The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 6. Unknown "Another Hope and Glory"

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Another Hope and Glory

(At one time, Dr. Nancy Friday was a household name. She sold millions of books in the 1970s with people’s first-hand accounts of their love-life histories. Although she solicited for same-sex accounts as well, Boyd McDonald was the doctor’s Gay equivalent with his periodicals and books. In these, he documented men’s actual sexual and emotional lives from the 1890s to his current day. One British subject wrote in with a 5,600 word account of his wartime exploits. The following is a condensed version, but it would still make a movie every bit as compelling as “Hope and Glory”. [[P.S. Let’s see if we all have the same favorite quote from the excerpts ;)]])

In 1943, the threat of invasion over, my parents brought me back from evacuation on a farm to continue my education in the English Channel resort town where we lived. At 15 years of age, it was like arriving in a strange town rather than returning home; my parents were unaware of my fascination for men and the town itself was strange. Sea-front and harbour were a mass of barbed wire and concrete fortifications; most of the shops were shuttered for the duration. The population was less than a quarter normal: hotels, public buildings, and unused schools were packed with British, American, French, and Canadian soldiers and sailors preparing for the D-Day invasion which was 18 months ahead. My new school was run by old men and old women not wanted for the war effort. The playing fields had been ploughed up for growing vegetables and my first lesson was in the art of planting potatoes. Our parents took us to school and brought us home — such was the fear of German air raids from fields across the Channel, less than 20 miles away.

I desperately wanted some sexual activity with someone. The nearest I got was rubbing the crotch of a boy sitting next to me one day in the darkness of the school’s air raid shelter. […]

The school started a scheme whereby soldiers and sailors visited one day a week in its pupil’s homes. Most of the kids wanted a Yank, for they were known to be bearers of such gifts as Hershey bars, Camel cigarettes, and nylon stockings. I drew Vic, a 19-year-old British sailor, who came from a coal-mining family up north. Vic had close-cropped sandy hair that went in all directions, freckles, green eyes, and a broken front tooth, and he was mine. The soldiers and sailors were given a midday-to-midnight pass once a week and the school gave us a “pass” on the day we were to be hosts, added to which the authorities chipped in with a few extra food ration coupons for the mums and dads. […]

I had a den over my dad’s garage and after the family meal I took Vic there to play the latest Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman discs. He was scared of me because my education had taught me to talk with a posh voice and my dad, with a car, obviously had more money than his dad. Vic’s dad worked on the coal face with his two older brothers and Vic found himself in the Navy because, being the youngest and less experienced, he was a surface worker and thus not in a reserved occupation. I played an Anne Shelton record (she was the sweetheart of the British Forces) and he started talking about girls, how they were easy lays up north but the sluttish camp followers “only do it with the bloody Yanks who have all the money.” I was too scared to tell Vic I could satisfy him just as well as girls. After his first visit, I beat my meat raw thinking that when he visited again I’d somehow be able to get my hand in his uniform.

Next time we were in my den listening to discs and reading copies of Photoplay, Vic whistled through his breath at a pix spread of Dorothy Lamour and said he’d like to poke a girl like that. I blurted out a question I was dying to have answered: was it true they put bromide in the soldiers’ and sailors’ tea so they couldn’t poke a girl like that? Vic grinned and said yes, but they didn’t put enough in for him.

He asked if I was old enough to jack off. He said he had to. I was in a daze as he pulled up his jumper to expose the flap (held by only three buttons, unlike the massive row on an American sailor’s uniform of that period) and moments later he was leaning against the wall with parted legs, flap open[.] […] It was a natural instinct for me to drop to my knees in front of him. He dropped his hand to let me have free access to his meat. The record came to an end and repeatedly scraped in the run-off. I was scared my mum and dad downstairs would hear it, and suspect something and told Vic to keep putting a disc on the machine while I sucked him off. Bromide or no bromide, when he came he flooded my mouth with warm cum.

He told me that back home he had a mate his own age, and if they couldn’t make out with a girl, they took turns screwing each other […], and the next week he asked me if I’d let him screw me. “I promise I won’t hurt,” he said. I dropped my pants and bent over the back of a chair near the record player, which was hand-wound, and tried to keep the thing going while he shoved his pecker up my ass.

