually the potential for some genital contact: maybe your hand would brush against someone's crotch or some other guy's hand would bump yours. I remember that happening a few times, the other guy's genitals would feel cold and squishy and you'd jerk your hand away, and if someone's hand happened to come into contact with your genitals you'd feel warmth there for a second before he jerked his hand away. If it happened you'd jump a little because you would get a little zing, then look quickly at the other guy before he looked away. It felt a little creepy but sort of good, too, in a way no one would admit to. I also got little tingles whenever I noticed someone taking a look at my crotch, which happened fairly frequently due to the uniqueness of my circumcised penis. I'm sure the other guys got tingles, too.
Once there was a field trip that took a lot of the guys out of my class that day, but not me. So we had gym as usual and afterwards, I stripped down in the uncrowded locker room and walked into the shower room. There were four or five guys standing in one corner whispering and as I came in they all looked directly at my crotch and laughed. That was tingly and unnerving but I didn't say anything, just turned my back to them and started the shower on that side of the room. They must have been discussing my dick's difference. If any of those guys had been close friends of mine I might have walked over to them and asked what they were laughing at and that might have cleared the air a bit and if someone did know what circumcision was they might have mentioned it and cleared up my confusion. But I doubt any of them knew about circumcision, because the town was pretty isolated and there were very few people there from other places. On that day as I started to shower I came up with all kinds of reasons for why they had laughed (it couldn't have been penis size because one or two of those guys weren't even adolescent yet), the most alarming being that since I had masturbated that morning before school somehow or other they could tell what I had done! I took a quick look down to see if any of my pubic hair was suspiciously stuck down or whether there was any dried semen anywhere on me, or worst of all whether there there was some dried tissue stuck to my dick head, but I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I finished my shower and grabbed my towel and dried off, keeping my back turned to the guys who had laughed to deny them another view of whatever it was that had interested them. The fact that it was because I was circumcised didn't occur to me at all because remember I didn't know what it really was.
One other incident, that ought to have tipped me off to the truth but didn't (I was bright but a bit dense at times), came when a guy in my gym class said to me during some kind of discussion during lunch "You're Jewish, right?" and looked confused when I said I wasn't. I had no clue why he would have thought that, believe it or not. Like me he had moved to that town from somewhere else and so he must have been one of the few who knew what the score was with my penis. It's a shame I didn't ask him why he said that, it might have cleared some things up for me and for some of the other guys who were also there.(But then again it might not have, because for one thing there would have been some girls sitting nearby who might have overheard what he was saying, and for another he likely wouldn't have wanted to confirm that he had looked at my crotch). I eventually reasoned out that my last name had a somewhat "Jewish" sound about it and forgot about it. There was a Jewish family in town, but they didn't have a son my age.
Another weird thing that happened sometime that year involved a guy who was a year or so older than the rest of us in that locker room because he had had to repeat a grade back in elementary school. He was a stocky fellow, short and heavy set, and because he was older he had a lot more body hair than the rest of us, plus he had larger genitals, including a penis which of course was uncircumcised. He liked to bully us so when for some reason he spent several weeks not dressing out for PE and sitting in the bleachers for the period we were all relieved. Then one day he was back in class and he dressed out and participated, then joined us again in the locker room to shower and change. He usually undressed and dressed in a spot close to where I and some other guys did, and that day was no different. But something was different when he pulled off his underwear and got naked. His crotch was shaved. He stood and faced me and the other guys and said (as if we had asked) "This is why I sat out for awhile." He put one hand on his dick and balls and pulled them to one side so that we could see he had a red scar there in his crotch between his genitals and where his thigh began. It was surprising and a little shocking, especially since he had no hair there to conceal it. We said things like "Damn" and "Wow" and he then went on "I had a hernia I had to get fixed." There was no answer to this and we just kept looking, sort of the way you can't look away from a car wreck. He fingered his dick for a second, flexing what I later realized was his foreskin, then turned and headed for the showers, giving us a view of his hairy ass. I and the other guys he had displayed himself to turned away and completed our own undressing, then hit the showers as well, keeping away from him in case he wanted to show his scar to us again. That was a repulsive thing to see and none of us ever talked about it. Over the next few weeks I noticed the guy's pubic hair gradually grew back, but shortly after that he must have had his 16th birthday because he dropped out and vanished from our lives.
