The Starbuck's Boy

Like anyone would be

I am flattered by your

Fascination with me...

Once upon a time, in the magical kingdom of Nippon, a school teacher met a boy. It was the teacher's first year at the school, and the boy's last. The boy was a third year, as the Japanese school system divides junior high and senior high into three years each. That made the boy fifteen years old.

And he was not a happy boy. A good English student (the subject the teacher in question taught), he was nonetheless the butt of all his peers' jokes in class. The teacher did not quite understand what it was that made him so vulnerable to attack, until he overheard the boy's homeroom teacher talking. This boy, who we will call "Takuma," had confessed to his classmate (and supposed best friend) that he thought he might be gay. The "best friend" immediately told everyone else, and left Takuma at the tender mercies of all the other boys.

Now, this story only works if you accept that the teacher had no ulterior motives. But being gay himself, he felt sympathy for the Takuma, with whom he had always had a good relationship with anyways. So one day after class, when Takuma lingered and suddenly burst into tears over the abuse, the teacher made a decision. He told the boy that he was, in fact, just like him. And he assured the boy that no matter how bad junior high was, someday he would outgrow it and find someone to love. Then he could look back on it all and laugh.

Things went well at first. Then, one day, Takuma came after class and gave the teacher a drawing he had done. It was the teacher's face, drawn from memory. The teacher accepted it, and then Takuma told him that he really liked the teacher, that the teacher was kind. He told the teacher he wanted his first boyfriend to be like him.

Like any hot blooded woman

I have simply wanted

An object to crave

The teacher made it clear to Takuma that he already had someone, and that Takuma was far too young. "Wait a few years, and you will find the guy you love."

Then the boy graduated, and the teacher did not see him for four more years.

It happened like this; Kenji had just left me three weeks before. I was devastated. Empty. I wandered around like a zombie with his heart torn out. Japan had never seemed more foreign to me that it did then, a hostile place of people who lied behind their smiles. I didn't want to even leave the house. But of course I did...I had a job, and now that Kenji had left me, I had to take care of everything on my own. I had to go out and deal with the world. I had to treat it like I always had. Thus it was that quite innocently I stopped in the Starbuck's one day, just after work.

I ordered a Grande size Cafe Mocha, and then waited for the barista to make it. He was a tall young man--taller than me--and very handsome. It took a few seconds for me to recognize him. Takuma had somehow gone from all arms and legs to dead sexy. Just in four years.

He recognized me as well, and we chatted while he made my coffee. Then I went off to my table.

Like any uncharted territory

I must seem

Greatly intriguing...

Takuma appeared before I had finished my coffee, having taken his break. He was a freshman in university now, and an English major. He wondered if we could meet sometime so I could help him with some college homework. Enough time had passed that I had forgotten my misgivings, and I had certainly tutored former students before. I arranged to meet him at my place--the place Kenji and I once shared--where I often taught students.

He arrived. I had made coffee and I helped him with his homework. As the night wore on, he seized his courage, and suddenly tried to kiss me. It was awkward for me and maybe more so for him.

"I never stopped thinking about you," he told me. "I would like you to be my first."

I don't think you unworthy

I need a moment

To deliberate

There was most certainly a time when a very hot 19-year-old would have been just my cup of tea. And God, the boy had become dead sexy. But I was twice his age. The boys kept getting younger and I got older. At best, they could feed my vanity. At worst--if I made the mistake of giving them my heart, the way I had with Kenji--it would mean only more pain. There was also the problem of Takuma being a former student.

Must be strangely exciting

To watch the stoic squirm

Must be somewhat heartening

To watch shepherd meet shepherd

So I told him "no." I told him I was still in love with Kenji. I told him I was too old. And I narrowly escaped with my dignity intact.

It was yet again more sign of the damage Kenji had done me. I was acting like an adult.

Lyrics by Alanis Morrisette, "Uninvited"

GOODBYE

I started this blog a month after Kenji left for New York. I guess it was my way to say "goodbye" to him.

It doesn't matter what I want

It doesn't matter what I need

It doesn't matter if I cry

Don't matter if I bleed

You've been on a road

Don't know where it goes

Or where it leads...

When he accepted the job, it left him with only six weeks to relocate to New York. We fought a couple of times in those early days as I tried to come to terms with what was suddenly happening. It ended when he said to me, "You can break up with me if you want." Because at that moment I understood what he was telling me. No matter what I did--even if I threatened to break up with him--he was going to New York anyway. New York was more important to him than me.

It doesn't matter what I want

It doesn't matter what I need

If you've made up your mind to go

I won't beg you to stay

You've been in a cage

Throw you to the wind

You fly away...