“Now it’s your turn,” he said. It was my first fuck. He shucked his pants and bent his white butt over the chair. I was scared my mum would come up with a cup of tea.

I wanted to suck his cock again but I never did; he preferred screwing and thought cocksucking too queer. In a couple of months I was getting quite adept at plugging his butt after my first nervous attempt. […]

The weekly fuck with Vic was not enough. I wanted more. Evenings were dull and long. There was no TV in those days and my dad refused to take me to the movies for fear of air raids. They tried to engineer my friendship with a neighbourhood boy the same age. I hated him. I tried to get in his pants for a mutual jack off, and he told me to take a cold shower and have my head examined.

The confines were eased somewhat when they stopped escorting me to and from school. Even with a war on they sensed it was a crazy way to treat a boy of 15. Shortly after that I discovered my first cottage [public men’s room], built in a clump of overgrown bushes in a small public park half way between school and home. […] I was scared to stay too long for fear my folks would ask why I was late home from school. But I went back the next day, and the day after, just to read the walls and beat my meat. […]

But another time I met a boy about my own age. We played around a bit but he said he didn’t want to come. When I asked him why, he confessed he was really looking for G.l.s – particularly the older, married ones. They paid a lot of money, he said, to “do things.” […] How much money for what things, I wanted to know. He said he got a quid (a pound, which in those times was a day’s wages) for either sucking them off or letting them screw him. I almost told him if I had a pound I’d pay them, I was feeling so in need; but instead I asked where and how I could make contact. He said the best time was at night after the movie houses closed. It was easy to find some place in the black-out. I told him my folks would never let me out nights, so he suggested I try the Rex movie house for a matinee.

I hadn’t any spending money but the next sports afternoon (the sports meets were so inadequately supervised no one would know if I was there or not) I got into the movie house for free through an emergency exit door that other kids were always leaving open for that purpose. The first thing was to find a seat before I was accused of not having a ticket. Almost immediately someone sat next to me. It was a G.l. Pretty soon he was pressing a leg against mine. I was wearing my football shorts, as I was supposed to be at the meet, and the next I knew, his hand was on my naked thigh. I instinctively leaned back on my seat and parted my legs to let his fingers gain access to my crotch. He pulled my shorts down and gave my cock a wonderful massage. He put his hand on the back of my neck and forced my head down towards his cock, which was sticking out of his fly. I tried to resist but he whispered, “it’s okay, no one cares till the lights go up.” […] It was after I’d left the movie house myself that I realised I hadn’t earned a quid. But it didn’t matter. I felt really satisfied. I hung around the Rex a lot after that. Quite often G.l.s would pay for my ticket out of sheer generosity, never attempting any sexual advances once inside, which I found disappointing. Once a soldier did give me a quid without [me] asking for it, and I felt a bit insulted. […]

My folks were only too pleased for me to spend all the time I was not at my classes helping out at the local YMCA. Every night at the Y there would be a dance attended by possibly a thousand guys and fewer than a hundred girls. Jacking off in the toilets was commonplace. The older Britishers, married men particularly, could be good value if, like me, you enjoyed taking it in the ass. They appreciated a willing boy-butt and I shall always remember one sergeant in the Royal Engineers, about 35 years of age, who had a couple of kids, who screwed me at least a dozen times over a period of months in one of the Y closets. He insisted so often he wanted a photograph of me that I had to get one done at the only wedding studio still operating.

