We are today becoming increasingly aware of teen-age sexuality. Not sexuality as a manifestation of physical and psychological urges and developments but as an active preoccupation, obsession and activity. To what extent is this based on reality? To what extent is our youth today more sexually precocious than were our ancestors one generation or five generations ago?
The answer to this question is not an easy one. If we wish to make a quantitative or qualitative comparison, we must first establish commensurable criteria of before-and-after as a means for reliable statistical comparison. While sexuality is one subject that can, given the proper insights and techniques, lend itself to fairly accurate statistical evaluation nowadays, both on the quantitative and the qualitative level, the art of science of statistics (and of many other recently developed fields of knowledge to which reference must be made, ranging from psychology to anthropology) is too recent to allow us to draw accurate comparison with the past.
One thing is clear. Children have always had sexual proclivities almost from the cradle. This is true of every age in history, of every stratum of society, of every civilization of which we know. What has been a changeable variable throughout recorded history is the extent to which such social factors have condoned or suppressed such early sexual manifestations and the age at which such suppression was imposed and at which it was eased.
A twelve-year-old girl giving birth to a child is today a fit subject for bold headlines in the sensational press. A hundred years ago (and fifty years ago in farming communities) a mother of nine would scarcely have caused a raised eyebrow. Among the impoverished peasants of South America, among the slum dwellers of Salonika or Damascus or Madras, such an event will cause little stir; the only emotion it is likely to engender, in fact, is envy among older women who yet have to bear their first child to term. As sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists our only comment to the phenomenon of pre-adolescent mothers' giving birth or to boys not yet in their teens being cited as defendants in paternity suits, is to admit that the average age of physical puberty in America is approximately 1.4 years lower today than it was twenty years ago and 2.3 years lower than it was forty years ago. While the average varies according to geographical location, race and economic status, this average reduction in the age at which puberty is achieved (defined as the onset of menstruation in girls and the first successful potent seminal emission in boys) holds true across the country, black or white, rich or poor, farmboy or city girl. And for this earlier onset of puberty we must give the credit not to books, television, movies, or the breakdown in law-and-order but simply to better nutrition, better housing, healthier bodies, healthier minds and better physiques. How far this trend will continue is difficult to foretell. The upward curve of hastening physical puberty shows as yet no trend towards leveling off. Our granddaughters may yet be fitted with their first brassieres while their baby teeth are still being lost and our grandsons may be given hormone injections while they are still in diapers to prevent their fathering offspring while in kindergarten. Physical puberty is a natural trend and its early onset is clearly the result of nature being allowed to have its head unhampered by disease and malnutrition.
What is within the realms of human control and change is the manifestation of precocious sexual activity. Each society can determine for itself at what age the "age of consent" is to be pegged, at what age boys and girls are to be allowed to indulge in various forms of sexual activity and at what age sex becomes an imitative adult activity rather than an infantile manifestation of curiosity.
Again, it must be stressed that nothing can be learned from the odd or unusual case. In examining adolescent and pre-adolescent activity we must take not the exception but the average or norm for a group or society. It is in this context that we must examine the comparatively recent and phenomenally growing aspect of adolescent and pre-adolescent sexual activity as indulged in by the group, the class or the club, for this is a statistically significant departure inasmuch as it takes place within the framework of peer-group acceptance and becomes the condoned and accepted pattern for ever growing numbers.
Parents (like husbands) are often the last to know of the unsanctioned sexual proclivities of those near and dear to them, largely because they would prefer to remain in ignorance of anything that disturbs their patterns of acceptable behavior. In presenting this popularly priced book, an adaptation and condensation of our larger study directed at the scientific and sociological community (Organized Sexual Activity Among Adolescent and Pre-Adolescent Youths in American Society, published by the Oneida Institute for Sexual-Anthropological Research in conjunction with the University of Palo Somares Press, 1968; 524 pp., $16.50), we hope to make parents and educators more clearly aware of the changing patterns around them and to alert them to the dangers that may await their children through lack of guidance, supervision and the setting of correct moral examples by parents and educators.
If, as a result of reading this book, one family will be spared from tragedy, one young life set straight, we will consider all our efforts to have been well expended.
Our personal thanks are due to our staff of dedicated researchers who have labored so painstakingly in presenting a study on the highest level of scholarship. Our special thanks are due to the trustees of the Rebecca Bethuel Foundation without whose munificent support the basic study would not have been feasible.
-Dr. Christopher C. Vandental, Ph.D. Marjorie Singer Palo Somares, Cal. January 1969.
CHAPTER ONE - TEEN-AGE SEX AS AN ORGANIZED ACTIVITY
IT IS HARDLY POSSIBLE today to open a daily newspaper without at least one report of a break-up by law enforcement officers of a high-school gang engaged in anti-social behavior, most commonly drug abuse or petty larceny. Newspaper reports, especially reports in sensation-seeking newspapers, many responsible parents will claim, are not true indicators of current events. In this they are correct--but in the sense opposite to that which they think.
We know, and our researchers have further substantiated this, that the cases that are reported in the press are less than eight percent of actual cases uncovered and hushed up. Moreover it can be categorically stated that sex, either overt or sublimated, is an important factor in every anti-social group activity among adolescents.
A case--one which we could repeat a hundred times from our files--will best illustrate this. The events took place in a middle class suburban community in Indiana. The press at the time reported the involvement of twenty-six youngsters of from fourteen to sixteen years in such relatively innocuous activities as smoking marijuana, drinking beer and shoplifting at local department stores and supermarkets. The true story behind this report (which the local newspaper blew up out of all proportions to the material it presented its readers) is far more grotesque and terrifying. That it was not reported at greater length is due to the influence various parents, clergymen and politicians were able to exert on reporters and publishers--because their own children were involved. This suppression of news goes on all the time all across the country: parents in well-to-do communities get police, juvenile court judges and newspapers to play down the misdoings of their children while crime, perversion and misconduct in the poorer sections of society and in the ghetto areas get no mention in the papers either, because they are considered too commonplace.
The true facts in the Indiana case we have mentioned are these: --Fifty-four youngsters were involved, ranging from girls of twelve up. At least four adults were also implicated, including a teacher at another school and a scoutmaster.
--Marijuana parties were never just that. As is almost inevitably the case, they were part of larger "happenings" in which the Mexican weed was little more than a catalyst for mild sexual orgies. --Drugs seized by the police included large quantities of amphetamines, barbiturates and smaller quantities of heroin and cocaine.
--Burglaries in stores were not haphazard. The target was frequently drug stores from which large quantities of contraceptive pills and sundry contraceptive devices were systematically looted for distribution among the members of the gang. Other burglaries were organized to raise money for drugs and marijuana.
--The gang had an "insurance fund" to which each member was expected to contribute $2.00 a month. The purpose was to pay for abortions in case of unwanted pregnancies.
--The daughter of an assistant principal at the high school was one of the five victims of a local medically-unqualified abortionist who induced miscarriages in teenage girls for a fee of $175 each--after first extracting "payment" from the unfortunate girls in the form of perverted sex acts.
--Another girl, member of the high school marching band, raised the abortionist's fee by selling her body --at five dollars a time--to trucksters who frequented a local greasy spoon cafe. She had become pregnant as the result of misconduct with a boy from another school "on the other side of the tracks" and, as a result, the "trustees" of the abortion "insurance fund" declared her to be ineligible for its dubious benefits. --One fifteen-year-old girl whose father, a prominent professional man in the community, had strict ideas about the value of money and gave his daughter an allowance that did not allow her to spend as lavishly as her peers, took to prostitution to raise the money she felt she required to purchase marijuana and drugs, clothes and records, so as to keep up with her classmates.
--Three of the boys, members of the football team, were implicated in a homosexual ring that was associated with a local politician with links to the Mafia. All references to homosexuality were expunged from police and court records through outside intervention from a source whose name has not been divulged. The boys involved were not natural homosexuals; one of them in fact boasted of having "fathered" at least two and possibly four of the aborted embryos. --Medical examination showed that among the fifty-four youngsters involved there were two cases of syphilis, seven of gonorrhea, twenty-two infestations with crab lice, twenty-two cases of venereally communicable diseases of a lesser nature. Of the twenty-six girls examined not one was a virgin.
We can and should blame parents and educators for their contribution to this sort of decline in adolescent morals. Parents who force nine-year-old girls into training bras, false eyelashes, wiglets and high heels, who smile benignly at pre-teen dating and "going steady," who arrange petting parties and kissing games for their ten-year-old offspring, who set a poor example by their own lack of moral standards, whose general behavior around the home and with friends can be compared at best to those of an alley cat, should hardly be surprised when their children, imitating their example, indulge in abuses and excesses with the cruelty and abandon that only children are fully capable of.
With the break-up of the family unit as our parents and their parents knew it, and with the lack of a good example (or any leadership example) from home, children inevitably turn to the peer group for approval and support. It is the peer group that gives the semblance of strength and acceptance to the individual and the peer group that encourages and abets promiscuous sexual behavior. It is the peer group that sets the standard of behavior and conduct. It is the peer group that channels defiance against parents and educators in the most potent channel available to the young protester: sexuality.
The danger as we see it is not that children are exposed at too early an age to sexual conduct and practices. Nothing in our studies and research has indicated precocious sexual conduct per se sets an indelible harmful mark on the future development of the child's personality unless other extraneous factors are present to occasion this. The danger to the child is that sexual activity becomes a function of group approval and a concomitant to rebellious anti-social behavior in general. It is imperative, therefore, that parents and educators be aware of the extent and the ramifications of organized sexual activities among teenagers today.
Superficial statistics do not tell the real picture. One sample survey undertaken by the Oneida Institute, shows, for instance that in a certain high school in an upper middle-class community in southern California, 14.29 percent of girls aged fifteen and sixteen were, technically, no longer virgins; 16.38 percent of boys of that age had performed coitus with a female at least once; 1.47 percent of the girls in that age group had become pregnant at one time or another and had either dropped out of school, married or (since this was a well-to-do community) had managed to obtain abortions. In a neighboring community chosen because of its statistical similarity, the figures in the same age group were 22.31 percent, 24.72 percent and a startling 4.91 percent. There was one significant difference between the two schools (as there was between the two communities): the first is one where individuality is highly prized; the second is one where all activity is directed towards group approval. Pupils in the first school scored an average of 11.2 points higher on the Brandeis University Personality and Motivation Index Scale and sample interviews confirmed that their activity in class and outside of school was strongly motivated by family and personality-inspired goals; pupils in the second school felt themselves under continuous challenge and scrutiny by their fellows and, significantly, there were at least three "sex clubs" active among pupils of that school of which our investigators were informed--one of them tending towards homosexuality and other sexual inversions, one a rather snobbish and exclusive group and one that was associated also with a motor-cycle group, a drag-racing group, and various shoplifting, vandalism, marijuana-smoking and drug abuse groups.
Correlating sexual activity with the results of the BUPMIS score showed us that the difference in statistical measurement can be attributed almost entirely to the fact that the less mature and the less stable of the pupils, whose emotional maturity had not yet reached the stage where they could "under their own steam" have entered a full sexual relationship, had been "encouraged" to do so by the group. These were immature youngsters, therefore, whom Nature had wisely kept in check against the emotional entanglements and personal problems that precocious sex could--and in most cases did--bring in its train. The group condonement of early and promiscuous sexual activity clearly led them into activities for which they were still by far too immature--with the resulting frighteningly high scale of unwanted pregnancies, always a sure indicator of deep-lying sexual problems.
Pam, a gawky sixteen-year-old who may one day become quite a beautiful girl if she only learns to restrain her excessive use of layers of cosmetics, eyeshadows and false lashes and cut down on her intake of candy, cake and greasy fried foods, told the interviewer how she had become involved in the sex group at this school.
"We moved here from Boston about a year ago. Dad got a new job with one of the big computer companies and we all moved here. I didn't fit in well in school. All the girls seemed much more grown up than the girls I'd been used to going to school with. They all drove cars and wore their skirts very short and they were allowed to stay up until midnight on weekdays and till any hour on weekends and vacations. They always had money for new clothes, too. I couldn't make any friends. Life was too different for me here than what I was used to.
"Then I found there was one group you had to be in with to get anywhere, I mean to have some social life. I noticed that if they liked you, you had it made with everyone. I felt like such an ugly duckling and nobody seemed to want to be friends with me. I asked one of the girls who'd moved here about half a year before me what it took to get accepted, and she sort of laughed at me and said "You've got to know how to put out." She said it in a very sneering way, like, and I felt that it was because she was too fat and she wore these big round glasses.
They were getting ready to have some sort of a big party. They didn't say anything officially but they kind of whispered it around and they were very busy with all sorts of things, and those of us who were outsiders all wanted more than anything else to get an invitation. I think I told some of the girls in Biology how much I wanted to go. Anyway, just before I got ready to go home that day, I was stopped by a boy called Elmer. I didn't like him and lots of other girls didn't like him either but he was a tough kid and we knew he was very important in the in-group. He asked me if I wanted to get an invitation and of course I said 'Yes.' He said it wasn't easy, that five kids applied for every one who got invited, that you had to show you fitted in and that you were a good sport and all that. I started telling him that I thought I was and I told him why, but he said he wasn't interested. He said deeds spoke louder than words and I'd have to prove it. He asked me where I lived and I told him and he said he'd pass our home at seven thirty and I should be ready when he blew the horn and then he'd take me for a ride.
"I told my mother I was going to go with some of the kids from school to do our homework together. She doesn't ever ask a lot of questions. She doesn't care who my friends are or if I have any friends at all but she's very particular that I know how to behave 'like a lady.' That's all she ever says: 'Remember you're a growing young lady and you'd better behave like one or if you don't nobody'll want to be friends with you.' I know she wasn't right because who you really need to know if you want to get in on anything doesn't give a damn if you're a lady or a tramp, all they want to know is how can you help them in return.
"Elmer had this real way-out crazy car, like it was bits from 1922 or something and bits from 1950 and bits like right out of the next century with chrome and glass. He built it himself and inside it was done over like a harem with bits of fake fur and silky drapes and a great big seat with huge cushions.
"I asked him where we're going. He said 'That's what we're going to find out.' He tried to sound like he was James Bond. He didn't make much of an impression on me though. We drove around a bit then we picked up these two boys and a girl at a soda fountain. I knew them all; they were seniors at our school. They got in in the back, the girl between the boys and they started necking and making dirty jokes about me and the boy I was with. His name was Elmer. Then we drove off through the back lot of a supermarket and they went over some gravel and stopped by the trees.
"The two boys and the girl in the back had been smoking. I knew it was pot. They passed it to Elmer and he took a deep puff and then he passed it to me and showed me how to smoke. I coughed and my eyes went red and he kept on showing me how to take it down and keep it there but I couldn't because I was coughing. I'd never had it before but I wasn't going to say no and show I wasn't a good sport.
"Elmer got his arms around me then and started kissing me with his mouth open. I didn't dislike him enough to want to push him away. He was alright and he knew how to kiss. Then he tried to put his hand in my blouse. A lot of boys had tried to do that but I never let them. My mother said you shouldn't ever let a boy get below the neck or above the knee. Besides they say it makes your breasts get flabby if you let somebody play with them when you're young. I'd had boys try to get fresh with me that way before but I'd never let them get under my bra, though. But this Elmer was more experienced than I thought because before I knew it he had my blouse right open and my bra off. He threw it over the back seat with a loud laugh and he said to Humph and Horace--that was the two boys in the back and the girl with them was Isabel--That's number one!' and they all laughed.
"He stroked my breasts, very softly at first so it felt quite good and I could feel them tightening up and the nipples standing out like they do when you're cold or when you watch a scary movie. And then he started kissing me on the breasts. I didn't know what to say. I didn't really know that grown boys would want to do that. It was really weird. I don't know if it was the pot that did it or the way he kissed and sucked but I suddenly found myself floating away like on a cloud as if I didn't know what was happening and I didn't really. But I knew I wasn't floating really because he'd pushed me down on the front seat and I was lying there with him on top of me. They were giggling and laughing on the back seat. Then he was sitting on top of me, very heavy, he's about a hundred and eighty pounds. He was sitting on my tummy and then he undid his zip and his thing popped out. I never really saw one before in my whole life. I mean I'd seen my brothers when they were little and I know I once saw my dad's thing when I was a little girl and I got very frightened, but I'd never seen a man's thing properly and he had it a few inches in front of my face, very hard and red. He told me to hold it and I said no and then he slapped me hard a couple of times across the face with the back of his hand and I knew I'd better do what he said, so I held it just like he told me. It was really big; I couldn't get my hand all the way round it. He made me stroke it a bit and I could feel some sticky stuff coming out from the tip.