Toward the end of the school year it got warm again and everybody went back to showering. By that time some of the boys who had been undeveloped at the beginning of the year had had their hormones kick in, because I noticed they now had some hair in their crotches and their genitals looked a little bigger, plus their voices were lower and they seemed a little more mature over all. Once in the last month four or five of the juniors and seniors in the class slipped into the freshman locker room, took off their gym shorts (they weren't wearing underwear), and ran around nude grabbing some guys and throwing them in the shower, slapping bare asses and crotches and letting their own genitals bounce freely to intimidate us ninth graders. One of them was the same guy who had let me and some other freshmen see his genitals at the beginning of school. He was really an exhibitionist and probably a voyeur as well, because throughout the school year he had done his best in every class to get up to foolishness like letting his shorts slip down so as to give a quick view of his genitals or ass, or sometimes when we were outside and the coach wasn't nearby doing things like trying to tug other guys' shorts down, plus he liked to do things like pinch nipples, slap asses, and sometimes even a crotch feel through our gym shorts. He and his buddies who followed his lead were all strong and muscular types, but as far as genitals go none of them were all that impressive, being average in size at most. One or two of them had some chest hair but not as much as I did, and I was actually taller than all of them.
In the crowding and confusion I was able to strip down and shower as normal while he and his buddies were harassing others, but eventually he spotted me, naked after my shower, and I saw him elbow the others and nod toward me. Apparently he had heard some schoolyard gossip about the guy with the weird dick and had been burning with curiosity to see it for himself. He had done the normal nipple pinching and ass slapping to me now and then through the year, and once or twice he had tried to yank my shorts down, but I always managed to keep him from doing that. Now he and his buddies had a chance for an unobstructed view of my genitalia, and he was ready to take advantage of it.
They all came over and stood for a second staring straight at my crotch in a really intense ogle, not even bothering to hide what they were looking at. It was embarrassing but knowing they were looking at my genitals gave me a couple of zings and a tingle down there. I tried to ignore them and dry off but then a couple took me by the arms and walked me backwards into the shower room and held me under a cold shower spray, then one grabbed my feet and the other held on to my shoulders and upper arms at my elbows and raised me so I was parallel to the floor, then stretched me out full length. I had seen them do this to some of the others so I just resigned myself to it. So there were two holding me prone and two or three others standing watching and laughing as they passed me slowly under the shower spray, with especial attention to my genitals. A couple pinched my nipples and pulled some of my chest hairs, giving me an electric jolt all the way to my crotch, and there was a lot of laughing. I saw that all of them were taking a good look at my penis and one brushed away some of my pubic hair so he could get a clearer look. When my entire front was soaked the two holding me turned me over so I was suddenly looking down at the floor and at the thighs and genitals of the guy holding my arms. I was close enough to his groin that I got a whiff of musk which was actually sort of fun. I got the cold spray over my back, rump, and legs. The guys watching gave my ass a couple of swats and one of them, I didn't see which one, reached under and gave my dick and balls a quick feel which made me jump and them laugh. (I realized later that whoever did it was verifying that I didn't have a foreskin.) Once I was thoroughly wet the two guys holding me let me down surprisingly gently and set about grabbing their next victim. I was annoyed and embarrassed but also more than a little titillated by having been so manhandled. I felt my penis starting to swell and so I hurried back into the locker room, grabbed my towel and dried off again standing with my back to the room and then slipped on my shorts before turning around. Fortunately my dick didn't get completely hard, but that was an experience that I relived during some masturbation sessions later on.
