Mine's almost exactly the same as you, don't know if that helps or not.

I do remember asking my mom point blank when I was about 8 if girls could marry girls. I think it was more from a "boys are different and I don't know if I like them" angle than a sexual one. Her reply was, "yeah, I guess so." And I went back outside to throw the football with my neighbor (boy about the same age).

I don't know if this exactly applies, but mostly what I recall is the absence of a common experience, e.g., I never went thru the stage where the opposite sex was "yucky." I felt attraction way before the appropriate age for that sort of thing to start developing.

I don't remember a first moment of sexual realization - I think it was lots of little things just evolve into a big picture. Less of an "aha!" moment and more little "hmmmm...." moments that eventually become related to one concept.

But I remember the day my Dad gave me "the talk". My parents were divorced and I went over to my Dad's one weeknight a week. I remember him acting strange all night and not being very talkative - enought that as a grade schooler I sensed something was wrong. I was watching TV while he was just standing in the kitchen, presumably trying to plan what he was going to say. I walked in to tell him something funny that happened on tv (the Dick Van Dyke Show) and he used it as an excuse to launch into "well, when a man and woman love each other...". I remember whatever it was I told him about from the TV had NOTHING to do with the birds and the bees and it was a pretty hamfisted transition on his part. With hindsight it's strange that he was so nervous since I was the youngest of four boys - he should have had the schpiel down by the time it was my turn. I also remember that I pretty much already knew the deal from friends and years of sneaking peaks at an old copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask.

Previously discussed (by me).

The other main time was my friend Brant taking me into the basement and showing me nudie mags that his stepdad had shown him during the "talk." (For this kid, the "talk" with his step dad included whiskey and cigars. At 8 years old, or so.)

I remember going home, and that night, playing with myself for the first time. I've gotten better at it since. *smile*

I never got the "talk" from my parents. It just sorta soaked in. As compensation, we have been VERY TMI with daughter. Probably too much so.

I remember playing doctor with the neighbor girl behind the bushes. I remember being 7 and a friend asked me if I knew what sex and fucking was. His older brother explained it to him the night before. There were still a lot of holes in his knowledge of course, but he explained the basic Tab A into Slot B gist of it.

What's the point?

It feels good. And it makes babies.

But how does the baby get in the girls belly?

*Shrugs* - Not sure

I remember as I was letting it all sink in, my friend said, "We gotta find some girls that wanna fuck".

Ahhh, kids say the darndest things.

It would take me many more years before succeeding with that task.

Aged 7 or 8, sitting at a friend's place, in his parents' bedroom, looking at the photos in a book on sex. These featured a naked pair in different poses. The man had a huge beard; they both looked very serious. It was very, err, exciting; I suddenly found out what this thing I had was for. I also found out why it grew bigger sometimes.

Then the doorbell rang. It was one of our classmates, a girl. When she left, we discovered that we both had "wanted" her badly.

We bred goats.

It was a relief to discover that courtship between humans was slightly more refined though I'm still pretty bad at it.

Also, most of my friends' hippie parents had the Kama Sutra laying around.

And R. Crumb, which was a little traumatizing.

And R. Crumb, which was a little traumatizing.

Oh man. R. Crumb did not make it look appetizing.

Nobody should have to learn about sex from R Crumb!

My 3rd grade best friend told me about periods and sex, which she actually equated only with rape, as in: "There are men who sneak around on the rooftops looking for women to have sex with! Watch out for them! They'll just have sex with you whether you like it or not!" I wasn't sure I believed her - the whole thing seemed so unlikely. She also told me that only some unlucky girls got their periods and the two of us would probably be fine, which was reassuring. It was also around 3rd grade that my brother - about age 4 or so - and I found a box of old, old Playboys in the basement of a new house we were moving into and looked at each one silently and solemnly. They made no sense at all but we knew they were forbidden.

Then 2 years later, when I was in 5th grade, my mother steeled herself up one evening, when I was totally minding my own business, and gave me The Talk. She was horrifically embarrassed which embarrassed me and so I told her I knew everything already, that we had learned it all in school. This was a complete lie but I figured that since my mom was trying to talk about it, those rumors of periods and boys and penises (apparently they got larger than my little brother's; who knew?) must be true after all and I could work it out on my own with the help of the elementary school gossip mill. And so I, mostly, did, although when I got my first period and didn't have another one after that for three months I was convinced I was pregnant even though I had never kissed a boy and barely even ever spoken with one. It didn't help that my mother cried when I got my first period and told me that her mother cried too and told her that it was the Curse god put on Eve. Nice job, god. Thanks.