"Then he shoved it right in my face and told me to take it in my mouth. I shook my head and screamed and then he slapped me again and started choking me with his hands so I knew I didn't have any choice. He pushed it right in and it made me gag and choke, even worse than the pot. It tasted funny, like you know it wasn't really meat and it tasted a bit like fish and a bit the way it tastes when you swallow a bit of silver paper with a candy bar and it gets stuck in a filling. He was pressing his legs on my breasts too and I thought I was going to faint what with not being able to breathe and all that weight and the funny way I was feeling. I think I even passed out for a while and then he was off me and trying to get his hand up my skirt. I yelled at him and kicked and he called me all sorts of nasty names that made me ashamed because of the other three. I thought they'd come to my help, at least Isabel, but they didn't pay any notice. He got my skirt up and my legs apart and then he ripped off my panties and threw them over the back and said 'That's number two!' "Then he started pulling and squeezing at my cunt. It didn't help me any more to try and cross my legs because he'd got his hand in through the fleshy bit of my thighs anyway and there wasn't any way I could stop him. I couldn't even yell because he had his mouth on mine and he was soul kissing me with his tongue deep in my mouth. I thought I was going to wet myself. I had this feeling you get when you've got to go on the John and the teacher won't let you, you know sort of burning and bursting down there and I could even feel myself getting wet all over, not wet like when you can't go on the John but like you get when you read a good story or you laugh too much or when you're kissing a fellow for too long.
"And then he took his hand away and tried to get his thing in there instead. I know all the time that that's what he wanted to do. I was scared. I didn't know what to do to keep him away. I tried pushing him but it didn't help much. He was hurting me all over. I couldn't cross my legs properly, either or do anything, but he couldn't get far anyway. I tried to scream but what can you do when a fellow's got your mouth covered with kissing. Then I had an idea. I bit his tongue and he jumped back and that gave me a chance to scream out loud. I must have hurt him a lot because he sort of got off of me and I thought if I pushed hard I could get up and make a dash for it but then I realized there wasn't much point because I had hardly a stitch of clothes on. I didn't have a proper chance, as it happened, because just then the fellows in the back seat grabbed me and held my mouth shut so I couldn't even scream, never mind get away. One of them got hold of my panties and stuffed them in my mouth as a gag. Then the three of them wrestled me out of the car and forced me down on the ground under the trees. They put a blanket there first. Humph and Horace held my arms and legs and they got Isabel to open up my crack with her fingers. She kept rubbing away at it. I thought it would be awful but it felt rather nice and exciting. She didn't have hardly a stitch on and her breasts were all bare. She kept sort of brushing my face and neck with them while she was working over me and once or twice she kissed my nipples too. It felt really good. But I wanted to go to the bathroom very badly and I tried to tell them that I was going to wet myself if they didn't let me go but they couldn't hear me because of the gag. Suddenly I felt I couldn't hold back any longer. It was all building up inside me and I thought it would all come out in buckets over my legs and Isabel's hands but instead I sort of started twitching and jumping--very funny it felt, too--and I think I swooned a bit too and then it came and I just lay there still and breathed very hard. Funny though, I hadn't wet myself at all, only a little bit, sort of creamy sticky all around like before.
"After that I felt a lot better. I didn't have the strength to fight back any more and I didn't have the will power either. Elmer was back again with his big thing and while Isabel held my legs he started trying to ram it in. It hurt like hell and I wanted to scream. Then Elmer said, he didn't say it, he screamed and he seemed real angry: 'O my God! The fucking bitch. She's a virgin!' I was glad he knew it and I hoped he'd lay off but he didn't. He talked with the others among themselves and then they turned me over on my belly and they made me get on my hands and knees. They wet my rectum with something--it might have been spit--and then Elmer rammed his thing in there. It hurt even more but I was glad it wasn't in the other place. I thought I was going to crap though and I was shit scared he'd kill me if I was going to make a mess all over again. When he got his thing in I was sure I was going to crap and I didn't know what to do but the others held me down and Elmer had his hands inside my crack, too, and he kept rocking backwards and forwards like crazy, in and out, and it hurt like nothing's ever hurt before. But after a time it didn't quite hurt so much anymore. It was going easier, like, and I even began to like the feeling it gave me way inside and also what Elmer was doing to my pussy was getting to feel rather nice too. I began to feel like rocking with him, every time he'd push I'd push too and the other way round and we started doing it together, faster and faster and I thought it would go on and on getting faster and faster till something blew up. And in a way it did. Elmer started kind of moaning and yelling and I felt myself shaking and blowing my mind and then I kind of fell down in a heap with Elmer falling down on top of me with his thing still inside my asshole and his hands in my pussy and his sticky stuff oozing out all down my legs."
It had started out as a classical rape, the kind to which our teenage youth is constantly exposed. The victim, as is usually the case, was as much to blame as the perpetrators. She could not have been ignorant of the reputation the "fast crowd" had enjoyed in school and the underlying reason for it. She could not have been unaware of Elmer's intentions and certainly, when Elmer first commenced his assault, Pam should have seized the opportunity for more forceful statement and proof of her unwillingness to continue. Had she done so, while Elmer was not yet fully aroused in his animal desires and her companions on the backseat were still somewhat self-possessed, it is likely that Elmer would have desisted --he would probably have booted her out of the car and forced her to walk home by herself and that would have put an end to Pam's chance of joining the fast group whose acceptance she coveted.
By the time the first rape had been completed (if it can be considered either rape or completed since Pam remained a virgo intacto) Pam had become a complaisant and willing participant; the victim, as my esteemed colleagues Bruno Bettelheim and Hannah Arendt would say, had identified with the villain and become his accomplice in the crime against herself. When Humph and later Horace performed anal intercourse with Pam later that evening, she not only did not resist but she actively enjoyed it. As she told her interviewer: "I got such a good feeling inside and all over I wanted it to continue. I wanted everyone I knew and especially my dad (for whom she has a secret Electra attachment) to do it to me and never stop. And I was just a little bit sorry that I was a virgin and that it stopped the boys from putting it in from the front instead of their fingers. I know that's what I really wanted then."
The classic cycle of lust, fear, desire, satisfaction and guilt was completed when Isabel presented herself for Lesbian attention while Horace was mouthing Pam anally. She had slid her thighs under Pam's naked body and forced the girl's head down into her lap and there forced the young victim to use her tongue and lips to stimulate her vulva, mons veneris and clitoris. Pam declared that she had felt a great deal of revulsion--apparently Isabel's sexual organs smelled like a goat and were slimy with semen and possibly also menstrual emissions. The performance acted as a method of penance for the forbidden deeds she was otherwise experiencing with such frightening joy and, to the extent that it served to expiate her sin, she actively enjoyed the degrading acts Isabel was forcing on her.
Isabel later helped Pam straighten and clean her clothes. She helped wash off all tell-tale marks and stains from Pam's body and Pam, after her grueling initiation into group sex, was driven to her home where her unsuspecting mother had become concerned over the delay--a concern she was glad to have explained away with Pam's story that she had gotten engrossed over her homework.
Pam's schoolwork began to fall off after this time but her social life certainly did not. Next morning, as soon as the story of the evening's events had filtered through the "fast crowd's" grapevine, Pam found herself the subject of complimentary stares and whistles and much attention. Bruce, the acknowledged "leader" of the group invited her out for a ride in his car that evening and Pam readily agreed.
Though she was painfully sore from the brutal attacks of the evening before, Pam let herself be taken anally by Bruce that evening in the back seat of his car--and enjoyed it. Bruce told her of some of the regulations of the "club": coitus with a virgin was strictly forbidden to prevent the possibility of pregnancy. Only while she was actually menstruating was a girl's virginity taken and immediately afterwards she was supposed to commence taking contraceptive pills. "But I couldn't possibly tell my mother or our doctor that I wanted a prescription,"' Pam had protested but Bruce told her that it wasn't necessary. One of the boys in the group clerked in his father's drugstore after school hours and he was always willing to make false entries in the drugs register and let the girls have the pills "for a price."
Pam's protestation that she couldn't afford paying much was brushed aside by Bruce. "Who's talking about money? He'll take anything you offer him in payment. He's such an ugly guy and such a lousy lover, it's the only way he can get it from a girl." (The rule a wise one in my opinion, was made apparently on the assumption that a girl would not conceive while menstruating. Contraceptive pills, to be effective, must be taken continuously from five days after the start of the previous menstruation. Diaphragms require skilled insertion and, like jellies and suppositories, are useless on a virgo intacto. Condoms are likely to tear when used on a virgin hymen and coitus interruptus is an exercise that few heady young people can be expected to perform successfully.) Until Pam was ready to "give up" her virginity, only Bruce as leader or someone delegated by him, was allowed to date her. Bruce met her a few times after school during the next ten days and had anal or oral intercourse with her on those occasions. The club had no elaborate initiation rites as many other clubs have, perhaps because there are no facilities available to pupils of that school where they can indulge secretly in a mass illicit activity. Bruce took her in the back seat of his car and the only formality required was for him to perform cunnilingus on her (while menstruating) to the point of climax immediately before he introduced his rigid penis into her tight vaginal opening and ruptured her tender maidenhead. Immediately after that he had to perform cunnilingus again to draw the blood "and speed the healing."
"He was very gentle with me really. I thought it would hurt a lot--the girls used to have terrible stories of how it was the first time--but I felt so excited I hardly noticed, and anyway all the rest of it felt so groovy. I could have gone on all night with him but he told me when it was over that I ought to go home quickly and get a good rest, so he drove me there and dropped me. I found out later that he'd gone to meet Lucinda--she's the Prom Queen and real gone on him--and he made it with her that night. I was a bit mad at first because I felt that having a girl give him the most precious thing in her life should somehow mean something special to him, but the others told me that it didn't really. Lucinda's his steady, anyway. I haven't made it any more with Bruce, not all the way that is, but I've made it with twenty-three boys from school and five from outside and that's pretty good going in less than six months. Some of the girls who've been doing it for a year or more haven't had even half as many, and I have more boys from the football team than almost anybody else."
The "party" to which Pam had so much wanted to be invited, was held the Saturday night before Pam finally lost her virginity. It was held in the spacious home of one of the boys, the spoiled only son of a wealthy divorcee of doubtful moral standards. A certain decorum was preserved in the main party rooms but in the bathrooms and closets marijuana was freely smoked, hard liquor was consumed, goof pills popped, and sundry forms of sexual conduct were indulged in.
Mrs. S., the host's mother and supposedly the chaperone of the evening, described the scene for us with more relish than regret. "Those silly little kids must have been screwing wherever they thought they were safe from grownups. There were panties in the broom closet, bras behind the boiler, the bushes were trampled and there must have been half-a-dozen odd shoes among the trees. But the bedrooms! I should have thought of locking them because, after all, the weather was warm and they weren't wearing much of anything in the way of wraps. There wasn't a bed that was fit to sleep in that night and it took me two hours to straighten up and take off all the stained sheets and bedspreads. I mean to say, they're young enough not to get desperate for it and they could have better manners than fucking around in their best friend's mother's own bedroom."
Our interview with Mrs. S. taught us a lot about the local community, the high school and the sexual activities among the high school children. If I sought for two words that would sum up both Mrs. S. and the town, I could think of no better words than "wanton" and "hypocrisy." Despite her protestations to the contrary, it is Mrs. S. who encouraged her son, Arnie, a very tall and manly looking boy of seventeen despite the soft and childish lines of his cheeks and chin, to become involved in the sexual goings on of his gang, and it was she who regularly encouraged him to bring home groups of boys and girls "to have fun" as she put it, without searching into their activities. Furthermore, she generally announced at such occasions that she would be going out or that she would be retiring to her room with a glass of scotch and her sleeping pills and wouldn't be around "to help or give you anything." Under the circumstances, this can be construed only as an open invitation to debauchery.
In our interviews with Mrs. S. we discovered that she had, as a child, been extremely jealous of what she considered the sexual license that her brothers were given, a resentment that she carried through into adulthood. It was jealousy closely interwoven-- as is usually the case--with envy and the desire to share in what was not open to her. By encouraging her son to indulge in precocious sexual activities and by often helping to find the girls with whom he may indulge, she is in a way reliving her past and improving on it: she acts out her sexual thrust through her son and becomes the sexual recipient through the girls she makes it her business to get into her son's bed.
CHAPTER TWO - TEEN-AGE SEX AS A PSEUDO-RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
HISTORICALLY AND ANTHROPOLOGICALLY, child-sex and religion have always been closely linked. As Freudian psychologists would have it, it represents the desire of the aged (the priests) to regain their youthful sexual vigor by symbolic substitution. Under this head we must put all initiation rites such as circumcision of male and female, the indenture of young girls to temple rites or cult prostitution, the ancient Anatolian custom of mating first born sons with priests of the Phyrgian rite, the sacrifice of infants to Moloch, and so on.
Significantly, most of the religious and social practices that promoted sexual activities by children and teen-age youngsters, permitted such activities to be carried on only as part of the ritual in which adults were involved or as surrogates for the adults. It is only in modern times, among esoteric neologic religious cults, that childhood sex per se has been encouraged and exalted.
The first group we may study is that popularly known as the Adamites, more correctly called the Religious Society of the Children of Eden. The Adamites flourished in what is now eastern Montana in the 1870's and early 1880's. Their doctrine was based on a novel interpretation of the concept of original sin and held that the fall of man was due to his acceptance that he was sinful from conception onwards. To remedy this, they sanctified all forms of procreative and sexual activity. The Adamites initiated their children into their first sexual activity--masturbation--as soon as they were physically old enough, usually before their first birthday. Group sexual activities were indulged in from the age of five or six, but only heterosexual activities were tolerated. Children were encouraged to mate and breed from the time they first displayed the first signs of puberty. There was no formal marriage: unions were blessed by the elders of the community with the divine blessing to Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis: "Be fruitful and multiply"--which is what the group did so that it grew, in the two decades that it flourished, from fifty to eight hundred souls. The sacrament of union was entered into not by two individuals but between each individual and the community. All men took the surname Adam and all females took the surname Eve, and all Adams were considered equally wedded to all Eves.
Captain Rufus Glastonbury of the U.S. Northwestern Territories Survey, who travelled widely in Montana in the years before it was admitted to the Union as the 41st State, gave us a full account of the sex life as practiced among the young adolescents of the Religious Society of the Children of Eden.
"The morals of the Adamites can be considered as among the loosest on this mortal earth. It is not uncommon for an eleven-year-old maiden to have congress with ten males in one night, among them--for she knows no better--her very brothers and stepbrothers or even her own father. Shame is unknown among youths or maidens. Except when the weather is inclement, they freely expose their bodies to the gaze of the opposite gender, seldom caring to hide even bosom or genitals. A virgin is unknown among them for many of their infants are wildly taken by the elders of the group before they have reached their sixth birthday. It required great fortitude on my part to withstand the blandishments of the more handsome of their maidens and, knowing that such forbearance could not be expected from the men under my command, I forbade any man, on pain of punishment, from consorting with their womenfolk or staying within the farms or encampments of the Adamites after dusk."
Glastonbury apparently had enough fortitude to withstand these blandishments (or else he stopped being concerned) for he spent a total of four months among the Adamites and reported faithfully on their way of life.
"As the sun crept slowly behind the tall pines, the community prepared for its evening activities. The men returned from their fields with their plows and oxen and the women folk repaired homewards from barn and byre. The evening meal, prepared by the younger maidens, was eaten in community as part of the sacrament. One elder recited biblical verses from the Book of Genesis relating to the Garden of Eden before the Fall, whereupon other elders uttered exegetic responses equating their lives with those of Adam and Eve. This was followed by hymns joined in by the entire community in which they castigated the Serpent as the source of all Evil. Hymns completed, they partook of a large plaited loaf from which morsels were broken off and passed from man to woman and woman to man, with the words "Eat from the Bread of Knowledge." Any man thus approached and any woman thus accepted of the bread, were thereupon considered mates for the evening, to perform with one another such rites of debauchery as either considered fit. The younger of the infants were given bread by an elder, who became their leader for the rest of the evening. When the meal was over and further blessings and hymns had been recited, the couples repaired to their respective beds while the children and youths, in groups of from six to twenty, went off to their own cabins under the leadership of an elder.