Getting black prick, with which I had become obsessed, was the real difficulty at first. I got my mouth round a lot of Gurkhas cock – the Indian regiment – but this was brown, not black meat. But the Gurkhas were very tough and very sexy; [same-sex love] was second nature to them. The American blacks were really screwed up; their white troops treated them as inferiors, and they were scared to do anything. Often at a pisser I would let a black G.I. or Marine see my hardon, but more often than not, they would give me a guilty kind of grin, button up and get the hell out. But I did make out with quite a few. My first full experience with a black was in a crapper at the Y. He followed me in and we bolted the door. He was a G.I., young […], and scared the MPs would catch him with a British kid. But as soon as he felt my lips around his cock, he calmed down. Boy, was I in heaven. His pants round his ankles, he laid back on the toilet with his thighs parted wide as I explored that wonderful black cock and tough ball sack and coarse wiry pubic hair. […] [Afterwards,] he wouldn’t leave the crapper till I’d gone out and made sure there were no MPs hanging around. He told me the safest place for action was late at night behind the Red Lion. […]

The Red Lion was one of many public houses (bars), which I was legally too young to enter. But I was not too young to use their outside pissers. All pubs in those days had somewhat primitive cottages adjacent, usually a couple of walls with drainage for the piss. During the war they were totally dark at night. One had to grope one’s way to a pissing position and if a match was struck for more than a moment to light a cigarette there would almost certainly be a distant yell from an Air Raid warden: “Put that bloody light out.” (A neighbour, a friend of my dad’s, was taken to court and fined five quid for the careless use of a match.) Anyhow, the Red Lion had a particularly fine urinal. It was in the side street behind the pub, under a railway arch, and not far from the entrance to the harbour. Like the famous Windmill Theatre in London, the Red Lion’s urinal never closed. There was action there all night, every night. Occasionally, someone would quickly light a cigarette and in the momentary flame you could see the piss-cavern crowded with sailors and soldiers and marines, jacking off, leaning against walls being blown, or just waiting their turn. Sometimes a guy would come in strictly to piss; I once heard a guy say, “Get your filthy hand off me.” His complaint was met with laughter in the darkness. I never had any refusal when I reached out in the darkness to feel prick. […]

One night the warning siren sounded but no one ran for the shelters. There were at least two dozen guys crowded in that pisser. The ack-ack opened up. Pieces of shrapnel fell on the corrugated iron roof. Several bombs fell a short distance away. The searchlight beams occasionally reflected into the cavernous darkness. I saw two Yankee sailors making a sandwich of a pink-faced Royal Engineer. A young soldier grabbed my stiff meat and guided it to his butt. Either I was the last of many, or he’d lubricated it with a lot of KY. It was wild, screwing and getting screwed to the sound of gunfire.

But promiscuity was not enough. I desperately wanted to talk to someone. One of the priests hanging around the Y interested me in religion, and I started going to a Catholic church. I actually read the Bible, and the more I read it, the more I loved Jesus and the less I loved that church. I was convinced Jesus was Gay and my favourite story was how he stopped the guys stoning a woman to death just because one husband was not enough for her.

I got into a conversation with one priest about masturbation, but after half an hour of doubletalk, I realised he wanted to get his hands on my cock without me or Jesus being angry with him. I didn’t have any objection to priests wanting to do these things, but I did object to his feeling guilt-ridden. After my cum splattered on his cassock, I had to convince him that Jesus still loved him.

One day I heard a friendly voice calling me from a line of women waiting patiently to buy some rarely seen oranges at a greengrocers. It was Gerald, [my air-warden friend]. He wanted to know why I stopped visiting him, and that night I returned to [the small] hotel [he owned with his partner Terry]. [Much later on,] one of the men there stroked my butt and whispered in my ear, “What you say, we find ourselves a quiet place upstairs?” The guy was in his late 40s, well-kept, with a quiet determination behind his gentle facade; I was to find out later that he was a policeman. I said yes, which was how we opened one of the bedroom doors and saw Terry and Gerald in bed. They had fled their own party. At that moment, as I saw them wrapped in each other’s arms, I knew what I hadn’t got, what I’d never had, and what I so desperately wanted. It was one of the most beautiful sex scenes I’ve ever seen. My companion said the two had been together more than 30 years “and they’ve still got this thing going for them.”

Eventually, I found the real constant love of my life. We’ve been together for 34 years now. Yes, 34, [since we met in 1948]. When life keeps us apart, we write long letters every day, including Sunday, which we mail together in the Monday envelope. Our closeness makes our promiscuity not only possible, but desirable.

—Unknown,[i]

account of 1943 to 1945