I grew up in Coral Beach, Florida. It’s one of those nondescript, don’t blink or you’ll miss it, faded little beach towns along the east coast that you never hear about until there’s a hurricane. Takes about three minutes to drive through, if you’re on A1A – providing you don’t make the light as you’re on the way to Miami or Key West or anywhere fun. Like everything else north of Palm Beach county right up to St. Augustine, it’s a town with a cute name that sounds a lot nicer than it really is. Truth be told, it’s just mostly retirees and white trash – where the Waffle House and a local dive bar called “Kelley’s Landing” are the only two spots that are even open after nine o’clock on a Friday night. And as far as dating and sex, good luck.

Okay, that’s not completely true. If you’re an eighteen to twenty-five year old single white female with her high school GED, who thinks that turning her prized GunsNRoses tour t-shirt into a tank top is a fashion statement, then yes, I suppose that there are plenty of would-be auto mechanics, blackjack dealers and casual meth addicts who will wine and dine you on mozzarella sticks and a glass of the house red – at one of our two fine dining establishments before whisking you off for a romantic hand job in the secluded parking lot of the local Elks chapter, number 349. But for a fifteen-year-old skinny teenage boy with few close friends and a pronounced overbite, who was on the verge of discovering his sexual identity in 1983 – not so much.
And as you might suspect, I was pretty much a virgin in high school – I mean definitely with guys – and apart from one very awkward incident involving this girl named Alma, who I had met a church youth group weekend jamboree in Clearwater – I was pretty much a virgin with members of the opposite sex as well. And when I say pretty much, I mean yes. Now, I will spare you the more graphic and certainly more embarrassing details of that one and only heterosexual encounter with said female but suffice it to say that I learned that day that one does not remove a teenage girl’s bra simply by pulling it over her head as one does a turtleneck sweater.
Yes, to answer the question, I knew I was gay long before then – like Fourth Grade. But when you grow up in a small town like Coral Beach, Florida, you learn to keep your mouth shut, close your eyes and slide your hand under the blouse of the first willing fore-eyed, buck-toothed girl from Okeechobee Springs in a darkened corner of a First Baptist fellowship hall that you find. That is if you don’t want to carry your teeth home in your Trapper Keeper.
And this was before the internet so any full to partial male nudity, let alone a sexualized depiction of an alternate lifestyle that was accessible to a socially-inept young man of my age at that time – was limited at best. Now, unlike my straight classmates who had an exhaustive collection of pornographic literature at their disposal – worn copies of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler magazine to name just a few, all generously given to them by older brothers going off to the University of Tampa, leaving my peers to trade, peruse and stain said reading material at their leisure. I was forced to rely solely on the underwear models from the Sunday paper’s pull-out advertising circular from Montgomery Ward. But even then, their chiseled mannequin good looks and Ken doll crotches gently packed into their Hanes Fruit of the Loom tighty-whities could only inspire so much .
Until, one June day when my father appeared there in the front door of our house on 837 Bay Sycamore Drive with a gift from the gods. It weighed about fifty pounds, took up half of the credenza and cost eight hundred dollars. A video cassette player from Sears. Of course, my father had opted not to purchase the additional remote, sold separately – grumbling that he had already spent much more than he had planned, so all rewinding and fast forwarding would have to be done manually but I, of course was too elated to care. It was the light at the end of the tunnel. A few drops of water on an otherwise arid stretch of coastline.
Now as I’ve stated, what with Coral Beach being the epicenter of American commerce, the closest and more importantly to my father, the cheapest, and when I say cheapest I mean free – video cassette rentals would be procured from the Clermont Community Library, seven miles north of us. “I’ve already spent enough on the machine. I’m not paying any more for the tapes.” Thankfully, it being summer vacation and I, with nothing but time on my hands, rather than wait for my Mother’s infrequent trips anywhere more than a half a mile from our house, I decided that a little sunburn and mild dehydration was a small price to pay for the potential sexual gratification that could be achieved so up the coastal highway I peddled my bike there and back under the midday Florida sun. I will admit that the audio-visual department of a public lending library of a small little redneck town on the eastern seaboard in the early 1980’s was hardly the treasure trove of erotic masturbatory fantasy material for the latent homosexual but what other choice did I have? So between the battered copies of Michael Keaton’s “Mr. Mom” and the complete British series “Upstairs Downstairs” – volumes two through eight, for four days a week, I would scour those shelves for hours upon end, reading and analyzing the back of every cassette box, VHS or Beta – from period drama to holocaust documentary in the hope of just a few fleeting onscreen seconds of male nudity that might assist me in relieving the more carnal of my urges.
Until one afternoon, when ironically, I revisited a movie musical whose cover art I had initially dismissed but upon closer examination proved to be the ark of the covenant to my Indiana Jones. Universal Pictures. 1982. Musical-comedy “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Specifically, the scene in the locker room where the Texas A&M Aggie football players have entered rooting and hollering from their glorious victory on the gridiron, now rip-roaring and full of sexual bravado, knowing that they will now be treated to a trip to Miss Mona’s Chicken Ranch, the infamous house of ill-repute managed by Ms. Dolly Parton herself.
All of them strapping robust young men, arguably more dancers than athletes but each a model specimen of the male physique in their prime, then proceed to strip down to their jockstraps, playfully slapping each other’s bare chest and naked behind before they hit the showers where they lather up as a team. For fifty-six seconds.
My teenage prayers had been answered.
(By the way, if you can get past the politically-incorrect male chauvinistic, borderline predatory lyrics of the song, which were written by a woman by the way – and concentrate solely on the visuals, I recommend home viewing as it remains today still as one of the most homoerotic scenes depicted in 1980’s mainstream cinema.)
I myself must have watched that scene so many times that summer that Ms. Patterson, the main librarian finally took it off the shelves and would have it ready for me to check-out every Friday afternoon as I rode up, sweating and panting on my bike. “I bet you know all the songs by heart by now” she’d smile. “Better than a football game” I’d grin, shoving the tape to the bottom of my bookbag, where it would sit until after my parents had gone to bed – then I’d sneak downstairs, sitting as close to our t.v. as I could, the volume turned down low so as not to wake them up. Fifty-six seconds was all I needed as there I’d sit on the floor of our sunken living room – hit play, rewind, hit play, rewind, hit play, rewind – only one hand frantically clutching the remote.
Until one night, there came a whirring sound from deep within the bowels of the VCR . Then an anguished wail, followed quickly by the sound of unspooling plastic, then silence. I froze. Remote in my hand. After weeks of self-abuse, the machine had had enough and the tape had snapped. “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” was now stuck inside the family video player.