The next day the guy and his buddies tried it again. Once again they slipped into the freshman locker room and took off their gym shorts. This time they were intent on another look at my crotch, and when they were naked they came directly over to where I was getting ready to shower. I tried to ignore them as I pulled my shorts off but I knew that once I was naked I would get manhandled and showered again, and I was tired of it. I dropped my shorts on the bench behind me, faced them, and took my penis in one hand and held it up so they could see its underside. With the other hand I brushed my pubic hair back so they could get a better look. I raised my eyebrows as if to say "Want to see anything else?" When the freshmen saw what I was doing they started laughing and cheering. The guy and his buddies were so fascinated by what they saw in my crotch that at first they didn't realize I was making fun of them, but when it sank in they reddened a bit and turned away. Just then the coach came into the room to investigate all the laughing and cheering and yelled at the older guys to get out of there. They grabbed their shorts and jumped back into them and ran out. I walked into the showers to applause and cheering that continued after I came back out and dried off. Having the guts to do something like that and take on the bullies raised my status considerably in the gym class and later, after word had spread about what had happened, in the school as a whole. Those bullies knew that they had been made fools of and they avoided me and the other freshmen for the rest of that school year. I don't remember much more about them, but I don't believe any of them graduated, they dropped out and either went to work somewhere or joined the Army, probably. Anyway, they disappeared from my life and I wasn't sorry to see them go.
Another time during that same goofy period when school was in its final few weeks there was some fun and games in the locker room, with wet towels being used to pop bare asses, and I got a full on whack right on my dick when someone's intended target moved at the last second. The shock and momentary pain startled me and I yelped and jumped which of course made everyone else laugh. Just then the coach came into the locker room and yelled at us to stop fooling around and get dressed. I came in for a little ribbing about getting hit in a sensitive spot, but the guy who had whacked me got more because he could be teased for having aimed at me on purpose. It looked accidental to me, but it's curious that the only dick pop that happened that year was the one that hit my circumcised penis. That was another experience that I was to remember later on when masturbating.
Freshman year was the only year we all showered regularly. In 10th grade for some reason the idea got around that it wasn't cool to shower (maybe some of the guys who still hadn't hit puberty started it) and we didn't except for a few times here and there. Once the PE coach gave us a talking to about us stinking the school up or something and he actually came in to the showers for a few days to make sure we all stripped down and went in, but after he stopped doing that we stopped showering, too. I do remember noticing once again that no one in the class had a penis like mine, and that it made me the subject of some gawking when naked, and it continued to puzzle me. Most juniors and seniors didn't take gym so that was the end of public showering for me until college except for a trip to Europe I took the summer between my junior and senior year, travelling with about 50 other kids from all over the country. Inevitably the other guys on the trip and I ended up sharing bathing facilities and I remember that some of them had penises that looked like mine and some that didn't but as in high school gym class you couldn't show too much interest or ask questions about such things. Again, that was a pity because I had become good friends with some of those guys and I'm sure they would have readily explained things had I asked.
So how did I finally figure out I was circumcised? Well believe it or not it was my senior year in high school when we all had to take a health class (separated by sex). The guys were all taught by the big burly and thoroughly intimidating football coach (not the PE coach) who kept his paddle displayed above his desk and used it on anyone who laughed inappropriately so most of the time everybody just sat there not daring to look around. Mainly we learned about STDs (this was before AIDS so syphilis and gonorrhea were the big worries) and we were actually given instructions on checking for chancres by skinning back our foreskins. We were instructed, not shown, by the way. And I thought "Skin back what? There's nothing down there to skin back." I wasn't about to ask that question in class, naturally. Then we got into some sexual anatomy and were shown drawings of uncircumcised and circumcised penises. That's when the light dawned at last for me, and maybe for some of the other guys who had seen me naked a few years earlier. I remember thinking "Oh! OK!" to myself as things slid into place in my mind and started to make sense. That evening at home I checked my penis out while masturbating and realized that the band of skin below the glans was actually a scar. Of course I never said a word about what I had learned to my parents, which is a shame because they're both gone now so I can't find out whether they discussed whether or not to have me circumcised or whether it was just done automatically before I was sent home from the hospital.
I've read that most men in the US are circumcised, unlike most of the rest of the world. If that's so, then it was my bad luck to be cut in a town that didn't follow that custom and let its boys go uncut. At least in college I knew what the score was with my penis and wasn't so self conscious (growing up had a lot to do with that too, of course), and most of the guys I saw naked in the dorm showers were circumcised, too. But it really would have been great if that health class had been offered in the freshman year rather than the senior!