For the next few weeks, we did not fight, but we moved around each other like ghosts, trying to make as little noise as possible. For my part, it didn't register what was happening. Suddenly, for no reason at all, Kenji was leaving me. No one had cheated. No one had lied. There were no money problems. It was just all coming apart. Just like that.

I had changed my life for this boy, "The Boy." Meeting him had changed me. I had found someone I really thought I could spend the rest of my life with, and I had always thought he felt the same way. But I was wrong, and there was precious little I could do about it. It didn't matter to him what I wanted...he was going. So I decided to let him go with my dignity intact.

I watched the first couple of weeks as he struggled to find a place to live in New York. He searched several websites, but could find nothing in his price range. Kenji would never, of course, have asked my help, despite the fact I knew New York well. He knew it would have been too cruel. But at the time, I was on summer vacation, and had all day every day to myself while he went off to work. I decided to be a gentlemen about it. I wrote an ad in his name on Craig's List, looking for apartments. Within a day or two I had dozens of responses. I spent most of my summer vacation corresponding with these people on his behalf, until I found what I thought was the best apartment for him.

My friends all thought I was an idiot. "You are HELPING him leave you???" Maybe I was. But other than throwing a tantrum, I didn't know what else to do.

He cried the night before he left. I heard him sobbing in the bedroom. "I am so selfish," he wept. "I am leaving you alone."

I suppose I could have said "Yes, you are. You told me you loved me, and that you wanted to live with me. Then you changed your mind. You are going and I don't know if we will ever be together again. I don't know if I can ever trust you again."

Instead, I hugged him. "Shhh. Don't worry. Get some sleep. Everything will be fine."

That morning, his parents came to take him to the airport. It was nearly a two hour drive from our place, and I decided not to go with them to see him off. How could I? How could I ride back in the car with all of them after Kenji had just left me? What could I possibly say as I spent all that time trying to keep up a brave face? I wasn't that Japanese yet.

Instead, I hugged him briefly at the door. Unable to say "goodbye," I said "see you later." Then he was gone.

For days I rambled around our apartment alone. It suddenly seemed so big, so empty. I had left my friends all behind to live with him, and this is where it left me. Alone. I had no idea what the future held for me.

It doesn't matter what I want

It doesn't matter what I need

It doesn't matter if I cry

Don't matter if I bleed

Feel the sting of tears

Falling on this face

You've loved for years

GROWING PAINS

As I mentioned before, the trouble with dating a younger guy is that you suddenly have to vicariously live through all those growing pains again.

Shortly after we moved in together, Kenji had to make the transition from university life to the workplace. Certainly, he had it better than I. Despite graduating near the top of my class, I was shoved out into a severely depressed job market, and the best I could do was mixing paint in the hardware department of Sears. I lived in a little $400 a month apartment in West Philadelphia, chock full of cockroaches and the occasional rat, but entirely devoid of air conditioning. Each day and night, I drove back and forth to work up the Schuylkill Expressway, a vicious stretch of road that was constantly bumper-to-bumper traffic. I lived off of instant noodles and Hamburger Helper. But that was long ago. Now with me at his side, Kenji was able to move straight from school into a fashionable apartment, complete with all the amenities. We bought beautiful furniture, dishes, drapes. There was never a cockroach to be seen. And since I finished work a little before him, I bought and cooked dinner every night, waiting for him when he got home. Whenever his 20-something friends came around, they always commented with envy that he was living in a "real" apartment.

This might have softened the blow a little, but Kenji still had to go out into the world. Japan being a fairly conservative nation, the first thing he had to do was cut and dye his hair. In college, it had gotten long, and he lightened it to brown with streaks of blonde. This was unacceptable in much of the Japanese workplace. So he had it trimmed short, and colored pitch black. Even his mother said it didn't look like him any more.

His reward for the image change was a job in an electronics store, selling mobile phones. Though he never complained about it, I think it must have been hard for him to watch me work. As a teacher, I had holidays off all the time, got home much earlier in the day, and earned double what he was making. But then again he hadn't been around to see me suck up to Sears customers in that awful red vest. I had come a long way, baby, and was far ahead of him in the game of life. And of course I was more than happy to share everything I could with him.

For a guy who had spent years learning a second language (English), working in a phone shop was completely unrewarding for him. But no matter how many times he tried to get something where he could use his English skills--such as working at an airport or in a hotel--he was shot down. Watching him go through it all reminded me of my own frustration back then, when the harsh realities of the world completely dashed my adolescent expectations.