And then I went to see 3 Days of the Condor, my first R rated movie with Robert Redford in an extremely tame bedroom scene that completely blew my small mind (I was one of those properly raised kids, you know, a liberal household for 1842) and alerted me to all kinds of surprising new feelings. This was rapidly followed by my stunning discovery of Erica Jong and Nancy Friday among my parents' books and yeah, R. Crumb is severely traumatic but I'd put old Erica & Nancy right up there with him. ;-) It was all quite mind boggling.

I had a friend when I was about 7 whose parents had told her about puberty in a very technical manner. I know this because the next day she told me that girls have egs in them that become babies if a boy sticks his thing in, but if he pulls his thing out and it's red then there will not be a baby. I pictured full size chicken eggs falling out of my lower abdomen and was scared.

A year or so later at a sleepover, that same friend like to act out having sex with a life-sized doll of hers and she wanted me to hold a flashlight to their crotches.

Then when I was 11 my mother gave me a set of books published in the 60s about puberty and growing into an adult, and the only thing I can remember about the book was a section on school dances, and it being okay to dance with a boy who is shorter than I am because he would probably be more fun anyway.

I read about this Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy scandal last week, I think. First I'd heard of this sex thing.

Man, I don't remember stuff it seems. I do recall looking at my dad's 70s playboys during a visit, but I can't recall any particular effect. I also remember a girlfriend of mine, at age 12 making some offhanded, boastful comment about a "blowjob" and being really confused by that...I couldn't imagine that having someone blow on it would feel that great really.

Boy, was I relieved when I found out more later. That's about it though. I don't recall anyone giving me a "talk" either. Hell, I barely recall the plot of the movie I watched last night. I suck at details it seems.

Apparently I told my gomother that chupahija had her furry shaved off (for some procedure) when I was three. I don't remember getting the talk, but Ms. had a "where do babies come from" as one of their stories for free children when I was around four. Every girl in my 4th grade class read Are you There God, It's me Margaret and in sixth grade we saw the menstruation film strip.


Ah yes, Adrian Goodlove and his limp-dicked condescension.....

The whole "doctor" thing went down around preschool. The epiphany was at or a little before 4th grade?

I remember at about 4 looking at a picture of a bodybuilder in a book or magazine and thinking he was "very pretty", yet somehow more than that, too, and it was a very powerful feeling, though not necessarily sexual. This is one of the million reasons I think I was "born that way" as I don't have any comparable memories about females.

I also have a million reasons why I think nurture helps one identify as ... whatever you identify yourself as. I've never believed sexual identity is 100% nature or 100% nurture.

Thank you, everybody, I feel normal again. I was shaken because one of the reasons I've had bad therapy experiences in the past is that they all seem to believe I was abused. I wasn't. (Certainly not that way, at least, maybe emotionally, whatever that means.) I don't know why I do the things I do or have the proclivities I have, but I think it's more nature than nurture, and I tend to just roll with it all. I just had this awful dream and considered becoming one of those repressed/false memory people for a few hours. As in most things, everybody's different, and the range of normal is quite large, hu? Very interesting stories.

In my old neighborhood, the neighborhood where I lived as a child, there was a vacant lot with a hole in the ground. That was our little fort, our little hideaway -- one of several actually, but this is the only one that is germane to this little story.

We gathered there one afternoon to examine a "borrowed" copy of a father's Playboy. This would have been when I was six years old, sooo 1977? Yeah, it was '77. I remember that the air was damp and humid and the sky was overcast.

The magazine itself was about ten years old at the time, so the centerfold had a beehive hairdo. I also remember that she had the classic torpedo tits. Erect nipples. Slightly parted lips. She was kneeling down. Her legs pointed away from the camera at a 45 degree angle. My memory of her is so vivid that I'm sure that, if I had any drawing skills to my name, I could recapture that image even now, three decades later.

As I looked at her, I felt this stiffness in my crotch . I had no idea what it was but it felt so good. I had had The Talk before but that was a little abstract-sounding to me. This was concrete.

And that's the story of my first erection.

I assume I learned from talking to peers and osmosing culture. That's entirely possible, right?

That's how I absorbed most of it, too. My four older siblings always knew things earlier than I did. The air in our house teemed with ideas that were just beyond my ken, letting me breathe them in at my own pace.

I don't remember a time when I didn't know the rudiments of babymaking: this part goes there and then this happens. (It's the same with Santa, oddly enough: I cannot remember a time when Santa was more than wishful thinking.)