"Stripped of their clothing, the young infants played shamelessly with one another's genitals, huddling and bundling in the manner favored by our village youths and maidens of twice or thrice their age, but with none of the signs of shame we might and should expect. Boys hardly old enough to write their own names took possession of girls not yet old enough to read or write, in the manner of a well-experienced husband, omitting none of the activities in which their parents indulge. It was a sad, yet ludicrous sight, to see these infants with organs sadly underdeveloped and scarcely able to become erected, attempt entries into the tiny rosebuds of their partners' secret parts. Infants who should have been allowed to experience ten further years of pure innocence before being rudely thrust into the sins of this world, gave themselves over to unspeakable debaucheries. Nay, their activities would have been frightening and horrendous even among their parents for they had no concept of shame or propriety nor was fidelity among the words in their vocabulary. Their pitiful probing efforts with one unfortunate little girl completed, these young boys of six or seven would wander off unconcernedly to take possession of yet another innocent girl's body and privates and, that accomplished, another and yet another. Soon the division into couples was all but forgotten as they became one writhing mass of sinful abandon that reminded the onlooker of the Serpent of Evil himself. The elders, who might have been expected to exert some restraint, were in truth the worst for they too did display their nudity, thrusting their virile members into the hands and even mouths of the unfortunate girls to be handled and fondled. Nor yet did the older women show modesty. Divested of all their clothes, they raised no objections--nay they even encouraged!--when a young boy stroked the curly hirsute covering of their privates, and exposed these to full gaze of all onlookers by spreading wide their neither limbs. It was not uncommon to see a puny lad of six or seven attempt to mount a matron old enough to be his mother or grandmother and attempt to do with her what only her lawful husband had the right to demand. At the height of the evening's debaucheries, when the young infants were exhausted by their precocious activities, the adults would gather in a group, observed by their children, and there proceed, entirely without shame, in activities as base and debauched as mortal eye has not seen since the fiery earth swallowed up the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah.
"The older youths and maidens, from ten or eleven and up, needed no mentors to show them the way of sinfulness. They too paired off, in all nudity and lasciviousness, to indulge in those activities to which as infants they had been introduced by their elders. For them, these activities were no game, but part of the regular ritual. Seeing them thus engaged, it was difficult to believe that these were not wantons and hussies but young children who should have been sitting that very hour over their lesson books or, dressed in sacred robes, raising their puerile voices in the praise of their Maker in the choir of a church. The young maidens were entirely without shame. Her bosom yet heaving from the excitements engendered by a twelve-year-old boy, a maiden of eleven might be seen approaching a youth but one year her senior who at that very moment was engaged in sinful acts with what might have been her sister, and urge him to a rapid consummation of his act so that he might yet, before his virility was entirely expended, lavish upon her some of the attentions he was at that very moment lavishing on his partners-- the same attention as this maiden had received but a minute earlier from his fellow.
"Perhaps half of the young girls had swollen bellies, yet even they indulged as shamelessly as any other. None knew who had gotten her with child. The idea of paternity was unknown amongst them for all or any of the men may have fathered the life that was beginning to beat inside her. When the infant was ultimately born, the community accepted it as one of its children, caring for it without thought of its illegitimate origins or its unknown paternity. A mother knew her own child only for as long as she suckled it to her swollen breast that sprouted so incongruously from her child-like body. Once weaned, the child became part of the group and, within but a few years, became a part of the wider debauchery. Not knowing who was father and who brother, incest was the lot of all."
Captain Glastonbury's report, cast in tones whose condemnatory nature left little to the imagination, was instrumental in the persecution and outlawing of the Adamites' cult when Montana became the 41st State of the Union in November 8, 1889. Denounced by churchmen and the laity in surrounding communities long before that and exposed to envious attacks and raids from their more prudish and churchly neighbors, the Adamites had long before been forced to abandon their fertile tracts and move into successively poorer and less salubrious regions where they were exposed also to attacks by Indians and rape and assault by trappers, hunters, explorers and soldiers. Weakened by inbreeding, their agricultural economy in shreds and their very canons of existence declared unlawful, the remnants of the Adamites wandered further westward and finally disappeared. Rumor had it that many of the young girls from this strange cult ended up their lives in the bordellos of the infamous Barbary Coast of California; the rumor was assiduously fed by the madams who passed off their choicest girls as Adamites, whose sexual reputation was so great among the California bucks and sportsmen that the madams could demand and receive a triple fee for the services of such girls. Some of the Adamites may have continued wandering into Utah in the belief that the Mormons, persecuted like themselves for their unorthodox mating habits, might prove more tolerant; in this they were sadly mistaken.
A similar union of sexual and quasi-religious beliefs is practiced today among a group that calls itself simply "Weallare" (We all are) and makes its home in rural Pennsylvania. Weallare was started originally by a group of beatnik students in the early 1950's. Its social beliefs are unquestionably Marxian, but its sexual beliefs owe nothing to that bearded German-Jewish prophet who found his political wisdom among the dusty tomes of the British Museum and whose grave lies in Highgate Cemetery. Today the oldest children of the early founders of Weallare are in their teens. Like their parents, they know no limitations in their sexual life.
"I can't tell you when I first started having sex," a pretty seventeen-year-old girl from Weallare, now a freshman at a California University, told her interviewer. "We never looked at it that way. We all played together as children. We watched the grownups when they had sex and we just copied them. We were never embarrassed by sex like the girls I meet at college. We don't make a fetish of it; when a boy and a girl liked each that way, they'd just mention it and go off to screw. I mean, when we were kids, like six or seven we couldn't really screw, but we got a lot of fun out of it anyway. When we were older, we did it the proper way. Every girl who looked old enough was fitted with a diaphragm and we'd get our own tubes of Ortho cream from the commune store the same way as we got our sanitary napkins and our toothpaste. Boys could get condoms if they wanted to--God knows why, because they used to blow them up like balloons and play with them and waste them. I'm glad I had a healthy approach to sex as a kid because I don't have the sort of hangups other kids have now, but I wish they hadn't filled my mind with all that other rubbish about communal sharing and emulating the early Christian communes, vegetarianism and pacifism and so on. I mean they all have their places and I feel very strongly about most of them but I think I can be a good Christian who loves all life and hates all wars without being a socialist and I can be a socialist without having religion or pacifism drummed into me and I'm sure I can have a good sound sex life without the other.
"Anyway, you want to talk about my sex life because that's what people are always wondering at. We never thought there was anything special about it. I mean it wasn't dirty but it wasn't scared, either. It was just what you did, like talking or kissing or eating together. If you wanted to you did, if you didn't you didn't. That was all. You weren't supposed to with your own brother or sister, of course, but some of us did, just to be rebellious. I did it with my own brother occasionally but I didn't really care for it because, frankly, I don't much care for him. There was a lot of home-made religious rigmarole around everything, like ceremonies over the food and the harvest and when we got our weekly allocation from the communal store. There were ceremonies when a kid was born and when it was weaned and when a couple got a room together. It was a weird mixture of Christianity and pacifism and vegetarianism and simple do-goodness. When a boy had his first proper emission and when a girl had her first period you were supposed to notify someone and then the commune was supposed to hold a special initiation ceremony in which you were declared adult. It seemed an awful lot of fuss to make about a little thing because being initiated didn't change anything in the way the grownups treated you except that you were supposed to have a full vote once you were initiated, but since all decisions were made by acclaim and were reached on through compromise in committee anyway, it didn't make any difference.
"They were really very prudish about sex, despite what they said. I guess it was because the older people had all those hangups and they felt they had to make something sacred of sex and mix it in with all that religious mumbo jumbo. You were supposed to stick to one boy as a "regular." You weren't forced to but if you changed boys too often you were held 'insincere' and one of the grownups would give you a lecture on it, or they'd bring it before the Youth Council for discussion. We used to love teasing them by sleeping with three or four different boys in a night just for the heck of it. What they really didn't like was group sex.
"We used to go out in the barn when we wanted to do it in groups. It wasn't anything serious, just fun and experimentation. Like we once tried to make a fist of the number of basic variations possible when you had two people, three, four and so on, so many boys and so many girls. Like having a boy do it to you from the back and another from the front at the same time while you sucked a boy and made a girl come with your toes stuck in her vagina. It wasn't really sex because that's too difficult to do well in that sort of situation, it was just curiosity, if you know what I mean. But I liked it in small groups, no more than six, and I used to get a lot of fun that way. I really did it with two boys at the same time, both bashing away at me at the same time. I like to be wrapped up between boys, my breasts squeezed against one and my back against the other. I like it when they both push their stiff cocks right inside me. I get it from all directions and I feel as if I'm sort of being taken possession of, as if I became part of the boys. I guess I've always envied boys for what they are and for what they can do for you. You weren't really supposed to do it with two boys because that was against their quasi-religious rules. Some of the boys I wanted to do it with that way even turned it down because we had quite a few prudes. But when they did it was heaven, and if I could get two boys at the same time I'd do anything they wanted after that to show my gratitude. The usual thing they expected after doing you a favor like that was to suck them off but I didn't think that was much of a payment because I liked it even more than them. I'm crazy about eating pricks. We're learning what that means now, in Psychology, and they're probably right because none of us got much attention from our mothers even though they used to suckle for ages and ages. I could eat half a dozen boys in an evening and just want more. Once, for a bet, I went in the barn with five boys. A lot of kids came in to watch, too. I had one of the boys from the back and one from the front. I sucked off one boy and jerked off two, all at the same time. It wasn't exciting, it was just awkward, that's all. Occasionally we'd have one boy with a few girls but there isn't really much one boy can do.
"In a way I think the way we grew up in Weallare was healthy, sexually speaking, but it was too forced, like in a hothouse. By the time we were fourteen or fifteen, we'd had all there was to have. There wasn't anything new except fooling around and experimentation. I think that's what made me turn to girls. I don't know whether that's good or bad and I guess I'll have to make a decision on that sooner or later. But at the moment I'm right off boys. I have a good thing going with a girl with whom I share a room. We always sleep together in her bed. She has a really lovely body and she's very exciting. She's really quite new to it. She'd never even made it with a boy. I find sleeping with her regularly is very comforting and restful, not like with the boys on campus; you've got to put on a sort of show each time you try to date one and act this way to let him know you're interested and that way to show him you're not too fast. I hate all that hassle. With my roommate it's so much easier. I know she's there, I know she likes me and I like her and we just take off our clothes when we've locked the door and do our studying together and then we go to bed and make love and fall asleep in each other's arms. We can bathe together and shower together and hold hands and that sort of thing and no one makes funny remarks like they do when you're with a boy.
"A lot of girls at Weallare are turned on to other girls. It's not allowed but everybody does it. A lot of the boys get turned on by other boys, too. One of the things about it is that when you've got somebody sleeping in your bed in the dormitory at Weallare, you don't get woken up every other hour by a soft prick suddenly going hard and trying to push its way into your cunt. When I've had sex for the night I like to curl up against somebody soft and loving and just go to sleep. And if I wake up with a soft hand on my cunt or lips pressing my nipples, that's fine. I can pretend I'm still asleep or I can return the favor and get involved in another round. But you can't do that with a boy. He's pushy and insistent and you have to give in. Also, when you're with a girl, you can pretend almost that you're making love with your own body, that you can reach with your lips all those lovely, secret, exciting places you've always wanted to reach. You end up not quite knowing which breast is yours and which is hers and whose lips are on whose cunt. I don't know whether I've made myself clear but, for the moment at least, I'm off boys and sex in general and only sleep with my room mate. I thought of inviting her home to introduce her to the people at Weallare but I'm sure she'd understand and our people are very chary of letting in outsiders who'd sort of get the wrong impression and cause us to get into trouble. Perhaps I'll stay here over Christmas after all, or else I'll go home and get used to sleeping with boys again."
Through this young college student we were able to make arrangements to meet others of the teenagers of Weallare--but not in their home community. Somewhat of the same distaste for the formalities of social and religious ideals that surrounded otherwise free sexuality were voiced by all. "We felt they were all hypocrites anyway. They preach socialism but are terribly possessive. They preach sexual freedom but it's really a very formalized game with them: you've got to do this or that and enjoy it and you're forbidden to do something else. Everything has to be done for some stupid ideal. Sex is a fetish with them and they can't just let you enjoy yourself the way you want without a lot of preaching. A lot of us boys don't care too much for girls and we'd rather play among ourselves, but if we're found out they give us no end of lectures and try to reform us. I don't know why they bother. I like getting rimmed, it's a good feeling and lots of fun. The girls can feel a good hard prick inside them; why shouldn't a fellow? And if a girl's allowed to suck off a boy's prick, what's wrong with letting a boy do it? He can do it so much better because he knows where it's at."
This lapse into homosexuality when sexual freedom is apparently available, runs counter to the expectation of most of those of us who feel that sexual freedom leads to sexual and physical sanity and absence of aberrant behavior. Dr. Sigmund Freud voiced this clearly in his "Geschlechtsverhaeltnisse in der Auferklaerten Gemeindschaft." Carl Gustav Jung echoed this in "Onanismus und Selbstverdarb mit dem Steifem Glied." Perhaps my late friend and mentor, Dr. Wilhelm Reich, put it in the correct perspective in his masterpiece, "The Sexual Revolution." It is not just a permissive society that our adolescent youth requires nor a society that seeks to give them sexual opportunities out of a feeling of guilt or responsibility--in which the young generation be comes surrogates for the pent up needs and jealousies of their elders, but a genuine revolution in which sex is accepted and neither forced nor condemned. The problems faced by these youngsters would have been less acute if they had been left to their own devices rather than preached at and urged to indulge in sex with some mystic religio-socialistic formulae.
Loss of perspective in "forcing" sexuality on young children rather than letting them discover it for themselves, is not necessarily the prerogative of a group inspired with socio-religious mysticism. We found the same or similar problems in our interviews with what would pass as a "sexually healthy" and permissive family. (Readers who wish further details are advised to consult the case history quoted in "Sexual Anthropology in the American Mainstream of the Nineteen-Sixties" by Dr. Vandental, and again in the popularly priced volume "Wife-Swapping in America" published by the same author as a companion volume to "Teen-Age Sex Clubs" and under the same imprint.) Dave and Lyn, somewhat typical Greenwich Village bohemians aged 42 and 37 respectively, have three children: Evangeline (17), Charles (15) and Genevieve (12). The parents frequently indulge in group sex with other adults. Sex is a regular preoccupation in their household and never hidden from the children, whatever their age. When groups of parents from the circle in which Lyn and David circulate, come together, there is usually an arrangement whereby the children--whatever their age--are allowed to attend the same "party."
"When they were younger," Lyn told her interviewers, "the children would often have little orgies of their own in the children's room while the grown-ups were having their swap party. What went on among the children in their room usually depended on what the hostess and the other parents considered right. We for our part never interfered unless it was to stop fights or keep down the noise level.
"I couldn't say when our children began sexual activities. All children are sexually active unless they're repressed and we've never done a thing to repress ours. I don't mean masturbation. All kids masturbate, even little babies, but ours don't do that much because they have the real thing. They've been trying to screw since they were out of diapers... Charles has been sleeping with his sisters for as long as I can recall and they've always enjoyed playing with each other; it's given them a lot of fun."
Lyn equipped her daughters with contraceptives well before they reached puberty and she insists on her son's having sexual relations only with girls whose parents do likewise. Evangeline, however, had reservations about the benefits she has gotten from her parents' permissive (we might call it demandingly permissive) attitudes. "My parents have been forcing me to lead a double life since ever I can remember... When I'm in school or around the neighbors I have to pretend to be childish and not to know anything about sex or fucking or lesbians, and all that. I mean the girls in school would just die if I as much as stroked their breasts, never mind sticking my tongue in their little hairless fannies; and the boys... they're even worse because they're always pretending they want to make out with us but when I meet a boy I like and get hot pants for him I find he's too scared to know what to do... I don't even think I'm highly sexed--certainly not half as much as my parents would like to pretend... They've been trying to get me to have more sex and meet more boys and try new ways and all that. They'd get us together as little kids when they used to have their big night out once a week and try to get us kids to perform for them--I guess it was the only way some of the parents could get their kicks. They used to watch the little four- and five-year-old boys trying to get their little cocks into our fannies and you'd think it was the biggest joke in the world. They used to get my kid brother to sleep with me and I used to hate it. He was so terribly childish and when he got me excited it used to embarrass me that this little kid I wouldn't dream of playing real games with was playing with my pussy and sort of being responsible for that good feeling... The happiest day in my life was when my kid sister was old enough and I could force Charles to sleep with her.
"A lot of the time my parents thought I was having fun I was really miserable because it was all so silly but I had to pretend just to make them happy. And I know most of the kids we used to meet at weekend parties felt the same way. We'd play Parcheesi or Monopoly or something once the parents got busy on their thing and we'd have one of the younger kids as a lookout at the head of the stairs and he'd yell when a grownup came to check on us so that we could put the game board away quickly and pull up our nighties the way they expected us. It's a lot better now that I'm allowed to be with the grown-ups and Charles, too, is much better now that he's growing up--he's a pretty good stud in fact though I hate to have to say it of him because as a brother I can't really stand him. But I wish my parents' friends treated me as a woman and not as a little girl they can work their paternal instincts over."
This last remark, repeated frequently in different forms, succinctly sums up the resentments felt by Evangeline and her siblings. It became apparent to the interviewer that Evangeline, at seventeen, still suffered from the inferior sexual status her parents had forced on her. She tried to prove in various ways (such as propositioning the interviewer, a married man who had a daughter three years her senior) that she was a thoroughly "adult" person with adult sexual appetite and abilities.