Things began marginally better when he landed an office job working for a telecommunications company. He still didn't get to use English, but he was now in an office environment. This was a blessing and a curse. Now he had to wear a suit everyday, and I couldn't help but wonder what had happened to the cute young guy I started dating just two years before. In the "gentle" hands of the Japanese workforce, it didn't take long to turn him into a drained, overworked, salaryman husk. There were times when I even tried to convince him to quit, to just be my "kept" house boy. But he wouldn't have any of it. He'd been brought up too well.

Another area where harsh reality set in was "me." Kenji had never been in a relationship before, let alone lived with someone. The romantic ideals he might have had must have quickly burst when he saw how bleary-eyed and miserable I could be before my morning coffee. But in this area, at least, I think he learned to accept. His affection for me never seemed to wane, and after our occasional arguments, we always made up passionately.

The one area of living with "me" that was more difficult was keeping our relationship hidden. True, we'd gotten a two-bedroom apartment, but the fact that we were practically joined at the hip must have rang some alarms with his family. They were, as Kenji had told me they would be, very polite about it. I was warmly included in family functions; in fact, when Kenji's nephew was born I was right there at the hospital with the rest of the clan, no questions asked. But this bothered me. I had made the decision to "come out" back in the States, and being forced to relive life in the closet grated on my nerves. I could live with the little things (like when one of his female friends drunkenly confessed she was madly in love with my "housemate" but couldn't figure out why he never noticed her), but when it came to his family I felt like I was lying all the time. They were always so kind to me, and I was being increasingly dishonest. Kenji knew I was unhappy with it, but never dared to break taboo.

But he had been wrong about one thing; the discussion he had thought he'd never have with his parents did eventually come around. Unfortunately, it also heralded the end of "us."

Having lived together three years, and been together just shy of four, Kenji finally got the opportunity he'd been looking for. The telecommunications company he was working for was opening an office in New York City, a place I had brought him to twice to meet my family. After endless attempts to get a job where he could use English, one was finally dangling in front of him.

There had been a time I think, when he was still in college, that Kenji genuinely believed all he wanted out of life was me. And I had been a damn fool for falling for it. Your 20s are meant to be a roller coaster, the wild twists and turns, the ups and downs of discovering who you are. Kenji was discovering, apparently, that what he needed was a chance to use his skills and a chance to prove to himself he could do it on his own. He needed that more than me.

The discussion started with his mother. He explained that he wanted to go work in New York for a couple of years. She asked him if he would get married when he returned to Japan. Perhaps he was feeling brave because he thought he might be departing, perhaps it was just the opportunity he was looking for. Either way, he told her marriage was not in the cards, and that he was more than just my "housemate." The irony of him finally telling his mom about us, as he was contemplating leaving me, was not lost on me.

And as for me? Well, that was growing pains of a new sort. Ten years ago I would have thrown a fit. I would have begged him to stay. But I knew from my own experience that there comes a time when you have to stand on your own two feet, when you had to go out and face the world alone. How could I--the guy who had dropped everything to try the challenge of a life in Japan--deny him the right to do the same in the opposite direction? Wanting more than anything to stop him, I instead found myself supporting him in any way I could.

To my horror, I realized somewhere along the line I'd stopped thinking about myself and instead was thinking about my partner.

I had grown up.

The Apartment, Part One

By the end of the first year, Kenji and I were looking for a home together. My relationship with him was very different from any relationship I had ever had before. Kenji was so open and warm, so completely comfortable with his feelings, that years of scar tissue and defense mechanisms were slowly being washed away. I was in love with him, and I was starting to believe that maybe I had been wrong all those years. Maybe living "happily ever after" really was possible.

But of course no life is a fairy tale. Not even a gay one.

Getting a new apartment in Japan is a daunting task. Being such a relentlessly modern country, it is easy to forget that just a hundred and fifty years ago Japan was still a feudal state...at least until you rent. Landlords in Japan still live like the medieval aristocracy (accept they can't behead their tenants anymore). In a land were, well, land is the most precious commodity, they can demand anything and basically get away with it. Despite being extremely small, Japanese apartments are famously expensive, but that's just the start. To move in, you are expected to pay the first two months up front, and on top of that a "contract fee." This is, essentially, a "gift" to the landlord equal to a month's rent. If you are lucky, this gets you into a two or three-year rental contract. When that expires, in order to renew you need to give the landlord another "contract fee." With all all "gifts" to the landlord, you might expect an appliance or two. But apartments in Japan come completely empty, no appliances, no light fixtures, nothing. Thus moving in and setting up house can cost a hefty sum of cash.

By the end of our first year I had the money, and we started looking for a place together. For a gay couple, this is the closest most of us can come to actual marriage. It was an exciting time for me, despite the hurdles. And there were a lot of those.

