A Sexual Education: The Gloryhole (Vacation Week Repost)

(While I'm making a quick trip south to visit my dad this week, I'm reposting a few older entries. They might be favorites to longer-term readers; to newer readers they might be completely new. For Monday through Wednesday, I'm posting the first few of "A Sexual Education" in the order in which they happened, which is completely out of order from the way I actually wrote them.)


My dad taught his classes in a large slab of brick and concrete known as the Business Building. In 1975 it was the newest building on campus, and one of the very few that had centralized air conditioning. In the middle of a muggy southern summer where the sun simultaneously blazed down from overhead and baked the insides of your legs as it reflected from the asphalt streets, the jets of cold air that would blast down as you walked into the building were a godsend.

Both my parents worked, and had worked out a system for the summer. Three times a week my father would pick me up from the daytime band camp I attended in the mornings, and take me to school with him until the late afternoon. My mother would pick up my sister from her morning swimming lessons and settle her in an empty room at the campaign headquarters where she was working. Both of us were easy to keep occupied; we’d simply take a book with us and read the afternoons away.

When I went with my father, I had the choice of either remaining behind in his office—not a bad option, as the converted Victorian townhouse in which his office resided had creaky floors that rang out like gunshots whenever someone would walk across them, and could easily be imagined as haunted—or accompanying him to the Business Building. Attractive as kicking back in his office might have been, I usually went with him to class, because I’d usually be guaranteed a few quarters in spending money for the vending machines, and the opportunity to read and eat candy in air-conditioned comfort in the student lounge.

It was one afternoon in the Business Building that I stumbled into the men’s room on the second floor and heard the sound of door slamming, followed by the rapid sounds of multiple belt buckles slamming against the tiles. I ignored the ruckus, headed to the furthest of the four stalls, and closed the door behind me so I could do my business in private.

Only I didn’t really have privacy. Not until I had my pants down did I noticed that to my left, right in the middle of the partition between my stall and the next, was a large hole, about the size of a softball. On the other side, I could see the curve of a jawline covered with beard, a flash of t-shirt, and then, as the other occupant stood to his feet, a man’s penis. It was curved and rock-hard. A globule of precum-bulged from the slit.

Oddly enough, though I was surprised, I wasn’t at all shocked at the sight. In Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), Dr. Reuben had gone on at curiously-obsessed length about how whenever homosexuals wanted to meet each other, their only recourse was to visit the men’s rooms in bowling alleys and have sex in the stalls. Richmond in the mid-nineteen-seventies had but one bowling alley, and it was on the far side of town, so on some level it seemed perfectly logical for the city’s homosexuals to shift their adventures somewhere more central and (more importantly) cooler in the middle of a hot southern summer. So I watched in fascination as the man next to me turned slightly to point his dick in my direction. The backs of his fingers sported dark tufts of hair that I gazed at as they curled around his stiff meat and traveled its length, back and forth, back and forth. I managed to intuit at once that my pillow and I had gone about masturbating all wrong.

The man sat back down. I saw his beard again as he leaned forward to look through the hole. I leaned back far enough that he couldn’t see my face at his angle, and covered my hands over my genitals. My dick was rock hard; it couldn’t have been any harder. As it had when the man in People’s Drugstore had touched me just a few weeks before, my heart began to thud violently—it pounded with such insistence that I worried I’d have a heart attack and that the paramedics would find me dead with my pants down and my dick hard, shaming myself and my parents forever. Again the man stood up and angled his own cock toward me, poking the round, full head through the hole so that I could see it more closely. He was dripping more, now, and the bead of his pre-cum caught on the top of the glory hole and stretched into a shiny, sticky thread.

When I didn’t do anything, he retreated, and tried to catch another glimpse of me. Maybe he saw how small and slender I was, and realized I was more than half his age at the very least. He didn’t try to urge me to touch him again, though. I watched as he turned his attention to the stall on his other side. After a few seconds, he was down on the ground, his knees spread wide and his feet bound by the trousers around his ankles. He thrust his knees and dick beneath the far partition. I saw a hand from the third stall reach underneath and snake across his hairy buttocks, and the shadow of a head as it lowered itself down between the man’s legs. Then came the loud and undisguised sound of sucking.

The man who’d been showing off to me looked over his shoulder squarely at me, through the hole. He winked at me, knowing I was watching, and then his mouth dropped open as he let out a loud moan. Our eyes locked—mine wide open, his slitted and glittering—as he climaxed. I watched as his hips bucked back and forth, and heard the sounds of appreciative grunting from his invisible partner. When he stood up, his dick was still wet and glistening from the attention it had received. My friend shook the last drop of semen from its tip, then peed into the toilet bowl, shook himself, and began to zip up.

I had a fear that if he left the restroom first, I might emerge and find him waiting outside, and I couldn’t let that happen. I yanked up my pants over my aching erection and dashed outside, then ran down the stairwell and into the lounge chair where my father had left me. He found me there a few minutes later, after his class let out. I’d managed to stop shaking by that point.

Three times a week I went to the Business Building after that, and once the school year started up again, I found excuses to convince my parents to take me with them to their classes. I found relatively quickly that all the upper floors of the Business Building were used for cruising. The action would begin in the second floor restroom, where I’d stumbled that afternoon. Once those stalls filled up, the men would spill up to the third floor, and then the fourth, and all the way up to the tiny two-staller on the seventh floor if it were a busy evening. The two stalls that shared the glory hole were the most coveted of all, though; men would lounge against the walls in the second-floor bathroom, waiting for a chance to take their place.

Sometimes the men would check me out through the hole, realize how young I was, and drape a piece of toilet paper over the gape so that I couldn’t see what they were doing—though that happened extremely rarely. Most of them looked through the hole and licked their lips with invitation, or peered or through the gaps in the stall doors to try to get me to show them my dick. I always refused, and kept my hands over and off my own throbbing cock. I never balked to look at theirs, though, when they’d pull it out for display. Nor did I close my eyes when the men would open their doors and thrust their dicks into a willing mouth, or stop watching when one of the cruisers would prop a foot on the toilet seat, bend over, and offer their asses to the perfect stranger waiting to fuck them.

For several months, from the other side of that small hole I spied, and observed, and learned.