I came upon a midnight clear. Actually, it was several hours before midnight. And my head wasn't exactly clear. But I definitely came. We had concluded our annual holiday choir concert with "We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” I was thinking of Mary, the perky Alto standing just in front of me, while I oversang the word "Merry" (or “Mary”), as I'd often jokingly done in rehearsal. Mary playfully threw back an elbow. She naile...

I never expected my first sexual escapade to take place on a windswept bluff overlooking a remote Pacific beach. Nor did I expect it to be with a guy. You could hardly imagine a more spectacular setting for your first time. Washington's Olympic National Park is perhaps best known for the Olympic mountain range - the jagged gray peaks of its eastern wall that form the sunset skyline of Seattle, the glistening icecap of Mou...

I got to go to band camp the summer after I graduated high school. I was a decent but not great clarinetist, with no pretensions towards becoming a serious musician. My parents just wanted me to have the experience. I would get an experience, all right. The first evening, a Sunday, was chaotic and exciting: parents dropping us all off, registration, finding our way across the college campus where the camp was held, having...

It was the Fall after I graduated college.  My longtime girlfriend had just dumped me.  Intellectually I could understand why: she was younger than me, and had spent most of her college career attached to me, and I guess she wanted to enjoy college without attachment for a while.  But it still hurt. I started spending more time with my friend Theo. I'd met him in chess club, of all things, early in college.  We had remain...

I'm a young man, staying in a city a few hours from home to attend a friend's wedding.  Which was a blast, but not what this story is about. As I'm driving around town the day after the wedding, I pass by an adult video store. I’ve only been in this kind of place a couple of times, but with some extra time to kill, I decide to check it out.  After some wandering around the displays of movies and magazines and dildoes, I f...