Of course, I panicked, frantically pulled up my pajama bottoms and went running to the kitchen, to find anything to free the incriminating evidence from its metal prison, finally settling on the longest bread knife I could find, as I attempted to pry out the tape, not wanting to leave any tell-tales scratches but desperate to save myself from the inevitable humiliation of having to explain not only what I had been doing at that hour of the morning but why exactly are you watching a movie about prostitutes? But it was to no avail – no matter what buttons I pushed or pulled, how hard I shook the machine, tipped, angled, positioned, plugging, unplugging or every button pushed without success.
The damage had been done and around four-fifteen, I was forced to accept defeat and crawled back into bed, terrified. In the morning, I was forced to tell my parents over breakfast of puffed rice and sadness that I had broken the VCR.

 
Only there was no discussion of my late night viewing habits or choice of subject matter. Instead, my father suggested that instead of dipping into my savings account that I just spend the rest of the summer mowing lawns to help pay for the repair, which turned out to be only sixty-five dollars. And my mother said that she would speak to Ms. Patterson about what needed to be done about a replacement copy, which the Clermont Community Library ending up excusing, citing normal wear and tear. And that was that.
Now a few months later as I was returning a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers” – not at all what I thought the book was about – Ms. Patterson stopped me at the circulation desk to let me know how sad she was not to be seeing me on a regular basis but how glad I must have been to finally have my own copy to watch whenever I liked. Apparently about a week before that fateful night, she had called to recommended that my parents buy me my own copy of the film since I liked it so much.
Nothing more was never said about it. Nor years later when I finally sat them down to explain that that nice young man I lived with was more than just a roommate. And as far as whatever became of Dolly Parton, her stable of whores or the Chicken Ranch, I couldn’t tell you.
To this day, I have never seen it through to the end credits.