This rebellion against activities forced upon her by the adult world to which she is not yet completely admitted, were reflected by Evangeline in other ways. "Nowadays, when the parents get together for one of their weekends, we older kids usually pretend that we're going to have a group session of our own but all we do is we go out to Central Park to smoke pot (marijuana), in the Sheep Meadow and then groove at a museum and take in the Electric Circus (a rock-beat dance emporium) or something like that. And then, just before they get home,, we muss up the beds and the cushions and rugs and put a pile of dirty glasses on top of the dishwasher so that they'll think we've been having a wild bash and they'll stop urging us to enjoy ourselves for a few days at least."
Evangeline's cri-de-coeur came right from her heart. "Sometimes I get so fed up with the whole scene that I make up my mind to go to a strict Catholic girls' college where the sisters will keep us all in check and stop any chance of meeting anyone sexier than a father confessor. The trouble is I'm too used to it now and I wouldn't really be able to do without sex for a whole semester. I'd probably end up by turning all the girls on and, who knows, even feeling up the nuns."
Deeper interviews with the three young adolescents tended to confirm the suspicions of the effects on children of having sex "forced" on them by their parents--and told us something about the motivations of those adults who feel the need to do this. The children rebelled at being forced to play the subordinate role prescribed for them by their parents and had a continuing and frustrating sense of inadequacy, knowing that they were being indulged in and treated as children, curiosities, subjects for study and projections of the grown-ups' secret fantasies. They wanted to explore life and sex by themselves and not have everything coldly arranged by grownups. Nevertheless, these children's attitude towards sex and eroticism was much more healthy than that of the norm, and more healthy than the children themselves were willing to admit. At a later session, Evangeline admitted that she really enjoyed sex with her brother, Charles. "He's really a tremendously good screw, very virile and potent and he knows all the little secret ways of pleasing me. He's also very kind and honest and when I get hot pants for some boy I can always tell him and he'll arrange for me to get laid. Actually, I've always kind of liked him and I used to get terrible fits of jealousy over my kid sister when she used to try and lure him into her bed... I know what he likes best so I sucked him--he gets tremendously excited with that, especially when I put three fingers up his arse-hole and try to get his whole column in my mouth with one gulp. And then he fucked me. It was really divine. He's so big and thick and long and his tool gets so red and it has all those throbbing veins sticking out when he gets excited. He's rough with me because I like it that way and he threw me on the bed and pulled my legs apart and then he rammed it into me again and again. He hurt me but I like it that way... he can keep up an erection for hours. He kept pushing it in and squeezing my buttocks and biting me on the breasts and I just came and came. It was really glorious. I get all creamy and swishy inside just thinking about it."
The subject, we must remember, is a girl of seventeen. That she can be so frank about her experiences indicates that, despite parental pressures and patronizing attitudes from other adults, she is remarkably free of neurotic inhibitions in her sexual life. That she is able to be this frank about relationships with her own brother despite the strong and pervasive taboo that society has against this conduct, would indicate a remarkably sane approach to sex in all other aspects that society is more ready to accept.
CHAPTER THREE - HIPPIES, GROUPIES AND TEENY-BOPPERS
WE HAVE TALKED OF teen-age sex as a proscribed activity illicitly indulged in within the educational framework, and as a prescribed activity indulged in at the demands of a micro-society and as part of its cultural mores. We come now to a group of young people whose conduct is subject only to the approval of the peer group, a group of young persons whose status is closest, in a sociological sense, to that of the outlaw of our society, a group of people that makes its own rules in everything from art to religion, from music to politics, from drugs to philosophy. A group of people, moreover, that has been surprisingly successful in having, if not its views then at least its right to hold these views, accepted by an ever widening spectrum.
For the purpose of this study, we shall define the distinctions between the three groups of young persons under discussion; a distinction that is not always clear and not always carefully adhered to in the common press. For the purpose of our study, we shall consider as hippies those people between fourteen and thirty who have alienated themselves from their home milieu, fend for themselves, live either by themselves or only with persons fitting the definition of hippie, do no work or are engaged in an occupation considerably below their social and/or educational rank or in marginally profitable handicrafts or avant-garde arts, offend community standards in terms of dress, hair-style or deportment, and regularly partake of marijuana or its derivatives, opium or its derivatives, lysergic acid diethylamide, amphetamine, methedrin or similar stimulants, mescaline, peyote, (but not barbiturates, alcohol or Miltown). Groupies and teeny-boppers may affect some of these practices some of the time but, first and foremost, have not cut all ties to their homes and traditionally acceptable behavior. Teeny boppers are girls of between eleven and seventeen who adhere to the fringe of the hippie-psychedelic-avant-garde-drug crowd; they are caught up especially with the rock-and-roll type of music world and are usually what is termed "dance crazy." Groupies are a sub-set of teeny-boppers: they are admirers of certain (or all) rock music stars to the extent that they are virtually camp followers of rock performing groups. The male equivalent of a groupie is a groupie-grouper, i.e., a boy of similar background who has special sexual interests in groupies as a type. There is no accepted term for the male equivalent of the teeny-bopper, partly because it is difficult to recognize an analogous group among males. Nevertheless a small select group does exist; we could refer to them as boy-boppers.
The sex life of teenage hippies is unorthodox in the extreme. It may be stated categorically with little fear of denial, that a shucking off (on the exterior at least) of all sexual restraints and inhibitions is a sine qua non for admission to the unchartered ranks of hippiedom. In all our enquiries, covering 1,284 hippies in seventeen separate communities throughout the United States, we have been unable to find a single one who was willing to admit to our researchers that he or she had sexual inhibitions. All forms of sexual practices are accepted in this sub culture: anal sex, oral sex, cunnilingus, fellatio, frottage, group masturbation, group sex, pederasty, male homosexuality, female homosexuality, incest, bestiality, sado-masochism, bondage and all forms of sexual fetishism.
Let us take, for sake of illustration, a sixteen-year-old girl who makes her home on New York City's Lower East Side (East Village to its hippie habitues). Her name is Celeste, she is the daughter of a respectable and well-to-do family in Des Moines, Iowa. She ran away from home some fourteen months before her interview, during her freshman high school year. She hitch-hiked on long-distance trucks to get to New York, together with a girl from her class. Both had had some early sexual experience in their school life though both had remained technically speaking virgins. Both lost their virginity on their first night on the road, lying on a trucker's bunk in the back of the cab while it was parked by a diner. According to Celeste she had been "raped" by "five or six" truck drivers and her companion had been subjected to the same treatment. Once in New York City, the two girls had split up. Celeste had $2.56 left of her savings when she hit the metropolis. That very same evening she was taken in by a group of hippies she met on the sidewalk at Second Avenue near St. Mark's Place. They lived communally in a ramshackle bug-infested apartment on East Third Street whose only furniture consisted of moldering mattresses strewn about the floor. - "There were nine people there when I arrived. Some were boys and some were girls but I wasn't sure which was which because some of the boys shaved and some were too young to need to shave. Everybody had long hair except one of the girls and she was colored and had an Afro hairdo. She called herself Ayomo. And some of the girls wore short dresses so you could tell. They made me throw away my bra that first night because they said it was a silly thing to wear. I have big breasts but I don't really need a bra except when I'm running and I've stopped doing that since I'm a hippie. Dancing makes it bouncy but that's a nice feeling especially when you're wearing something loose and rough and it brushes against the nipples. We all slept together in a pile. Nobody cared much if you took your clothes off. We didn't all make love, it wasn't like that. We slept close together and sometimes we kissed the people we were touching against and sometimes you sort of let your hand go to caress the other person or somebody caressed you. If you felt like it you could make out but you didn't have to.
Everybody does their own thing. Like I'm with this group of cats and I dig their bag and I see someone's a beautiful person and I get to like them so I'll go over and kiss them and perhaps give them some of my beads or just a flower and I'll put my arms around them. If I get good vibrations I'll take off my blouse and get them to take off theirs and we'll come closer and make love. Like it's not how you make love or who you do it with but it's that you do it because that's how it feels, that's what counts. Like if it's a beautiful girl and it feels good so you do it with a girl and you dig her breasts and you groove on her woman smell and you try to get right inside her. Or it's a beautiful boy and you like the line of his hips because he's slim and he's got these beautiful ribs, very skinny, showing through his shirt, so you let him know you dig him and you grope for his penis and hold it and kiss it to show you care. Or you cover him all over with beads and flowers. It's a nice feeling when a lot of people who were strangers till then show you they think you're beautiful and they send out these crazy vibrations and you know you can groove with them and you just let yourself go in all that love without you know, singling out just one person. You make love to the whole group. Sometimes when you're high you don't need a person. You can groove on a candle or incense or a beautiful dress. Like I've got this thing about boots. I dig long tight boots. If I meet someone who's got long tight boots I want to make it. I like to feel myself squashed between booted legs and I like to wear them myself and squeeze. It gives you power. When I'm high I can just groove on the boots like once this cat was making love with this chick and he had on these boots like crazy and I tried to get in there between him, and then he took them off and I didn't care any more about him really, just those boots and I rubbed them all over myself, like my breasts and my cunt and everything and I made love like that. I know a girl who gets crazy about big furry dogs and she likes to cuddle with them when she's on a trip and she kisses them and gets her kicks that way. That's her bag and we--that's her friends --always look out for big strays for her. You know, that's her thing. She comes from this very square home in New Jersey where they used to keep a toy poodle in a little antiseptic doggie basket. And she likes everyone to be free and loving and she wants to make up for the way they don't even let the animals live free.
"I don't take dope and none of my friends take dope. There's a few on speed but we don't go for that. They're all the time talking on and on for days at a time. They say speed kills. I don't know. I don't go for it. It isn't easy to get acid anymore. Like there was this cat who used to make it in a loft on Broome Street and he used to give it away free but then he got busted. He beat the rap but they made him shave his hair and forced him to go back to college or they'd throw him in jail and throw away the key. He's on probation and we haven't heard from him since. But we used to have wild parties when he was around. Like there'd be ten or twenty of us in a loft or somewhere with light shows and incense and three or four tapes playing acid rock at the same time, as much pot as you could smoke in a lifetime and a huge bowl of Sunny Strawberry Kool-Aid spiked with acid (LSD). If you've never made love on acid you don't know what sex means. You know like it isn't you anymore, it's the whole world. Everyone and everything is love. You look at the lights and you cream, you listen to the sounds and you come. And you feel you're making love with everything. The white lines between the bricks on the wall become all sexy like and you feel like making it with them but on the way over your legs turn to rubber and you're swallowing stars and it takes a week to get to the other side of the loft but you don't care because you've found this empty coke bottle and it's the most beautiful thing there's ever been in the world, you have to love it. You hold it in your arms like it's your baby, and then you want to put it under your sweater to let it suck at your nipples. But you know that isn't what it's for and you want to really love it so you zip down your pants and push in the neck as far as it goes and it goes and goes and goes till you come but it isn't over yet and you grab out for the nearest boy to try and get him to put the right thing in you. It doesn't matter if you get hold of a boy or not because everything is love and if all you manage to grasp as you turn over is the bare boards--and it takes you a month to reach those-- that's all right too, because you can groove on everything and the boards feel good and kind, even the splinters are good and you can press yourself to those boards and feel them with your fingers and really groove with love for everything while the music goes right through you and you're swimming through the light and the stars fit themselves around your hair.
"It's a real gas. Like what I'm telling you really happened to me once. I was just grooving on those rough boards with the boy I wanted only six inches away from me but it didn't seem worth the effort. Then this chick got between us. I think she was walking someplace else and she must have stumbled over my hand and fell down. I didn't care. This boy I wanted so much reached out to her and they grooved together but I could reach them both now without an effort and I sort of humped them both, like squeezing them to me while they were making love or whatever they were doing, and I managed to kiss them both, I think. I wanted to have his prick inside me but it didn't matter where it went as long as it got in deep and I ended up by getting fucked: you'll never guess where, in my armpits. In both of them. And not by the guy but by his chick. I got hold of her bare feet and pushed them in my armpits and got them in and out. It was the craziest screw I ever had. It seemed like I kept on coming for a year and it must have been at least an hour. And then someone started eating my pussy. I don't know who. It could have been a fellow or a chick but I kept imagining to myself it was a great big white bear from outer space and it could have been a big shaggy dog one of the fellows had brought. I felt like one with the cosmic universe with lights bursting all over and I was flying between the galaxies with the whole stellar system fucking me and fucking everything in sight.
"That party lasted four days altogether, over the Thanksgiving Day weekend. I couldn't keep track of the time because it didn't mean anything anymore. And I couldn't keep track of the boys I was with either. But I wasn't high all the time. No, that's not true. I was high, higher than I've ever been before, but I wasn't tripping on LSD all the time. You can't because there's no fun in that. You've got to come down from your trip so's you can really groove on the next one. There were always a few people who weren't tripping just then to act as guides and they wouldn't let us touch the acid while we were still tripping. So you trip and come down and then trip again. A trip takes about eight hours because that acid was really good, right from his lab, and then there's ten or twelve hours while you're coming down and having the most exciting feelings like you're flying and falling very slowly into a warm net, and then you're down, ready for another trip, waiting for one of the guides to give you a dixie cup of Kool Aid or a sugar cube and you let yourself go again. So I must have tripped five or six times that weekend. I hate to think what it did to my chromosomes if what they say is true but it won't probably do anything to me because I think I'm sterile anyway. I mean I've never taken the pill or used anything and never gotten pregnant yet and some of the girls I know--they're maybe fifteen or sixteen years old and they're den mothers in a crash pad and they've been pregnant two or three times even though they use everything and they had to go to this quack in Newark and get abortions.
"At first I used to be careful, like washing myself out with Lysol right after every screw or only mouthing with fellows, because I was scared of getting pregnant, but then when I found out it wasn't hard to get an abortion and everybody chipped in for the hundred bucks it costs, I didn't care so much. I don't want to use anything because it spoils the feeling of getting close and they make trouble, the doctors and the free clinics and the drug stores if you go to them and they see you're not married and only fifteen or sixteen. Some of the girls got caught that way and got sent back by the cops to their parents. And I don't want to use the pill because it makes your legs swell and gives you varicose veins and, besides, it's against my religion.
"I don't have a regular place to stay and I haven't worked at anything steady since I've been here. I usually stay in somebody's crash pad. There's usually eight to twenty people in a pad and one person pays the rent and anybody who has some bread buys groceries like coffee and ketchup and macaroni and beans. They're filling and easy to cook and don't cost much. Anybody's got some pot or acid he shares it with everyone. You can stay in your pad for a week at a time without wanting to go out or doing anything else. You smoke, you take acid and you screw. Screwing's what you do most of because it's for free and it gives everybody a thrill, even if they're not taking part, just watching and grooving. There's usually three or four fellows for every chick and that's fine for a girl but it can make you sore after a while. A boy who hasn't got a regular girl for himself often makes it with another boy if there aren't enough girls to go around. I like watching that. It's good. I like boys when they're young and soft and before they get all hairy but it's alright with an older fellow too and I dig beards especially when they get down to eat you because it gives you a nice tickling feeling in your crotch.
"When I get tired of the place I'm staying or it gets busted and I have to split, I go down to St. Mark's Place. You don't have to wait long to find a fellow there who'll let you stay with him. If you really want to meet someone new you hang out by the Gem Spa (a soda fountain and cigar store at the corner of St. Mark's Place and Second Avenue) and you'll meet everyone. It's alright for a chick to ask a fellow if she wants to go home with him and screw. Sometimes I meet a guy I really want to make it with but he doesn't have a place and then, if I don't have a place either, I ask around till I find another fellow who has a place and we go over there. You don't pay but he usually expects you to put out, or else the boy you're with if he's that way. It's only fair, anyway. You don't often find chicks who'll let you come up to their place to screw because if they have a pad they probably have a couple of guys there already, anyway, and they're uptight about losing them.
"I haven't had much trouble with the cops. They're always on the lookout for minors but I've been bothered only once by this plain-clothes fellow. You could tell he was a cop because he was all hung up and he looked older than most of the boys and he didn't know how to talk. He was a dumb Irish cop but he was alright in a way. He got me one day as I was coming out of the Gem Spa from making a phone call. He'd been standing there for a long time and I knew there was something funny about him. He stopped me as I was coming out and he showed me his badge and then he said I was under arrest for possession and he wanted to see my bag to see if I had any narcotics. I had this tapestry bag over my shoulder with my things in it--some spare panties, a blouse, a couple of sugar cubes and almost a dime of pot (i.e., ten dollars' worth). He put in his hand and pulled out a little paper package which he looked at and said it was pot and that was funny because he'd planted it there on purpose and he didn't have to because I was loaded anyway. He said I was under arrest and he had to question me.
