Sexual experiences

As I was in the Scouts, we often went away on camps and groups of boys would stay together overnight. It was during this time that we engaged in what, to many of them, was just a bit of 'adolescent foolishness'. These experiences took on a much greater significance to me and resulted in me becoming, by the time I was about 13, a very sexualised and highly emotionally dependent teenager.

And so there followed a series of sexual experiences in my early teens, each giving a greater desire for more, each experience promising much and delivering nothing, driving me on the next experience and the next. I had a relationship with a guy some four years older than me and for a period of a few years, up until I was about 16, I was having sex with him every three or four months.

When his job took him away, I was left feeling lonely, isolated and even more emotionally and sexually needy than before, by now having a serious obsession with masturbation. My need to be loved by a man was seemingly insatiable. My aching was sometimes so great that it was all I could do to sit in a chair and hug myself. More sexual experiences when I was 16 and 17, with other boys of that age, just added to the problem. By the time I was 18 I was risking going into a gay bar in Liverpool (and once being approached by two men who were clearly plain-clothed police officers), looking for that someone who I was convinced was out there, who was going to make my life complete. Walking home from the club alone afterwards, I would also be aching and feeling empty. All of this went on without my parents really knowing.

I left school at 16 and got a job as a building society clerk and went to night school two nights a week to get the A Levels I needed to get on a journalism course. Even at journalism college, I would look for the gay pubs in the town and dare myself to walk into them. On holiday in Europe with a 'straight' friend from school, I ventured back into the red light district of Amsterdam and cruised several gay bars, desperately trying to get picked up. Even once I had got my job as a journalist, far away now (thankfully) from my family and Liverpool, I would venture out of my bedsit into the local gay pub, one time getting picked up by two young men and taken to the house they shared in Slough.