I do have a vivid memory when a different aspect was revealed to me. I was about four, and I'd just figured out that sex occurred more frequently than justified by the demands of babymaking, and often between people who couldn't or wouldn't make babies. It seemed odd that people engaged in something so untidy and exhausting and gross to no purpose.

I asked my (very conservative, very reserved) mother to explain. To her ever-lasting credit, she exclaimed gently, "Oh, honey --- it feels good."

That normalized some feelings I had already noticed in myself, and probably saved me from some years of mild worry.

TMI warning: I have a good friend who is heavily invested in her recovered memories of sexual abuse at the hands of her mother and grandmother. Her entire identity is built around being a survivor of this.

Far be it from me to deny it happened, but it is just strange to hear about, over the more than 20 years that I have known her. She dates a lot, and claims to love sex, but can't seem to stay in a relationship. She is attracted to women, but feels that following up on this would be giving in to the abuse (although she has to have anal stimulation to get off, due to this, according to her, being the main venue of the abuse).

She is a wreck emotionally, and has gone through any number of therapists and drug regimens, all the while being a researcher at the highest academic levels.

I am among a number of friends who have been very supportive and have listened to her a lot over the years. All the while, my "jury" is still out on whether the abuse that she remembers really happened like she remembers. It makes me feel like my sexual identity is pretty straight-forward.

I knew the basic biology when I was really young. My brother was born when I was four, and I knew perfectly well that he'd popped out of my mom and how he'd managed to get in there in the first place.

But I had no idea of how those facts connected with social or romantic behavior. For many years I thought sex was something that people undertook deliberately for procreation, presumably standing up and in the bathroom. It may be relevant here that I watched almost no TV growing up.

I think I've mentioned this here before, but the closest thing I ever got to "the talk" was when I asked my parents how "accidental pregnancy" could take place. I think I was eight or nine. They sensibly explained that sometimes people just want to have sex, sort of like you always want to hug Grandma when she shows up to visit. And that you don't necessarily conceive a baby every time you have sex, so sometimes people have sex even though they don't intend to have a kid, but it happens anyway.

And suddenly a whole lot of other puzzling things started to fall into place.

It's all rather muddied, and I knew "something was different" about me and my budding carnality. Likely sensing this but not wanting too much to bother with the talk, my mother got me a set of books from a thrift store called the Life Cycle Library. The fine print indicated that it was published by Catholics, which made sense because I felt guilty at the start. It honestly wasn't too berating about wanking (beating the bishop becomes harmful when when you are plied away from doing other things you like, such as playing sports or attending choir practice), but it was rather grim about homosexuality (many say it's a disease, and being gay won't produce Catholic babies, so avoid doing it unless directed to by your priest). Despite the lack of enthusiasm for these activities, it provided just enough information to get things started.

Not long after, when I was perhaps ten, I made my very first O face. I quickly wrote down the details of how I did it, what it felt like, and drew a crude picture of the scene, apparently for the purposes of documenting this for medical science.

I lived in dairy land, surrounded by farms all with boys or girls my age, about eight of us. We all knew about bulls humping cows (not to mention dogs and cats) fairly early. Our doctor sessions started when I was five or six and were more like group therapy in the hay mows although we didn't often go beyond the touching stage at first. Two of the older girls (who were eight or nine) would occasionally get us boys hard with some fumbling head but never long enough to see if we could ejaculate.

In our town, the 7th and 8th grade Spring Dance at the YMCA was the traditional time for first actual intercourse, in the corn field out back. Even my father and his circle of friends started out back there. Teenage pregnancies were common and only a scandal among families who had moved there from the cities.

I have often wondered why we seemed so different from the rest of american society. My only conclusion was that so many farming dutch and other northern europeans had established our communities only a couple generations before and that rural Netherlands, Germany and Poland may have been much the same way. All our grandparents had been married by their mid-teens.

I'm not sure what my first memory overall is, but I do remember that my first sex dream involved Dr. McCoy and Nurse Chapel.

I know, I know. I don't understand it either. Not even my favorite characters on the show ...

I recall getting a "funny feeling" in the crotch while straddling the limb of a tree I was climbing, sometime while I was in second grade. However I had no real comprehension of what was going on, nor did I for many years hence. I never got "the talk" from my parents, and generally absorbed all the information about sex at school. For reasons not entirely clear to me, I was a very late bloomer, and I don't recall having sexual feelings toward another human being until I was fourteen or so. I didn't have any friends to talk about it with, but while I was in middle school, I was aware of the fact that my cohort had sexual feelings for one another. However, personally, I just didn't 'get it.' Intellectually, it made sense, but I didn't have any of those feelings myself. (also note, my family was never religious, so that's not a factor) The first time I recall deliberately getting myself off was when I was visiting Portland with my parents, while my dad was interviewing for a job here. I had my own room at the Hilton. I must have been 14 or 15. In fact, my office faces that building, and if I turn my head to the left *turns around and looks out window* I can see the window of that room from where I'm sitting.

