Female, 16, California
He was a mop-haired Eagle Scout with artistic leanings. I was the daughter of lesbians from San Francisco. Although he had two years on me, I was the more experienced. We met as students of an educational institution resembling a ski chalet, tucked into a valley that straddled hills full of mansions. Earlier that day, there’d been a huge volleyball game that was the climax of an ongoing “Spirit Week,” played against our even snobbier rival. For once, our dorky private school embodied what I felt was full-fledged Americana high school style. We didn’t have a football team.
Long and lanky, in the way that disappears when men fill out in their twenties usually, he drove us back to his parent’s suburban house in his 1970s Volvo. There we drank tall cold glasses of orange juice before fooling around. He got me totally naked only to announce that we were on his deceased grandfather’s bed. They call that setting the mood, I believe.
He brought up sex in the nervous, halting way of the virgin before walking, for the first time since infancy, naked through his house to grab a condom. I don’t know why he was so sure his parent’s wouldn’t come home, but he seemed impressively confident. I had no reservations about losing my virginity.
Once we started trying, I attempted to be patient while he struggled to find the hole. I remember thinking that I’d always figured it would hurt a lot more. I mean he wasn’t being gentle or anything, but if it hurt at all it was the good kind. Whatever it was, it didn’t last long. As he scrambled back into clothing, I joked that since he was 18 as of two days prior he was officially a pervert. He mentioned that even pre-marital sex, according to the Catholicism of his youth, would get him sent to Hell. I put my own clothes on, lazily, thinking that he was a good guy to lose it to and that I hoped he didn’t get too attached to me. Then I hopped on the local transit.
I had arranged to sleep over at a friend’s house so that I wouldn’t have to face my mother immediately afterwards. Nonetheless, when I walked through the front door the next day, her first question was, “Did you lose your virginity last night?” I protested that I had only been fingered — my family is pretty upfront with each other — when my other Mom came out of the kitchen to join in the conversation. “It was the weirdest thing,” she said, “last night around eight, we’re watching TV and your mom says, I think she’s losing her virginity! It’s like she has a spiritual umbilical cord.” Beet red, I retreated to my room. It would have been better if she’d been wrong.
She made sure to leave condoms around the house then on, in a fashion that totally embarrassed me. The boy I lost it to went on to get married and have three kids and more recently approached my mom on Facebook to say how much he’d always admired her in a kind of creepy/romantic way. This is what it’s like to have gay moms.
Image via Flickr.