"He didn't take me to the station house, though, but to a loft on Third Street, right by the Bowery. He made me strip, to examine me for needle marks, he said, and then he felt me up all over. He made me lie down on an old blanket with my legs spread and he put his fingers up my cunt to see if I had anything stashed there, he said. I knew then he was only giving me a spiel and I wanted to say to him: 'You didn't have to go to all that trouble. I think you're beautiful and if you wanted to fuck all you had to do was tell me.' But I didn't dare say anything because he could have got me for possession and then when they found out I was a minor they could have sent me up to a reformatory or forced me to go back home. So I let him feel me up. And then he put his fingers to his nose and said I can smell it. You've been hiding heroin in there. I'm going to get the goods on you if it's the last thing I do. I'll have to use another method, if you don't mind, and you'd better not mind because it's very unpleasant for me and it's terrible the things they force you to do when you join the Force but it's all in a day's work.' I had an idea what he was going to do next and he did. He started tonguing me. He kept going in deeper and deeper and it felt real good, but I couldn't let myself go because I couldn't let him see I was enjoying it because that would have told him I knew he was enjoying it too and I knew he didn't want to know that I knew he did. So I held myself very still and let him suck me and lick me. It was heavenly in a way and I was very scared and I couldn't let go and that just added to the excitement so that I wanted him more and more. Then he put his fingers up my arsehole and felt around in there while he was sucking my cunt and then he started sucking my arsehole and I could see he was getting a great kick out of it and I was too but I couldn't let him know. I think he came but I couldn't tell for sure because he kept his pants on but I could feel his prick all stiff inside his chinos and then it went soft. I was terribly excited and I wanted to come too but I didn't dare frig myself while he watched.
"The funny thing is, when he'd come he burst into tears. He looked like he was only sixteen or seventeen, like a little boy crying, but he must have been at least twenty-one if he was on the Force and probably older if he was plain-clothes. He said he'd done a terrible thing and his wife would never forgive him and he'd let down his comrades and he could never face himself again and he was a disgrace and all that. Then I took him in my arms and told him it didn't matter because he had his job to do and anyway I liked him--I really did--and he shouldn't worry and if his wife found out I'd go there and tell her he was a good man and he'd only done his duty and she shouldn't be hard on him. I told him I liked him and that if he wanted to he could fuck me. I'd really like it if he did, I said, and I meant it. Not just because that would keep me out of trouble but because he seemed like a nice boy and he'd got me all worked up.
"He said, no, he couldn't. That it was an awful thing to say and that I was making things harder for him and that I was only trying to talk myself out of a rap but that he was really a sinner and he ought to be punished. He wouldn't let me tell him otherwise. He said he ought to be punished and he gave me his handcuffs and told me to lock his wrists around his ankles so he couldn't get free and he made me take off his shirt. Then he told me to take his belt--it was one of those wide belts with brass studs--and he made me whip him all over. I could see his prick getting harder and harder. He had his fly open and it stuck out like a signpost. He wouldn't let me stop whipping him though I was terribly sorry for him and I wanted his prick so much for myself.
"I drew blood and he screamed but he wouldn't let me stop. I tried to kiss him and I tried to kiss his prick but he just pushed me away and made me go on whipping him. He told me to call him all sorts of names: pimp, whore, motherfucker, cuntsucker, bastard, shiteater, everything you can think of. I started enjoying it too. I've never met anybody like him. I mean somebody like him who likes getting whipped and all that. I've seen some weirdos in my time but never anything like that. No, it's not true, I've watched people who dig whipping and things but I've never done it myself. It was very exciting. I could feel my cunt itching and twitching everytime I laid on another stroke. That belt was like it was part of me, like I was fucking him with the belt and the belt was my prick. I really laid it on till he was bleeding all over and then he made me kick him in his back and in his bum and then he came. He had this great big come that must have splashed nearly a yard and he kept on coming and coming. I tell you, it was such a waste because I wanted him for myself after this.
"He wouldn't fuck me, though. He said he was married and he could never face his wife again if he was unfaithful to her, but he did suck me off when I begged him. I think he was waiting for me to do that. I knew that was what he digs, anyway. So I made him suck me with his head locked between my thighs and his fingers in my arsehole and it was really good. Like we'd been there over an hour and he'd been exciting me all this time and I was dying to come and I came pretty quick. It was really groovy and he was crying all the time. Weird, I tell you. He told me to get dressed and to go back to the Gem Spa and get back in the telephone booth and not to leave the Gem Spa for fifteen minutes, and not to tell a soul about him. He said if I did I'd get busted and they'd lock me up for every crime in the book and throw away the key.
"I never saw him again. Of course I told the cats at the Gem Spa to look for him and some of the girls said they wouldn't mind getting busted by him if they had to, if that was the way he got his kicks and he let them go again, but nobody ever saw him again. I think he got himself transferred to another job because he couldn't take it but one of the fellows said he wasn't really a cop, he was just an uptown weirdo and that was the way he got his kicks.
"You'd be surprised at some of the weirdos you meet. Sometimes, when you've got to make some bread, you answer some of the ads in EVO (The East Village Other--an underground newspaper specializing in social provocation, obscenity and sex). There's always a bunch of guys advertising for hip chicks to share their apartments but most of them are married Madison Avenue types who take a pad in the East Village and try to pretend on their Saturday oft that they're real hip. I don't go for that type, thank you. Then there's ads for posing for photographers for $10 an hour and they're a weird bunch too and they usually want to get laid or something before they fork over the money and sometimes they won't even then and threaten to call the cops on you if you make a fuss. What I like doing is posing at the skin studios where they have these sweaty old men leer at you and pretend to paint you only they're awful painters. They let them skin paint for twenty dollars an hour and you get five dollars for yourself out of that which isn't all that much because it takes you an hour to two to get the stuff off. When they see you're young, like me, they nearly always proposition you. I once had this old grandad type, I think he was a banker, offer me a hundred dollars to sleep with him but I just laughed at him which made me feel good. I don't dig old men. I told you, I like soft young boys, with long hair, like Jim Morrison. Then you get ads from fellows who just want to eat, your know, have oral sex, suck your pussy. Sometimes they pay. There's one guy from Philadelphia who calls himself the Great Ray and he's always advertising to eat pussy and he comes to New York all the time. He doesn't pay but a couple of chicks I know have tried him and they say he's a lousy lover, always panting and sweating and he's much too fat, anyway, and he doesn't suck good.
"The best way to get bread is when a bunch of college kids put on a party. Like the NYU frats over in the West Village around Fourth Street. They get three or four of us to go over to their parties, sometimes a fellow or two as well, and they get us to put on a show for them. Some of them just want you to dance topless or to strip but sometimes they want you to put on a show, two girls together or else a bunch of boys and girls. They pay good and we always ask them to lay on pot and acid. Most of them haven't ever tried it and they don't know where to get it so we get it for them. Sometimes they want to fuck you afterwards and I never let them pay me because you know what that would make me. They're not much good as lovers, anyway, because they're all hung up, but it's fun to turn them on. One of them, a real wealthy kid from Massachusetts, got so turned on he dropped out of law school and became a hippie. We were lovers for a while but he was too old for me and after a while he split for the Coast. He went to Haight Ashbury. I think the Army was after him for dropping out.
"It's a good life. Everybody's always turned on and you don't have parents and teachers breathing down your neck and telling you what to do, but you've got to watch out for the pigs-that's the cops. They have this youth squad that's always trying to turn you in as runaways. I spoke to my people once, a couple of times, collect, after they'd put an ad in EVO and said my grandmother was dying, only it wasn't true. Then some of the kids told me it was dangerous because they could trace the calls and have you busted so I stopped calling them. I send them a note every now and again to keep them off my back. I tell them I'm in Chi or L.A. or wherever and give them to kids to mail when they're going out that way, and that makes them think I'm somewhere else. Sometimes you get trouble from a bad trip like now when they've busted all the good acid makers and you never know what you get, and then you meet the weirdos and the bullies. You get crablice too often if you don't spray yourself after every screw with a new fellow with DDT and there's a lot of syph and gonorrhea around. I had syph once and I had to go up to the health clinic on Ninth Avenue. I told them I was twenty-two and married and that my husband had caught it from a whore and they believed me. I've never been pregnant, touch wood, but they'll always help you out if you need an abortion and everybody knows about this quack in Newark who'll scrape you out while you wait but they say it hurts a lot because he doesn't give you a shot. The. girls always take acid first because then it doesn't feel like it hurts and they get these way-out trips while he's scraping, like turning on in a slaughter house while you're dripping blood.
"I tell you something. You really live down here. This is where it's at. I mean when I think back on my folks and my school and all that it makes me feel like I'm sixty-four and I've been gone for fifty years."
Our typical groupie is a thirteen-year-old girl from a suburb of Newark, N.J. Catherine looks older than her years--most would put her age at fifteen or sixteen, although she is half an inch short of five feet. She wears false eyelashes, has bleached a lock of her long hair, and wears all the "mod" clothes: slinky boots, vinyl clothes, leather skirts, velvet vests with brassy embroidery and mirrors, capes, floppy hats. She is the only child of a broken home. Her wealthy father indulges her--at long distance, by check. Her mother, caught up in the social whirl of her community, with bridge, dances, charities, and "swinging" happenings, has little time for her daughter and less authority. Catherine does more or less what she wants at weekends and what she wants is to be part of the rock-mod-psychedelic scene of New York City's Greenwich Village. Catherine has an absolute obsession about the pop-rock stars. Her room at home is plastered from floor to ceiling--and on the ceiling too--with pictures of her stars. She subscribes to seven fan and rave magazines devoted to the lives and doings of her stars. She has a collection of six hundred and forty records--singles and albums, all pop rock. She buys her clothes with the money she wheedles out of her father and sometimes her mother --an average of thirty-five dollars a week when she made her account for us. That is her only expense aside from the fan magazines and her cosmetics, hairdos and her weekly fare to Greenwich Village on the Hudson Tubes. Her records she gets free, as "gifts." Purists might dispute that and point out that, in effect, she is a prostitute who takes her whore's groat in the form of pressed vinyl disks at 33 r.p.m.
Since she was twelve, Catherine has been hanging around with the electric guitarists and drummers who play the high school dances, Friday night dating bars, pizza joints and bar mitzvahs, in her community. She has been a fan, an obsessed camp follower ever since. To get closer to the acne-complexioned long haired youths some two or three years her senior who are the idols of her set, she has slept with them whenever possible. She is insatiable in her appetite. She will harass and follow her temporary favorite until he surrenders--seldom a difficult task for these children hepped up on erotic sound, lights and drugs. Her taste is not necessarily for just the one performer; she covets the entire group and will have sex with whichever member is willing and ready--or with all of them, at the same time or in succession. She has no particular loyalty and, once she has "made it" with her current rage or one of his fellow players, she is likely to abandon that group and go on to the next one. She exacts payment from each one, though--a record, an album or a collection. If they are reasonably good players she will settle for one of their records; if not she will demand a record of one of the current star teams. She has been sleeping with rock musicians since shortly after her twelfth birthday. By her count she has slept with over a hundred and twenty in the intervening period, a number that our investigators were inclined to dismiss as exaggerated but which she has substantiated more or less, giving names and dates and references in her diary. Catherine's mother cannot be unaware of her daughter's activities, but on the surface she denies even the suspicion that her daughter is no longer a virgin. "It's a passing fad that all girls go through," she told the interviewer. "I was all nuts for Frank Sinatra when I was her age, but it passed. I think she might as well get it out of her system while she's young. A couple of nights dancing won't do her any harm and, besides, it's good exercise and will teach her to get along with boys when she grows up."
"The first boy I made it with was an eighth-grader called Gregory. He was the leader of a group that called itself Gregory and the Gregorian Chanters. He was real beautiful and all the girls went for him. I was in the sixth grade at the time. There was a seventh grade girl who said she'd gotten pregnant by him but we knew she was lying because she hadn't even started having her period yet. A few girls started saying after that they'd slept with him but none of us believed them. They used to look down on me because I was only in the sixth grade so I decided to show them I was as good as them and really grown up. I went to one of the dances where the Gregorians were playing. It was a Saturday night dance at our church social hall. During the intermission I waited for Gregory to come offstage and I took his hand and said I had something very important to show him that he'd never seen before. I think he thought I was pulling his leg. He asked me to tell what it was but I wouldn't tell. I told him it was something that lots of grown up people wanted to see but I'd never shown it to anyone.
"I took him to the parking lot and we found a car out of the way of-the lights that had its doors open. I told him to get in the back seat with me. Then when he asked me what I wanted to show him I started kissing him. He was very sweaty from playing and I loved that smell. We soul kissed for a long time. I had my tongue deep in his mouth and I really know how to kiss well. Everyone is always telling me that. I undid my bra and rolled up my sweater and let him feel my boobies. They weren't very big then but I used to push them up to make them seem bigger. My nipples were alright, though, especially when I was excited, and he probably thought I was a lot older. Then I got my hand on his fly and pulled out his prick. It got soft when I took it out. I don't think he'd ever had anyone do that to him because all the stories the girls used to tell were just lies, anyway. It got soft very sudden when I took it out because he was frightened. But I stroked it for him and it got hard. He really didn't know what to do. I don't know where he'd been. I mean he hadn't ever been with a girl before, I could tell, but he hadn't even read any books, I don't think, and he couldn't even have talked about it much and I don't know where he was during sex education lectures because we had these at our schools but if your parents wrote a note saying they didn't want you to attend you weren't allowed to go to those lectures, only what you could find out for yourself from the biology books and from lessons about the birds and the bees and flowers. But I still don't understand it because after the lectures we always told the kids who weren't allowed to go. So I don't know how it was he didn't know.
"I made him pull down my panties and play with my pussy. It was good. I used to play with my pussy myself when I was listening to records and I used to cream for the Beatles and the Doors and Donovan and the Animals and a few of the others, but it was more fun having a real live performer do it for you. And I stroked his prick till it got hard. I got very excited. I knew now was the time. I'd been dreaming about it for a long time but I hadn't really believed it would ever happen to me. I made him come down on top of me and put his prick in my crack. He couldn't get it in. He kept missing and trying to put it anywhere but the right hole. So I had to make it wider with my fingers and then push his prick in. I had no idea it could be this good. It was really wild. I started moving my hips like they tell you you have to do. They say a boy hates it when his girl just lies there like a sack of potatoes without moving her hips. So I moved my hips and pushed myself against him till I could feel his prick sliding in and out. It was divine. It slid in and out just by the entrance and I was all creamy and soft and it felt good. We were kissing and tonguing, too, like crazy. And then he caught on and started moving his hips too only he couldn't get too far because I was a virgin, still. I had his pants down and I put my hands on his behind and started pushing with my hands, in and out. It hurt a lot but I didn't mind because it was a good hurt. He got it in a bit deeper each time and then I tore. It hurt hard for only a moment but I could feel the blood and then he was in and I didn't mind the hurt anymore at all because it was good.
"As soon as it was in good I made him pull out. I didn't want to get in any trouble. I'd bought this packet of condoms at a slot machine at a filling station and I made him put one on. I had to show him how, and then he put it in and we fucked. I was my first fuck and I thought it was real groovy, but it wasn't a patcho on what I started feeling later when I was more used to it. I came first and then he came but I wanted some more so I made him rub me till I came again. When we finished I took off his condom and tied a knot in it and put it in my purse and we went back to the hall. Before we went in he said I'd promised to show him something important and I hadn't shown him and what was it. So I told him I'd shown him how to screw. And he said I'd told him it was something no one had ever seen before and I said, yes, because no one had ever seen my pussy before, and he seemed a bit disappointed because he said, 'Oh, was that it,' as if it wasn't very important to him at all but he was only playing it cool.
"When we got back in the hall everybody was mad with him because he'd been holding up the dance.
They were only supposed to take half an hour for intermission and we were gone for nearly three quarters of an hour. I told the girls what I'd done but they wouldn't believe me so I got them to go with me to the powder room and I showed them my panties which were all stained with blood, and one girl laughed and said it was just my period and then I got out the condom and showed them but they still didn't believe me and one girl said it was only soapy water so I undid the knot and let them smell and I told the girl that didn't believe me that if she really thought it was only soapy water she wouldn't mind if I squirted it up her crack because it couldn't do anything if it was only water, could it, but she was scared because she really knew what it was and, of course, she was afraid of getting pregnant.
"They were terribly impressed with me, especially my friend, Lucy, and she asked me how often you can screw in a night, and I said I could screw all night. So in the next intermission I got Charlton--he's the drummer of the Gregorians--to come out with me to the same car. I made it with him, too. It wasn't so hard because I think he'd done it before. He knew what to do and he didn't waste any time. But I was very sore from where I was bleeding and I couldn't come that time. We didn't take more than twenty minutes which was lucky so there wasn't any fuss that time. I showed Lucy the second condom and she told the girls and they all crowded around me in the powder room and this time, I think, they really believed me.