Having been raised Catholic, I don't think I could even go back and try to unlock the archives without going to Confession.

To bring a bit more levity to this thread, I'll recount an interesting rumor which circulated in the first grade:

The information about where babies came from had been widely disseminated by some kids in the know. However, it was rumored that some rare cases, kids came out of "the other hole". You know how some people "just ain't right"? Well, it's probably because they were born out of the butt hole, or so we believed. Those people resulting from rectal birth were just never quite normal human beings for the rest of their lives.

What's sex?

I got the talk after I told my mom a dirty joke. The talk involved a book with cut paper art work of, among other things, two dogs fucking. The people were shown covered with blankets and in a position that made copulation impossible. I always wondered why it was OK to show dogs doing it, but not people.

In 5th grade I got formal sex education which included the obligatory picture of Bullwinkle. The nurse was an elderly woman with a British accent. We wanted to know was sex was like and all she would say was that it's "wonderful, wonderful!" Turns out she was right.

Oh, and the punchline of the joke I told my mom was, "Mommy, mommy, turn on your spotlights! Daddy's car is in your garage!"

formal sex education which included the obligatory picture of Bullwinkle

Oh, lordy. That's created an unfortunate mental image that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

≡ Click to see image ≡

Sometimes, when a boy moose and girl moose love each other very much...

plinth: I know I've heard that joke before!

I remember once knowing that babies were made by kissing a boy. Something in his spit went into your stomach and made a baby. I also remember trying to tell the other girls in my neighborhood this information. One was older and knew how babies were really made, so I think she told me - but I don't remember what she said.

I also remember being in the bedroom of the boy that lived across the street. I had a big crush on him. I was backed up against the closet door, he was on the bed. He said something to me and I said, "Oh no, this means more kissing". I almost think that I was abused, but I can't be sure.

That being said, I know I started thinking about sex when I was about 10. Maybe a little younger. I would draw write stories about me and boys that I liked - but it was mostly about the lead up to the sex, not the act itself.

I'm not sure I can answer this one.

When I was around six, my parents were away and my grandma was looking after me. This neighbor girl from around the block asked if I wanted to come play. My nonna said to be back soon, I told her 'five minutes.'

I went to the neighbor girl's house and we went to the basement, I assumed to play. She said she was going to take her clothes off and asked if I wanted to see. I nodded. She said 'what side.' I told her to lay on her stomach (I was six, I only knew from butts). She did and I stared in (dimly understood) reverent awe for a while. She walked around the room a bit, too. I remember being really excited and in a kind of awe, although I didn't know why. I don't remember if she asked me to get naked or if I did. Her grandma (she lived with her granny) came down the stairs and interrupted. I went home and my nonna was upset because I had been gone for over an hour.

It was over a decade before I saw a naked girl in person again.

I assume I learned from talking to peers and osmosing culture.

Oddly, due to the abundance of older-brother/neigbor/found in the woods porn and sex manuals on sale in the mall Waldenbooks, a big chunk of my generation knew about such things as 69, S&M and fistfucking before we had so much as seen a boobie.

(as far a learning how babies are made, I looked up 'sex' in the dictionary (because of how excited people got around the word) around age 8 or so and stumbled upon 'sexual intercourse: n. penetration of the vagina by the penis.'

"Oh." I remeber thinking. A few months later my parents brought out the 'where did I come from' book and I informed them that I already knew, which seemed to surprise them.

Here's the Bullwinkle picture (NSFW in a clinical sort of way)

I remember that when I was about ten, my extended family (uncles, aunts, cousins, and my family) sat down to watch a video, presumably something interesting taped off of overseas TV. The video started up in the middle of a sex scene. It was unreal and seemed longer than it must've actually been. Somehow I knew that someone had made a BIG mistake. After a minute an adult jumped up and pressed "Stop" on the VCR. There was a long, awkward silence.

That's not my first memory, but it's definitely my funniest sex-related memory.

I don't remember any time I didn't know about sexuality, but sex education cleverly avoided telling us how sex actually occured and I didn't find out until 7th grade when I read it in Our Bodies, Ourselves.