losing my religion

I’ve had a number of conversations with people about when I lost my virginity, and it always ends with a fundamental difference of opinion; I experienced penetration at least a year before the time that I personally count as it and that seems to be the criteria the rest of the world goes with.  My high school boyfriend and I spent so much time screwing around in his bedroom that it was bound to happen eventually, but for me it somehow didn’t count as the real deal unless we stayed conjoined for more than a brief minute or two before breaking apart and moving on to something else.  It’s a mystery to me why we didn’t just buy ourselves some condoms and have at it; early on in our relationship, when we were both about sixteen, his mother actually offered to get condoms for us, and he didn’t take her up on it.  But we didn’t, and so I considered myself at least a half-virgin until I was just past my eighteenth birthday. 

What bothers me about the virginity argument, especially now that I live my life as a queer person, is that the definitions we use for sex have so much variability and vagueness embedded in them that I believe for the most part that it’s only sex if you consider it sex.  Now my criteria for what constitutes sex have widened beyond what I ever would have imagined at seventeen, but when I was in high school they were extremely conventional.  Even though I spent more afternoons than not giving and receiving head, letting my boyfriend suck on my nipples, and basically making out like my life depended on it, I didn’t call it sex.  And because I didn’t call it sex, I’m sticking with my own version of my virginity story.

I’m a classical musician, and in high school I spent about six weeks visiting a different city every weekend as I auditioned for undergraduate music programs all over the country.  I was eighteen, and my parents allowed me to make these trips on my own; most people’s parents go with them, but neither of mine could afford to take the time off work to follow me from state to state.  The very last audition I had in this long and exhausting process was at Juilliard, that bastion of the arts that even non-artists recognize the name of, which was in New York City.  At first my mother refused to let me go, saying that the city would be too much for me, but luckily my boyfriend–also a musician–had his audition on the very same day as mine.  Actually, let me back up a little bit: he wasn’t technically my boyfriend anymore.  We’d broken up a few weeks earlier, which is the only reason my rightfully skeptical parents allowed me to share not only a trip but a hotel room with him as we braved the big bad city together.  We’d split apart, but in the first “arrangement” of my semi-adult life we had agreed to continue sleeping together until further notice.  It was my first experience with not wanting to let go of somebody, and so I did stupid things like putting myself in uncomfortable positions that would end up lasting for several more somewhat angst-filled years.  Live and learn, I guess. 

We showed up in New York City at the end of February and checked into a hotel where we laboriously explained to the doorman, via our parents’ instructions, that we needed an extra cot because we were related and didn’t want to sleep in the same bed or some such nonsense.  Naturally that cot gathered dust in the corner, because we weren’t about to miss out on the chance to do all the things that being in high school and living at home prevent young people from doing.  As soon as we got to the room we started making out, and moved on to taking our very first shower together.  (Verdict, although I never would have admitted it: giving a blowjob in a shower stall, although very hot, is a great way to get a lot of water in your eyes and risk drowning.)    And that’s pretty much what we did for the rest of the three days we stayed there, in between practicing and eating giant slabs of delicious pizza so greasy that I would end up with orange rivers running over my wrists.

What we didn’t do, over and over again, was have sex.  I had been counting on this trip to be my chance to lose my virginity once and for all, but my boyfriend seemed oddly hesitant.  I’ll admit that I got a little bitchy after two days of passing drugstores, asking him to go buy condoms only to watch him shrug his shoulders and say “Maybe later.”  Every day the reluctance, and then during the night he was moaning in my ear and saying how much he wished he could fuck me; it seemed inexplicable.  I’m not incredibly proud of this, but on the afternoon before our last night there I forced him to come into a drugstore with me and, telling him that he would surely regret it if we didn’t buy some goddamn condoms RIGHT NOW and then marching him up to the counter with me as I purchased a twelve-pack (an optimistic quantity, to be sure) of Trojans. 

 When we got back to the hotel and once again fell into bed, he asked me if we could order a porno over the hotel pay-per-view.  I felt pretty ambivalent about it, but at that point I’d do anything if it would lead to having actual sex, finally.  And so we did, making a selection based on the highest sex acts-to-minutes of length ratio, and settled down to watch a truly horrible movie that was based loosely around the plot lines of The Blair Witch Project.  (I swear this is true.)  As bad as it was, we were horny teenagers and didn’t really know any better, and soon we were naked and panting in between kisses.  We turned the movie off, and his face got all serious as he asked me if this was what I wanted.  I reached for the condoms and opened the box with fingers that were shaking only slightly, pulling out the first of the little crinkly plastic squares.

What can be said about losing your virginity?  I had, as I said earlier, been penetrated before so the pain was not really the issue I was worried about.  I was just nervous, and so was he, and so we moved against each other a little self-consciously until he came with a groan and I thought to myself, well, that’s it then, I’m finally not a virgin anymore.  (I was so trite in high school.)  It was both exciting and profoundly disappointing; I was thrilled that we’d finally “done it” but it hadn’t really felt all that good to me.  We held each other for a while, talking in our throughly insufficient language about what had just happened, and then after a while we turned the porn back on and watched until he started kissing my neck again.  After the requisite foreplay, he asked me if he could fuck me from behind and I agreed, intrigued.

That didn’t really feel any better for me–in fact, it felt worse because he was thrusting deeper and I still wasn’t wet enough or versed in the ways of lube–and after a few minutes of staring in horror at my stomach to see if it was bulging outward from what was inside of me I suggested we turn over and go back to missionary position.  And something happened.  An image from the movie, a touch he gave me, something made me finally get wet and click into the rhythm that was building between us.  (I still love that sensation, that snap that happens when two people synch up and lock into each other.)  We began moving against each other in earnest, and suddenly my head was filled with a red haze as I lifted my hips and moaned and wrapped my legs around his back.  The haze deepened until my brain was roaring and I felt completely out of control as I dug my fingernails into his shoulders and came from him pounding into my cunt. 

He came a few seconds later, and I abruptly began crying from the immense shock of the animal impulse I had just felt inside of myself.  It was amazing, but it was also terrifying to me.  I’d always been a very controlled person, and to feel myself lose control like that shook up everything I believed about myself.  I started crying harder, moving from tears to hysteria as he went to the bathroom to dispose of the now-used condom.  He returned, looking at me a bit fearfully, and then came to hold me as I shook.  I had no way of telling him what had happened or was still happening, and when he whispered in my ear that there had been blood on the condom and was I okay? I began almost wailing.  I think now that it wasn’t so much that the blood scared me (although it did) as that I was totally freaked out at the absence of inhibition the blood represented; I completely lacked the language to even articulate this to myself, and so all I knew was that I was scared and shaken and overcome.  He held me until my tears ran out and I was shaking in dry heaves, and then when I had calmed down almost entirely we turned out the lights and he fell asleep while I stayed awake, dry-eyed and contemplating what I had felt.