"I was quite a celebrity when I got back to school on the Monday and all the girls wanted to be my friend. I made them give me records. That's when I really started my collection. I made Gregory give me some records, too and Charlton, but I didn't fuck with them any more after that. I didn't have to because everybody heard about it and I found it was very easy to fuck any boy I wanted to. But I didn't really want to fuck with the kids from grammar school. I started with boys from the high school. They're more grown up and they treated me grown up, too. Fourteen-year-old boys are really children, they're much younger than girls the same age. I got boys of sixteen and seventeen, real cool players. It really made me grown up and everybody started looking up to me because I was the first one in the class who'd fucked properly, except one girl and she'd gotten pregnant at the beginning of the year and had to drop out but she didn't have any real friends anyway.
"Once I'd got started all the other girls in my class and the ones in seventh grade wanted to try it too. They got me to tell the boys they were interested in and I had to make all the arrangements. I had to do almost everything. They got me to buy the condoms for them and find them a place to do it in and give them advice. I had to do everything but cream up their cunts and make the boys' pricks stiff for them.
"About a year ago I started coming to the Village. I was getting sort of fed up with the boys from around New Jersey. They were all very young and none of them was very famous. I used to come in Friday evenings with my friend Lucy. There was a girl in our class, Madeleine, who'd gone to live in New York, so we told our mothers we were going to sleep over with her. We went straight to Macdougal Street and bought ourselves some pizza pie and just sort of walked around. There were a lot of real, groovy boys there with long hair and way out clothes and things and we got speaking to a few and they told us they were from a combo called Daniel and the Lion's Den. The boy I liked was called Daniel and the other said his name was Leo and Lucy liked him. The third was called Roger. They said they were going to play at a place on Third Street at ten and asked us if we'd like to go up to their pad and watch their rehearsals. They hadn't ever pressed any records themselves. They said they had demos but they were having records made by Columbia and they weren't out yet so I made them buy us about eight or ten albums and then we went up to their pad. They weren't really musicians because they didn't have any instruments up there. There was just this one little room with a lot of icky pictures on the wall and a record player but they had some reefers and they let us smoke and I didn't really mind because they were sort of groovy anyway and I dug this cat, Daniel. I let him fuck me and then I made it with Roger who wasn't much good. I would have liked to make it with Leo, really, but Lucy got nasty and I didn't want to fight with her. We went out for a walk later. It was raining a bit but it was real groovy, and Daniel knew all the cats on Macdougal Street and I gave my telephone number to all the boys he introduced us to and I told them we'd be coming up again the next weekend and they should call me if they wanted a date. We lost Roger on the way, which wasn't bad because I didn't care for him and then we went back and we all got into the one bed together and we screwed again, Lucy with Leo and me with Daniel. I'd never slept with a boy all night and it was really nice even though it was very cramped in the bed and Lucy and her boy kept knocking into us all the time. But I liked it.
"I called my mother next morning--well, it wasn't morning, it was after twelve--and I told her we were having a good time with our friend and could we stay over Saturday, too, because we were having a good time and she said O.K. if our friend's mother didn't mind and as long as I got back in good time on Sunday to finish my homework assignments, and I told her to tell Lucy's mother that she wouldn't be back till Sunday, either.
"We split from that pad Saturday afternoon. We walked around the Village for a while and met some more boys and then I met this groovy kid who said he'd played with the Doors and with Moby Grape. We went up to his pad on Second Avenue and he gave me some records he said he'd played on. He was quite a good fuck. He didn't make it with Lucy but a spade cat from the next apartment did. I didn't care for spades at that time but I dig them now. We went to the Wide Open--that's a place on Bleeker Street but it's closed now--in the evening and we danced and he introduced me to the players, and when it closed we went back to his place with a couple of the cats from the Wide Open and we all screwed together but I slept with this kid--I don't remember his name, the one who'd played with the Doors when they started and Moby Grape--but the others went home and Lucy slept by herself in the other bed.
"I've come back to the Village every weekend since. We usually go three or four together but sometimes I go alone. I know all the players and I always get myself some records from the boys I make it with. It's something to remember them by and I love showing off my collection. It's the biggest collection anybody's got in my school. I only make it with real players but sometimes I get tricked like when a boy tells you this fantastic story of who he's played with and you believe it even though it isn't true but if he's a nice boy and he's got some good records for me, I don't mind even when I find out he hasn't ever played in a real group because he's nice and I enjoy fucking with him. Then sometimes you've got to fuck with a boy who isn't a player himself but he knows everybody and he's the one you have to go through to meet the real top cats, you know, the ones on the top forty. It's very hard to make it with anyone in the top forty because they all have their own girls and there's a lot of groupies all want to make it with them, so you have to make it with these cats first and then they fix you up with the real ones. There's another boy I know who can get you pills and I make it with him whenever I need pills.
"I'm getting better all the time and I'm getting known so I can make it with the top cats. My ambition is to make it with one of the real top groups and join them. I want to travel with them. I want to be their girl and go with them on all their gigs and to festivals, like, to Newport and Woodstock and San Francisco and the Electric Circus and The Scene and Arthur. I want to go to England, too, because that's where it's really swinging. I want to become a vocalist with a top group and travel around with them. That way I'll get really famous and I can meet all the stars, even the Beatles themselves although they're too old and they aren't really popular anymore but I'd like to make it with them, especially Ringo, and with the Monkees, too. And I want to have autographs and discs from everyone that matters. Perhaps when I'm fourteen my Mom will let me join one of the groups."
Catherine has two pet hates: the groupie-groupers and the teenie-boppers. The groupie-groupers are groups of teen-aged boys who are not players themselves but hang around the players and their groupies and try to "score" with the groupies in the hope somehow that the "fame" of the players will rub off on them at second hand. They abound all over and they tend to prey on the groupies' desires to establish sexual relations with genuine players; groupie-groupers find that the reflected "fame" of their encounters with groupies will give them the opportunity to "make out" better with other girls, especially the teenie-boppers.
Teenie-boppers are considered a cut well below the groupies. "They always talk and giggle, but they're not really interested in making it with the real players," Catherine told the interviewer. "They're real childish and all they care for is to seem older and more grown up. They read all the fan magazines and they go crazy about dancing and they try to wear grown-up mod clothes and hair and make-up. They give us a bad name because sometimes we get taken for teenie-boppers and then they won't take us seriously. But teenie boppers are really kids and some of them are still virgins. They don't know what they're saving it for.
"I like sex. I sometimes screw with a boy from our high school if he's groovy and he likes dancing and he's a good player. They all go for me because I know all the important players in New York and have all those records and I'm very popular. But I get a real charge out of it only if they're real name players. My Mom doesn't ask me about my sex life. I don't think she minds. She's not a one to talk, anyway. I know she screws around all the time. She goes to bars and places and she makes out with couples in a local wife-swapping club. She's glad to have me away over weekends so she can do her thing without me. I don't think she'll object if I want to become a full time groupy and join a group on tour. If she does, I'll just run away to San Francisco."
CHAPTER FOUR - GHETTO GANGS
GENERALIZATION IS A dangerous game for sociologists. Generalization concerning sexual behavior--moreover sexual behavior among the young and unformed--is doubly dangerous.
Between the sex-life of the adolescent in the safe and comfortable middle-class white suburbia and that of the economically underprivileged youth in the predominantly black ghetto, lies an unbridgeable gap. The sociology, the culture, the morals and the mores of the urban ghetto are far removed from those of what is generally considered the norm, so far indeed that it may be considered a separate world in itself. (My esteemed friend and colleague, Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey, whose untimely death was such a tragedy for the scientific study of sexual behavior, wisely chose to limit his researches to white Americans in the knowledge that diffusing them over wider studies would detract from their central value. We agree with the wisdom of his selectivity but feel restrained, nevertheless, to accord equal time and opportunities to the study of all significant elements in American life.) A number of basic elements enter into the discussion of the basically different attitudes towards teenage (and pre-teen) sex in the ghetto. One is of course the crowded physical conditions with attendant lack of privacy, lack of entertainment facilities and lack of sporting outlet for physical exuberant youth in the wider open spaces that, normally, allows for sublimation or dissipation of excess sexual energies. Another is the social climate engendered by the widespread absence of a strong, self-assertive male parental figure. A third is the less inhibited (and often more healthy from a mental hygiene point of view) sexual attitude that was transplanted from a primitive Africa through the agricultural community of the old South to today's industrial complex without passing through the stultifying influence of the American Puritan tradition.
Sex and sexuality are treated in a much more matter of fact way among poor Negroes than among middle-class whites, and much more so than among poor whites. Middle-class Negroes, on the other hand, bent on seeking acceptance into the equivalent strata of white society, tend to be even more restrictive and neurotic in their attitudes to sex and especially sex in adolescents, than their white neighbors, partly, we feel, in an effort to dissociate themselves from what they considered a stigma of uncontrolled sexual appetites that is widely attributed by our society to our Negro members.
In the Black ghetto, one of the more remarkable manifestations is the absence of a strong social taboo against the unmarried mother. The absence or presence of a husband or "a regular man" is considered a matter of luck, chance or personal choice. Having a child without the prior blessing of a marriage by the church does not automatically cause the young Negro mother's exclusion from her society. She can continue to be a church member in good standing. She can continue to reside in her parental home, and, having proved her fecundity by her first (or many subsequent) infants, she is, if anything, more likely to contract an advantageous marital union than if she had been a childless virgin.
Not only is the young Negress who has become pregnant not automatically rejected by her family, as is too often the case in what may be considered the heartless and self-seeking White society, but she will find her mother glad and happy to take over the care of the infant while the mother continues with her schooling, her employment and her sexual affairs. Sex, not being imbued with the false aura of sanctity with which our puritan heritage has invested it, Negro women are more ready to grant it its true place in their lives, and Negro children are inclined to treat it with more matter-of-factness that is healthy and augurs well for the future.
We have centered our principal investigations into the sex life of the urban Negro teen-ager on a ten-block area in the heart of the Negro ghetto in Detroit. In this area, fifty-five percent of the teenagers were locally born and just under forty percent were brought by their parents from the rural South either as infants (18%) or between their third and twelfth birthdays (19%). A natural father was present in thirty-nine percent of the homes; an adult male, other than the natural father, was present in twenty-one percent of the homes; thirty-eight percent of the homes were headed by a woman. Eighty-two percent of the mothers had, at one time or another, been legally married.
Lucinda is seventeen years old. She is a light-complexioned Negress with regular features and a small build. She could easily be mistaken for thirteen or fourteen years old. Her mother, Carolee, is thirty-four and looks twenty-five. Sharing the home are Lucinda's two nephews, daughters of her eighteen-year-old sister, a professional prostitute since she was fourteen. The sister, Bettina, supports the family from her earnings, mainly as kept mistress of a white businessman at the present time. There is also a brother, Jerome, aged sixteen who is seldom home because he runs around with a gang in another section of the city, and Huntley, aged fifteen, who lives at home. Both Lucinda and Huntley attend school. Carolee says she was married when she was eighteen to Jerome's father, "a no-good nigger who never done nothing for his folks." She had a man living with her for three years until recently, the longest she ever lived regularly with one man, "but his wife came up from Carolina and threatened to cut me up and she took him away."
Lucinda lost her virginity at age eleven to one of her mother's male friends. "My ma was having her period and Bettina was pregnant so he took up with me." Carolee was dependent on the man for support while her daughter was pregnant so she raised no fuss over the defloration out of fear of losing the man. She did, however, turn to a Protestant welfare organization and arranged for contraceptive counseling for her daughter to save her from the complications of pregnancy, one grandchild being enough for her future. (She railed to take adequate precautions with her other daughter and three years later was presented with a second grandchild.) Lucinda sees no problems in her sex life. She enjoys sex and indulges regularly with almost any boy who asks her. Her biggest complaint is that too many of the boys with whom she attends school are not interested in women. The status symbol among Negroes is to be "cool," uninvolved, unexcited. In this they differ greatly from their white counterparts who use sexual prowess and precocity as proof of their adulthood and manliness. Many of the Negro boys in Lucinda's high school class are preoccupied with their image. They spend inordinate amounts of time and money in catering to their appearance, spending on hand-made clothes, hand-made shoes, hair straightening, complexion lightening and so on. The philosophies of negritude, "Black is beautiful" and black nationalism have had relatively little impact on these attitudes. In many cases this preoccupation with self is narcissistic manifestation. In a few cases it is a method of appearing "sharp,"
"cool" or "jivy." In all too many cases it is a manifestation of homosexual leanings.
There is a lack of male focus even in the school. Most of the teachers are white and of low caliber. The few Negro teachers are mostly female. The male Negro teachers are all, without exception, "Uncle Toms."
"We don't pay them no mind," Lucinda says. "We smoke reefers in the corridors. Them what's hooked shoot up in the cloakrooms. They don't never say nothing if a cat put his hand up under your skirt in class. Sometime they come in an empty classroom and see a cat and a chick screwing on the floor. They don't never say nothing. They go right out and pretend they ain't seen nothing. Sometime a couple of fellas get a girl out in the yard and spread her legs. She better not scream because it won't help her nothing. We all look on and applaud. We had this white teacher once. She was right out of college. She tried to stop it once when they was making out in the yard but this big black buck tell her to shut up and then one stud kneel down behind her and another gave her a shove and she fell down on him and then three or four of them gang bang her right there in the yard during recess. You couldn't hear her shouting because there was so much noise anyway and everyone was standing close to watch so the teachers and principal couldn't see and they all ram in their pricks and fuck her and one push his black dick in her mouth to shut her up and they all fuck away, right during recess. The girls held her arms and pulled up her skirt and held down her feet and the studs gang fuck her. She walked right out from there without saying a word to no one and she never came back. If you ask me she liked it and was afraid she was going to want it every day. She never had it so good in her little white house before."
Lucinda and her friends believe in the myth, widespread among Whites, that once a White woman has enjoyed sex with a black man, she is never again satisfied with a White man. The same, apparently, does not hold true for black men, in the popular view. Black men often consider sex with a white woman to be a special mark of distinction (perhaps a reversal of the general humiliation that a Negro male suffers, at the hands of whites and of his own womenfolk, from cradle to senility) and, to the great chagrin of Negro women, often continue to search out white women in preference to women of their own race, whenever the opportunity presents itself. White male teachers frequently molest their female students (and sometimes their male students) according to Lucinda. She herself has not experienced anything more overtly sexual than a pinched buttock, but a number of her classmates, she claims, have been propositioned, seduced or raped by her teachers. In some cases it was the only means for them to obtain passing grades or to be allowed to take certain courses that would otherwise have been "over-subscribed." In others it was a means of staying out of the clutches of the truant officer or the juvenile court for one offense or another. The white teachers were naturally hated and resented. One girl, Jennifer, a tall, very shapely, very dark-skinned girl with "a peach of a figure" revenged herself on almost all of the male white teachers for the indignities they had inflicted on the colored girls. Having contracted syphilis as the result of contact with a returned Vietnam War veteran, she proceeded to "let herself" be seduced by one white teacher after another until practically the whole male faculty of the school was diseased.
Sex between the students at Lucinda's high school is casual and uninhibited. There is no rape and no coercion. If a girl likes a boy she will sit with him and kiss him and then invite him up to her apartment after school is over. There may be someone else present at home; in that case the reaction differs according to each individual case. Some mothers are understanding and casual themselves. If her daughter wants to make love she will remain in the kitchen watching TV while the young people disport themselves in the bedroom. Some daughters wait for their mothers or sisters to leave. Some will take their friends up on the roof if the weather is fine--roofs of apartment buildings are favorite places for sexual congress in the ghetto areas, even for married couples when the nights are hot and the tiny rat-infested rooms are dank and fetid. When the weather is inclement, sex takes place in the basement, in the boiler room or in the hallways. Sex is a natural form of self-expression, of voicing the individuality and personality of the self.
About once a week, Lucinda brings five or six of her friends to her home "for a little party." It is on Thursdays when her mother Carolee attends her local church women's council of which she is an active officer. Three boys and three girls is the usual complement. On the way they stop off to buy some frozen dinners and a few six-packs of beer. The girls bring records, the boys bring marijuana. The afternoon starts off rather staidly with TV watching, eating, smoking reefers. Then they start dancing-- Watusi, Hashkeni, Boogaloog and so on. Sexual contact comes readily, starting with a kiss, a fondled breast, a pinched buttock. Soon all are stripped, at least to the waist, with ebony flesh, firm and lean and well-rounded glistening with honest perspiration. Lucinda likes to oblige with a torrid strip-dance that enflames the passions of her friends, both boys and girls. "It is a strangely pure and innocent form of sexual enticement," our interviewer wrote in her notes. "I could not help being fascinated and enticed by the clean eroticism of it all. Lucinda has a beautiful and graceful body that moves with an effortless and uninhibited ease. I felt a great urge to take her in my arms and show her I understood her desires and her needs. In that one grinding dance she was expressing the suffering and agony, and also the longings and aspirations of her race. I would have felt it an honor to become an 'honorary' member of that group that I was attending solely as a dispassionate observer."
The interviewer did not long maintain her dispassionate observer's role. "I found myself being drawn closer and closer into the group and its expressed ardor and innocence. I felt indecent, an intruder, a peeping torn, sitting at the side and taking notes. Finally, when all had stripped to their dark skins, I felt I could not in all honesty remain sitting there in my aseptic street clothes observing them as if they were some strange specimens in a zoo. I asked for permission which was readily granted, and Lucinda helped me divest myself of my clothes. I thought I should perhaps keep on my bra and panties, if only to preserve decorum and maintain a little distance between me and my work. The girls, and the boys, insisted however, and I stripped myself of the last shreds of my reserve. I felt self-conscious in my white skin, whiter even where the sun had failed to tan me under my swim suit.
"Despite that they soon put me at my ease, paying compliments to my appearance, to the paleness of my skin, my freckles, and my figure. Lucinda showed me some of her favorite dance steps and I was soon caught up in the rhythms. The boys danced with me in turn so as not to make me feel left out, although it was obvious that I was a totally unaccomplished dancing partner. They were perfect gentlemen. Being Negroes, their organs were naturally large in size even when flaccid. (It is a common fallacy to believe that Negro men have larger organs than whites. They are larger only in the flaccid state. A white man's penis averages 3.2 inches in length when flaccid and 5.8 inches when erect. The average for Negro is 5.2 inches and 5.9 inches, respectively. Whites who have seen Negro members only in the flaccid state make the mistaken but understandable assumption that in the erect state it, too, will almost double in length.) None of them had an erection, however, a state I would certainly not have expected in a white boy. I put this down to the fact that the Negro boy accepts sex and nudity without fanfare or special concern, unlike the inhibited white boy who finds that even thinking of the forbidden sexuality of a woman will arouse him to erection and even ejaculation. Speaking for myself, I think I was more aroused by the sexual presence of all these attractive black bodies than the boys were. After a while we all got tired and rested. The girls sat on the boys' laps and vice versa and a certain amount of kissing and fondling occurred. Lucinda asked me if it was alright to carry on. I told her to do whatever was natural under the circumstances and to try and ignore my presence. She got down on her knees in front of one of the boys, Coram, and took his organ in her mouth. He was still, apparently, relaxed in a sexual way. His organ did not achieve rigidity immediately. When it did I was myself surprised for, despite previous observation, I found it was capable of great elongation in the erect state, to some seven and a half or eight inches with a girth to match. He was a magnificent physical specimen. He held her head firmly clamped between his knees. She pulled and sucked at his member with graceful movements, rocking on her heels. After about five minutes of this action the boy reached his climax, ejaculating vigorously into her full-lipped mouth. His recovery was quick, perhaps a factor of his youth for he was only seventeen. Almost as soon as Lucinda had withdrawn her mouth he had achieved erection again, partly by manipulating his organ. When it had reached full size he stood up, forced Lucinda on her back, and mounted her. He inserted his member with little apparent effort and kissed her vigorously on the mouth while he maintained his rhythmic up-and-down movements. He allowed his lips to roam lower over her well-shaped brown bosom and the erect purplish nipples, that he took in his mouth alternately. He reached as low as he could over her gently curved belly with his mouth and then, when he could reach no lower in this manner, he withdrew his member and sat back on his haunches with his head between her thighs. It was all done completely without self-consciousness despite the presence of the other two couples (who had been engaged in similar sexual conduct) and myself as an outsider. I was told that this was how they normally conducted themselves in group sexual sessions. Lucinda reached an orgasm during the act of cunnilingus, arching her back violently and thrash-about with her limbs and head in the ecstasy while she uttered low moans and shrieks. It was both fascinating and exciting to watch the complete abandon with which the entire group accepted this act. When she had subsided from the orgasm, Coram mounted her again and entered her, pumping away with long graceful movements from toe to head. They performed coitus as if it was a graceful dance that had been well and frequently rehearsed, a dance carefully choreographed by Nature herself. This time both reached their climax at the same time. After that sex became somewhat of a free-for-all with couples and groups forming and reforming, mouths and sexual organs used interchangeably, with groups ranging in size from two to all six and a disregard for sexual distinction so that at times males played with males and females toyed with females. Being so natural, this act did not fill me with the revulsion it would have engendered under normal circumstances.
"They were whispering among themselves and I came to the realization that they were in a quandary as to how I was reacting and what propriety demanded they suggest. I realized that they felt that I might feel excluded from their group and therefore resentful, but at the same time they feared that I might take an invitation to join them in the wrong way or, worse still, reject their invitation. I solved this by getting down on the floor and joining them uninvited. They opened their ranks readily and with obvious pleasure and allowed me to join the sweaty writhing mass. I felt immediate welcome from these tender young bodies and all inhibitions on my part vanished immediately. They soon had me enveloped from all sides. I felt myself being kissed and kissing back in return. Someone parted my legs with a woolly head and a tongue started lapping at my vulvae. I was lying with my head between a boy's thighs. They parted and I felt my mouth impaled on a firm dark penis. I had never held a man's penis in my mouth before. I can only admit that I found the sensation pleasing. Even the taste and the smell were far from unpleasant; there is something attractive in the natural odors of bodies and orifices excited by sexual passions.
"The girls showed me how to please the boy and I soon became an adept pupil, pursing my lips in the right manner and moving my mouth up and down in rhythmic order. I noticed that pulling, biting and jerking movements with lips and teeth were especially welcomed by the attractive dark-skinned youth. I used my hands to caress his young body, especially his buttocks. One of the girls massaged my body in return with especial attention to my breasts, which she kissed occasionally as part of the ritual. Once I had mastered the art of fellating a boy, he responded readily and rapidly. Finally he ejaculated. I was not, of course, used to this and my natural tendency would have been to withdraw my mouth rapidly the moment I felt it occurring but I knew that this might have been misunderstood under the present circumstances as a racist gesture and, accordingly, I swallowed his semen as rapidly as possible although the unaccustomed texture and the bitter taste made me gag. Once I had finished, though, I could abandon myself to the pleasures the others were giving me. Cunnilingus is a very pleasant sensation and I appreciated the stroking and massaging of my breasts and buttocks. I achieved a clitoric orgasm of what I estimate to be between six and seven on the Johnson-Masters scale. It was only later that I discovered that it was not a boy who had been performing cunnilingus on me but Lucinda herself, a very sweet and helpful girl.
"Huntley, Lucinda's youngest brother, returned home while we were spread out nude on the living room floor. He seemed absolutely unembarrassed as he greeted all the boys and girls by their first name and me too. Then he made himself a peanut-butter sandwich and left to go back to the street and play. We danced some more after this and then the boys insisted on showing me what 'a good fuck with a black nigger' was like. I agreed to let them mount me, one after the other. I did not wish to show any reserve and was quite ready to simulate an orgasm with each one. This was unnecessary. Their lithe young bodies, their perfect sense of rhythm, their clean animal smell, the gentleness and gentlemanliness with which they conducted themselves, all combined to give me pleasantly voluptuous sensations so that I naturally and spontaneously reached orgasm with each of them. Nor did I object when the girls in turn presented their young pudenda to me while I was performing coitus, spreading their lips and inviting me to kiss their "pussies" as they called them. I have no inhibitions about what some condemn as lesbian practices and I was only too ready to show my appreciation to these young girls for their spontaneous display of their uninhibited sexuality and to prove that, though white, better educated and some ten years their senior, I was quite ready to be 'one of them.' "We were all showered and dressed by nine o'clock when Lucinda's mother returned from her church meeting. Huntley returned home, we put him to bed, and then we all went to a neighboring discotheque for some more dancing where I was stared at as the only white woman."
We naturally discourage our researchers becoming personally involved in their studies as this tends to blunt their objective observation. An occasional lapse such as this one--especially one that permits subjective empathy with those being studied, does have its value, however, and we are therefore more than ready to include this personal account in the records though, in order to preserve the statistical values of our research material, we have not included this young researcher's findings with this particular group in our statistical sampling.
The example given above reflects an emotionally healthy approach to adolescent sex on the part of a group of uninhibited ghetto dwellers. Unfortunately, this attitude is not shared by all and the ghetto and its ambience give rise to much psychotic sex. In the very school attended by Lucinda there is, for instance, a gang of girls--all of Lucinda's age or younger--whose sexual urgings have been perverted into violent and anti-social sadistic directions. The group of girls some twenty-two in number, calls itself the Black Cats. They show a certain amount of heterosexual urges and activities but their orientation is clearly homosexual In dress and deportment they tend to ape men. They are vicious and brutal. Their normal dress is men's dungarees, heavy boots, leather coats or tunics. They congregate in groups, often dance together, curse men with a language that would put a longshoreman to shame. Much covert and overt homosexual activity is carried on among themselves. Their heterosexual activity, too, is undertaken as part of the group. They frequent the area where men tend to congregate to find prostitutes. This is an area adjoining a main traffic artery not far from a seedy rundown park where broken glass takes the place of grass and discarded hypodermic needles take the place of flowers. Both Negro males and whites prowl here in the search for prostitutes who charge anything from five to fifty dollars for their favors. The Black Cats, in groups of two or three stand here and wait to be accosted. When contact is made with a "John" they lure him into the bushes where a larger group of girls fall on him. He is usually beaten, kicked and his pockets are emptied of all valuables. Occasionally the girls will pounce on a relatively young boy and fellate him one after the other. What at first seems like a voluptuous sensation to the youth soon turns into a frightening agony as his vital juices are tapped again and again so that it soon seems to him that his very manhood is being threatened. Finally, utterly drained by the assault of a dozen vicious dark-skinned girls, he is allowed to hobble out of the park, his organ limp, and lifeless, his clothes torn and his pockets denuded. The girls have no fear of the police for the guardians of the law carefully avoid the neighborhood of the park where they themselves would be in danger. The girls have also been known to assault men, both black and white, passing through the neighborhood in all innocence, but their favorite victims are white homosexuals in search of young male prostitutes. Some of these young boys are pupils at the same school, some brothers or cousins of the girls themselves. The girls lie in wait and, when the white man is found in a compromising position with one of the black boys, they pounce on him, strip him of his clothes, and beat him. Sometimes they beat up the colored boy, too, but sometimes, when the boy is known to be a confirmed homosexual himself (not all male prostitutes are necessarily homosexual in their private lives any more than female prostitutes are necessarily heterosexual), they "punish" him with heterosexual activity ranging from fellatio to manipulation, forced coitus or sodomy or to being raped by the girls with a dildo or simply abused anally with a stick or other convenient object. The conduct of the Black Cats is a serious problem for the school authorities, for responsible members of the Negro community and for the guardians of law and morals in the city. There is little that can be done, however, short of removing the underlying causes of poverty, discrimination, repression and exploitation that give rise to such warped drives and attitudes. The Ford Foundation through its mental health programs and sundry other approaches, is attempting to do something about this situation that is known to exist also in many other large slum areas, and is currently involved in a multi-million dollar survey of the situation so that a remedy may be found in the mental health field.
Homosexuality, rampant here as in all ghetto areas, unfortunately has received little attention. Our studies show that in the area surveyed, thirty-two percent of the boys between thirteen and eighteen regularly participate in some form of homosexual activity. We have eliminated from our raw figures those who have only indulged once or twice as under duress or out of curiosity and those who indulge only as part of a wider group activity in which the major object is coitus with females. Faut de mieux, homosexuality as an outlet in situations where willing females are unavailable, is not a factor in this area where there are enough uninhibited young girls of the same socio-economic stratus who are more than willing and able to satisfy those boys.
Young Negro boys are in great demand among homosexuals, both black and white, and they fully exploit this situation. An attractive youth--those without pubic hairs are especially desired--can easily earn fifty to a hundred and fifty dollars in an evening. Many of them engage only in fellatio while others are less discriminate allowing fellatio to be performed on them and indulging in active or passive anal sex. Many of the boys get started as an easy way to make money but soon discovered that they are "hooked." They begin to crave the excitement, the sexuality, the attention they can earn from men who under other circumstances would barely tolerate to spit at them. With a rigid penis projecting from his black body, the disadvantaged Negro youth soon discovers doors opening that even the possession of a Ph.D. would not readily breach. Homosexuality for the Negro youth is a form of power over his environment and over the class structure. It is his means of asserting his manliness. It is the only way he can be accepted as a man. After a time he begins to equate preoccupation with women with a loss of his manliness and soon becomes a confirmed homosexual.
An exception to that is Lewis--so he claims. Lewis is a product of Lucinda's high school. He is now twenty-four. Despite the miseducation of the school system he has managed to acquire quite a veneer of culture and education, mostly from the white "Johns" who are his homosexual clients.
"I first started picking up white men when I was thirteen. Some of the older cats in school introduced me to it. They were all queers and they had contacts with the best paying men. To get a client through them you had to first make it with these cats. I didn't mind much. I'd done it with girls quite often and enjoyed it and it wasn't all that much different with boys. I rather enjoyed having a prick to handle, in fact, because I used to have this dream where I was sucking my own prick and then I'd wake up and try to do it but I could never reach. So this was, in a way, a substitute.
"They showed me how to do things properly, how a white man likes to be treated--or mistreated because many of them are really masochists and they like nothing better than to get a little runt of a black boy to degrade them. I learned how to make them want to come back for more and how to get every last cent out of them. The one thing they couldn't teach me because they didn't know it themselves otherwise they wouldn't have been what they were, was how to preserve my integrity despite it all.
"There were about a dozen of us all from the same school working as a team in one corner of the park. That's where whitey knew he could get the best cuts of young black meat. I used to wear tight, tight pants, my shirt unbuttoned down to the waist, a dab of petroleum jelly on my cheekbones to highlight the bone structure, and just a shade of shadow on my eyes to make me look sadder and hungrier. That's what they wanted--remember I was just thirteen at the time.
"For ten or fifteen bucks I used to suck them. I don't know how many white pricks I sucked that first year. Flabby, smelly, formless white-and-pink blobs of meat that you had to slave away for half an hour just to get them to stand. For fifteen bucks they could suck all the sperm they could get out of my black cock. That was a threat but it wasn't a long threat for them because I was a strong-blooded kid and I used to come within a couple of minutes at the most--and if they weren't good at sucking I'd help things along by quickly rubbing my shaft. For twenty-five I'd go home with him and give it to him any way he liked, Greek-fuck him or let him Greek-fuck me. The secret was not to let go too much, not to put too much effort in it, not to ejaculate too much and not to lose too much energy. If the money was right I could get a hard-on within half an hour of being sucked off and I could do it easily four or five times a night. Once I came eight times. I was going for some sort of record that night. I got sucked eight times, I ate five and then I went home with a couple of queers who rolled all over me all night and fucked me I don't know how often and I got it hard enough to give them each a stiff one up the arse.
"Within a year I had a regular clientele. They used to come looking for me, 'That pretty colored boy with the sad eyes,' they used to describe me and everyone knew whom they meant. They used to come looking for them and I used to be nice to them, give them a good time, behave like the sad little boy they were looking for. I became a sort of mascot to them. I had my regular clients and I was living off them. I didn't used to go out in the park every day, only once or twice a week and I used to come home with my pockets stuffed with dollar bills, some for my ma and the rest to spend on sharp clothes and on girls. When I was fourteen I was paying the rent on a white girl's apartment. How's that for neatly turning the trick full circle!
"But I got much more out of my Johns. They gave me a sense of worth. They encouraged me to look for better opportunities. One of them used to let me stay in his apartment whenever I wanted to as long as I didn't bring up any other Johns--he didn't mind if I brought up other little black boys, he told me, and I know he would have loved a whole nestful of little black Sambos for him to play with only as I told you, I'm not really gay and I don't usually make it with men except in the line of profession. But he had books, that man, shelves and shelves of books. He'd been a college professor and now he was a highbrow book critic and he let me read right through his library. That's where I got my education. I also got an appreciation for good food, good wines, and good art from him. I was Galatea to his Pygmalion. He made me what I am now. When I got too old for him he passed me on to his gay pals. I still make my living off them, two three queens a week. But I have a luxury apartment in a good white neighborhood and about fifteen-thousand dollars in growth stocks, all given to me by my lovers. I'm five credits short of a B.A. and I intend to go on to get my doctorate. That's quite something for a black cocksucker, wouldn't you say. And can you think of any other way I could have made it?"
Lewis himself provided the answer. Of all the boys from his school who used to provide for the perverse needs of the white homosexuals, he is the only one to have in some way bettered himself. The others are now petty crooks, flaming faggots, numbers runners or, the majority, sad wrecks of men, hooked on heroin or other drugs, their lives slowly seeping out of their needle marks. Lewis, by his own admission, was the only one never to experiment with heroin. The others soon were using all their earnings for the drugs and today can no longer make a living even as male prostitutes. What helped Lewis on his present path is not homosexuality, then, but an uncommon amount of courage, perseverance, and desire for a better and more meaningful life.
CHAPTER FIVE - THE QUEER GANG
HOMOSEXUALITY IS A danger not only to the black schoolboy but to his white neighbor in the more affluent suburb, with almost equal measure. It is a danger that is more pervasive in a conservatively oriented community and environment than in one with more liberal attitudes.
As Dr. Sigmund Freud first formulated it some sixty years ago ("Beobachtung der Charakterbildung in Juenglingen in den Hochschljahren," Jahresbuch der Psychoanalytischenanstalt, Wiener-Neustadt, 1910): "Youths who are brought up in a repressive atmosphere where natural outlet is frowned upon for their basic drives, tend to bottle up within themselves such attitudes as are not permitted in the society and pervert these unconsciously into channels whose tendencies are apparently opposite to those they are attempting to repress. In such ways is dissatisfaction with parental authority turned into revolutionary activity where the whole of society comes to represent the forbidding father. In such ways, too, are youths, who are forbidden to masturbate or to associate with girls of their own class or even with the serving maids, turned inwards on themselves into abject perversions that include flagellation (in Englishmen) and homosexuality in all its forms."
Our own researches have shown that the more open and broadminded a community, the more likely it is to find school age youths and girls occupying themselves with precocious heterosexual activity. The more puritanical and conservative the community, the more likely we were to find homosexuality rampant and accepted. In communities where the social life of boys and girls is kept relatively separate, teenage homosexuality is likely to flourish with great intensity.
A junior high school in a working class community on the shores of Lake Michigan served as research material for one of our teams of investigators. The community was once fairly prosperous at the turn of the century, then fell into economic decay during the depression. Today it is seeing a rebirth of economic well-being as the result of reindustrialization. All power in the community is, however, vested in the hands of a handful of the "old" families who own much of the surrounding land, most of the rental housing, the banks, the main commercial establishments and some of the major sources of employment.
These "old" families who cling to all the "old" virtues, also control the political parties, the town hall, the courts and the school board. In education, too, there is great stress on the old virtues: spare the rod and spoil the child, give him an inch and he'll take a mile, the bad apple falls closest to the tree, put your shoulder to the wheel and keep your nose to the grindstone, and so on. In the entire school of 1400 children aged thirteen to seventeen, we found two girls who had had sexual affairs with boys and four boys who had had sexual affairs with girls. The girls were both "from out of town," and the boys had had their sexual enjoyments with prostitutes, girls they had met on vacations or girls who had wandered through the town--roving tramps who rode the truck-and-sex route.
We discovered, however, that one hundred and thirty-eight of the boys had engaged in homosexual activity more than once (this being our criterion to weed out the "I'll-try-anything-once" adventure seekers). They were not necessarily confirmed homosexuals for in this community, where even necking in the back seat of a car is frowned upon and all mixed functions are carefully chaperoned, much of the homosexual activity is of necessity of the faut de mieux nature.
There were two rival cliques of homosexual boys, each with about forty or fifty members. The Spartan Lords was the more clearly structured of the two. Harry, a weedy fifteen-year-old, described it for us.
"We used to play with each other in the cloakroom waiting for school to start or in the gym when we were stripping into singlets and shorts. We did it for fun. You know, there'd be this boy busy stepping out of his pants not thinking anything and then suddenly another kid grabs him by the balls and starts groping. It was all in fun and some of the kids would get annoyed like hell but a lot liked it all the same. Or we're sitting on benches waiting to go out and play and suddenly someone will grope you and then you do it back and everyone does it to everyone. Well, you really get to like it because it's fun and when you know that the gang is playing at groping you sort of try to get in there, too, but you pretend you don't know it's going to happen and you act shocked. We were doing that in grade school too, but then it was mainly for fun. We used to laugh when someone got a real hard-on, but we didn't take it seriously and when you get a hard-on yourself you try to hide it but some are really proud and they'll work up their pricks so that they'll show through their pants and let everyone see what a good and stiff and long one they have. I like people to know I have a good prick and I once had this girl who was sitting next to me and I got a hard-on and wanted to show it to her so I got hold of her hand and let her feel. But she got so mad at me I never tried it again. She threatened to tell the teachers and the principal and my parents and my sisters too and I had to buy her off to get her to shut her mouth. I spent all my pocket money for a month buying her ice cream sodas and candy so's she wouldn't squeal on me. After that I only used to let boys feel it and they used to let me feel back in return. When we went to the John we sometimes went in there two or three together and compare cocks and try to jerk each other off. But that was in grade school and we did it for fun.
"In junior high there were bigger boys who used to beat up the freshmen. The only way you could get them not to was to let them feel your prick and then they'd make you feel their pricks in return. I was walking home with this bigger boy one day. It was in the fall, just after I got to the school and he said he'd show me a quick way to get home by cutting through the park. He took me to this place under the trees and we played around for a while and then he said he wanted to feel my cock. I thought he wanted to feel through my pants but he said no, he wanted to feel the real thing. I had a hard-on by then and I let him unzip my fly. He took it in his hand and he said it was a good prick for a little freshman like me but he said he'd show me a real prick if I was good. He told me to put my hand in his pocket. He had a hole in it and he'd forced his prick through the hole and as soon as I put my hand in it I could feel it. It really was big. He made me stroke it and then he told me to undo his fly. We looked at each other's pricks for a while. I'd never really looked at it from close up. He wasn't circumcised and he showed me how the skin rolled forward and back and he opened up the tip and let me look at the hole. A couple of drops of this white stuff came out while I was holding it and he told me to lick it off. I didn't want to. He twisted my arm something awful so I said "uncle" and he let go and I licked it. He asked to lick mine. I let him. It felt good. He took it in his mouth and he nibbled at it and worked his mouth backwards and forwards. I felt real good. I felt I wanted to jerk off. I was jerking off since I was about twelve, one of the boys had showed me how and I used to do it almost every night before I went to sleep and often during the day if I got excited I used to go to the John and jerk off.
"But he wouldn't let me jerk off. He said I had to suck him first. He pushed me back on these dead leaves and he pulled down my pants to the knees and he got on top of me with his prick in my face. He had his legs around my head and he pushed my head with his knees and forced my mouth on his prick. I quite liked it. It was big and it tasted good and sort of silky soft and all slimy. I had a very stiff prick myself and I didn't know what to do because it was bursting, like, and I felt I had to do something before I burst only I didn't know what. But he took it in his mouth and started rubbing and sucking and opening up the little hole with the tip of his tongue. It felt real good. I liked it. I liked it too the way he held my head between his knees and I wanted to squeeze him only he wouldn't let me do that. We kept it up from a long time. Then he stopped in the middle and he said he was going to come and that when he came he wanted me to keep sucking or he'd beat the living shit out of me if I stopped and I'd better not try to spit it out because he wasn't going to waste his stuff on some silly punk.
"We went on at it and it got feeling better and better. Then he started going real fast, up and down, up and down. And finally he went all stiff and then it started spurting out, right in my mouth. I didn't think a guy could have that much and I tried to catch it all like he told me only some dribbled out because there was that much and I carefully licked it all up so's he wouldn't notice and beat me up. I thought he'd keep sucking me till I came, but he didn't. As soon as he'd come he got up. I asked him why he didn't do it to me like I done it to him and he called me a punk and told me to shut up. I was dying with my prick all swollen and red and I got hold of it and I wanted to jerk off but he wouldn't let me. He made me tuck it inside my pants and I could hardly do up the zipper, it was sticking out that much and I could hardly walk. He said I'd better not talk to any grownups about what we'd done or I'd get what for. I washed my face in a water fountain on the way home and I tried to wash out the stains from my collar but I couldn't so I spread some mud on it so my Mom wouldn't notice.
"I knew which way he always walked home and I met him there the next afternoon. He took me to the same place and we played around for a while with our cocks and this time when he got on top of me he sucked me all the way. It was real good. It was much better than when I jerked it off myself, even better than the first time I done it. He said I wasn't a bad kid although I was young and he asked me if there were any other kids in my class with good pricks. I told him some of the kids had real big ones but I didn't think they'd go in for eating it. He said how do you know if you've never tried. He said I should find out which ones liked it and then bring them to him on the way home at the same place and if they were good he'd let me join the Spartan Lords. He said the best way to find out if they liked it was to see if they liked getting groped and if they got a hard-on as soon as you touched them. If they did, he said, I should get them to come with me the next afternoon. I knew this boy, Jim, liked it, I didn't even have to try. So I asked him to come home with me the next day through the park and on the way we told dirty jokes and groped each other. We both had hard-ons when we got to this place and Tom--that's the bigger boy--he was waiting there. He said: 'Hey, look what's here! Look at their pricks poking through their pants. Jim tried to hide his by working it down along his thigh but Tom was quicker and he groped him and made it stand even harder and then he undid the fly and pulled it out. Jim has a good prick and Tom played with it for a while and then he unzipped his own fly and told Jim to hold it and Jim did it straightaway. You could tell he liked it. My cock was getting real stiff again and I undid my fly to show them I was just as good and Tom took it in his other hand. Then he got Jim to suck him a bit and then he sucked mine a bit. Anyway we all pulled our pants down and we laid down, it wasn't very comfortable, with Tom's cock in my mouth and my cock in Jim's mouth and Tom sucked Jim. We all came that time and then we changed over and I had Jim's prick. I think he done it before. It tasted good, even better than Tom's. We went real wild this time and I think I could have kept sucking and coming all night but we did it only once more.
"We did it nearly every day on the way home. I found another boy who liked it from my class and Tom brought some bigger boys too, and sometimes there were five or six of us. About two or three weeks later Tom said he'd let us become members of the Spartan Lords because we were good and knew how to play it. There were five kids from my class now, all joining in sometimes. He told us to meet him in the same place the next afternoon after school. There were five big boys waiting for us there. They put blindfolds round our eyes and tied our wrists together with some rope and they walked us over a lot of rough rocks to a secret place. They twisted us around and around till we were dizzy and we didn't know where we were. Then they made us stop and pull down our pants. I didn't know where we were. I thought maybe they'd taken us into the parking lot of the shopping center and they were going to leave us there and make fools of us. But I wanted to join Spartan Lords and I couldn't have done anything anyway. So I dropped my pants and immediately someone started playing with my balls. It was a good feeling. Whoever it was he was stroking my thighs and my legs, real good, and playing with my prick once in a while and it felt good especially with the cold air playing around my balls. Then he started stroking me around the arsehole. That was good. I never done it before. One of the boys I knew once told me about it. He said he always put his fingers up his arsehole when he jerked off and I wanted to try it once but it felt dirty so I didn't. But when this boy did it it felt real good. He put two or three fingers in and then he put some cold creamy stuff in and he told me to lean forward and put my hands on the top of this low wall sort of thing. And then he pushed my bottom open with his hands and he rammed in his cock. I wouldn't have let him if I'd known that's what he wanted to do because I'd been told it was a terrible thing and the Bible says you go to hell for that and there was this scoutmaster everyone talked about who'd been caught doing it once and they sent him up to jail. But I didn't dare yell and it felt quite good though it hurt at first. But after a time it felt a lot better. It felt good. He had his arms around my hips and he was playing with my cock and he kept pushing it in and out, faster and faster. It felt good only I thought I was going to shit. You know, his prick was just the shape of a big lump of shit and every time it came in and out it felt like I was going to let go with a big one. Then he came inside me, very hot and slimy but good and he kept rubbing away at my cock and he tongued my ear and after a while I came too. I didn't just come like I usually do but I came all the way inside, deep inside, right in my guts. I thought they'd take off my blindfold but they didn't and then I got fucked again. It was even better this time because I wasn't scared any more and I knew what to do and also it went in more easy because I was still slimy from the first one. I got fucked five times altogether that time but the other times weren't as good as the second one. I didn't come each time, mind you. I think I came three times. I found out later that it was an initiation and they had all the Spartan Lords there and they each fucked one of the new members at least once.
"After that we played around quite often. They showed me how to get to this secret place that no one else knew about and there were always some Spartan Lords playing around there every afternoon after school. They showed me how to rim. I like rimming best of all. They say it's just how you do it with a girl when you get inside her pussy. But I also like getting rimmed myself and sucking and getting sucked. We got another eight boys from the freshman class to join and I was allowed to take part in the initiation. They say I'm good and I'm very popular with the bigger boys.
"They've got another gang at the school. They're the Long Lances. We don't mix with them. They're real wild. They ride motor bikes and wear boots and chains and leather jackets and they say they whip and stomp each other. The Long Lances also have some bigger boys and even some grown ups. I don't want to get involved with them. They're bad business. They're real mean. Sometimes they try to catch one of the Spartan Knights and beat him or fuck him and then we have a big fight with them. They never found out where our secret hideout is but we know where they go and sometimes we go there on a Saturday, that's when they have grown-ups with them, and we throw rocks at them.
"I don't always stop off with the Spartan Knights on my way home. I have two or three good friends and we often go home together and then we go down in the basement, in their place or in mine, and we play around. It's better in winter because it's warm and none of us has a car yet. I'm always scared my Mom will catch me but we've rigged up this bell wire at the top of the basement stairs and if she comes down it rings the bell and then we can pull our pants up again quickly. But sometimes it's a close shave and I feel sort of foolish with my cock all hard and stiff lying along my leg and pressing against my pants so she can see it if she knew what it was.
"I once did it in the shower with this kid from my class. I was sitting on the bench and he was down on his knees sucking when the coach came in. This other kid saw him coming and he got up quick before the coach could see him but I didn't know what happened and the coach got wise to what I'd been doing. He told me to pull my pants up and go straight to his office and wait for him. I tell you, I was shit scared. He came in and told me about having done something wrong and what he was going to tell my Mom and Dad and then he said I should come in after school because obviously I didn't understand about these things and he'd explain how to keep me out of trouble. They'd been telling stories about this coach and what he liked and I was really scared all the rest of that day but I was scared in a nice way, you know like. I went there after school and he locked the door and started giving me a lecture about clean minds and clean bodies and he showed me some drawings. Then he said he wanted to examine my penis to see if I was mature. It was already stiff when he started looking at it. Then he told me to compare it with his and he pulled it out. It wasn't really big at all only thicker with a lot of hairs. He made me hold it and then he jerked a bit and he came all over my hands. He got me to wipe it up with some tissues and then he told me to get the hell out of there and never let him catch me do it again. It just goes to show you can't trust any grownups."
CHAPTER SIX - WHAT OF THE FUTURE?
IT IS OBVIOUS that we must become reconciled to the fact that our youth is as preoccupied with sex as much as is the adult world. With all media of communication, from movies to books and television oriented strongly to sexuality and sexual innuendo, and with the advertising world, above all, spreading its message thinly garbed in sexual terms, we can hardly expect our young people to remain ignorant and innocent of all matters sexual as were those of the Victorian Age.
What is obviously required is a further study on the physical and emotional aspects of precocious sexual activity. The Oneida Institute in its study has confined itself to a social and anthropological study of the existing situation; it is up to the medical, educational and mental health foundations to probe more deeply into the matter and prepare conclusions that will help us to guide our youths in the proper manner in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
It may be that experts will conclude that early sexual activity is all to the good. If that is the case, and we are far from convinced that this is so, a move should be made to modify our laws, reducing the age of consent, making contraception more readily available and, of course, improving the quality of sex education presently offered in our schools.
A step that has been in the right direction, perhaps, is that of the Guyon Society of Los Angeles, a group of a hundred or so families in the Los Angeles area, all respectable professionals highly regarded in their community. They are advocating wider acceptance of sex activity among younger children, decrying "our kids' headlong plunge towards drugs and crime." If we have to take issue with them, I feel we should pass judgment on their other slogan "Sex by the age of eight/or else it's too late." Eight, by any standards, would seem a little early.
It may be, on the other hand that further studies will show that precocious sexual activity is potentially harmful to the physical or emotional wellbeing of our youth. If that is the case, it is incumbent on us to ensure that crass commercial interests and lustful adults do not plunge our youth at the age of twelve or fourteen into a life of physical debauchery and hedonistic pleasures that they might live to regret when they are older.
In that case, too, our educational authorities will have to face the task of instilling into our young people the basis of a sexual ethic that is better founded than today's hodgepodge of hypocritical views and practices.