For starters, as I mentioned, young Japanese men and women rarely moved out of their parents' house before marriage, and the idea of housemates is largely unheard of. When we told the first few real estate agencies we were looking for a two bedroom apartment together, they were not shy about telling us most landlords would reject that. Young married couples were perceived as stable, two unmarried guys sharing rent was not. And since landlords could cherry-pick the tenants they wanted, they wouldn't be shy about giving us the thumbs down.

We kept each other's spirits up, going from agency to agency, sure the next one would help us out. Hopes were dashed again and again. I began to get irritated. I had a great, stable job, good references, and plenty of money. Being rejected because I didn't fit the narrow parameters of the Japanese norm was ticking me off. In addition, the apartments we were seeing were less than stellar. I began to suspect the agents were showing us the bottom of the barrel to give us the brush off.

We moved slowly out of the center of the city into the suburbs. There we found an agency that--though skeptical--seemed willing to play ball. So long as my employers were willing to be my guarantor, and Kenji's father (a city official) was willing to be his, they saw no problems.

The first place they showed us was "the one," and I knew the moment I saw it that Kenji and I would live there together. It was a large (by Japan's standards), two bedroom apartment (two because he wanted to keep up the pretense to his family we were "just friends"). It had a decent kitchen, a great balcony, and plenty of space. This was going to be where Kenji and I really started our life together, and the first real home I had made in Japan.

Shopping for the apartment was a blast. Picking out the furniture, the lights, the drapes, really made us feel like a couple. And being able to see him every day, to have him in the center of my life, was the best feeling I had had in more years than I could remember. He was mine and I was his. We were for each other.

And this is how it was for three years. We had great Christmases together, with me buying a full-sized tree. We had our friends and his family over for dinners. Having a passion for making cocktails, I bought a large bar and was always having people over for drinks. Kenji's friends, as well as his older brother and wife, were frequent guests, and we would all laugh and drink late into the night. Looking back, those were the happiest three years of my life.

Until, suddenly, it all came to an end.

Meeting the Folks

Let's do the Time Warp Again...

About four months into the relationship, Kenji stunned me by asking me to do something so deviant, so unheard of, that at first I thought I must have heard him incorrectly. I made him repeat the question.

“Do you want to meet my family?”

Like most young Japanese men and women, Kenji lived at home. This was perfectly normal in Japan, a nation roughly the size of California, but with fully one-half of the entire US population crammed into it. Land was like gold, and rents tended to be far beyond the reach of younger, unsalaried workers. While large companies often ran dormitories for their unmarried employees, those who worked part-time jobs, or in the service industry, usually remained at home. Kenji, who was just finishing university, had a part-time job in an electronics shop, occupied the same bedroom he had grown up in.

I’d been to his house once. Usually he came to my place, but there had been a time when his parents were away for the weekend and I spent the night with him in his room. There was something vaguely kinky about the whole thing, making love in what was obviously a child’s bed, with posters and plastic models looking down from overhead. It reminded me of San Francisco, when I dated a Vietnamese guy who was a student at UC Berkeley. 27 at the time, I found myself staying over in his dorm room, having flashbacks to my own college life. That experience had been completed by the inevitable roommate-walking-in-on-us-during-sex shtick that was a required part of living in a dorm. The same evening, some drunk students had a 3 A.M. fire extinguisher fight outside the door, reminding me of all the reasons why I didn’t miss being in a dormitory. I was getting way too old for that crap.

We were at my place when Kenji extended the invitation, and having made him repeat the question, it still was sinking in. I had dated several Japanese guys, and knew several more. None of them introduced boyfriends to parents. Hell, Shouhei wouldn’t even introduce me to any of his friends, friends of his friends, or any other living being. Being gay in Japan, I had started to get used to the idea of being my significant other’s dark secret, the thing that if it leaked out would cause him only embarrassment. But as I was starting to learn with Kenji, none of the rules ever applied to him. Whether he was too naïve, or some sort of social maverick destined to liberate Japan’s gay community from the shadows, I couldn’t be sure. Regardless, my curiosity was piqued.

“Introduce me as what?” I asked.

“Well, my friend.” He replied. “They already know I come over here a lot. It would be strange if I didn’t introduce you.”

I could see some logic in this. Maybe Kenji wasn’t a rebel after all, maybe he would simply be hiding me in plain sight. Why not? He had lived overseas in Canada and the UK. He had had foreign friends before. Maybe his parents were used to him bringing stray gaijin back the house. Reluctantly, I agreed.

I was sure that Kenji’s parents were perfectly nice people; after all, he was a pretty decent guy. But I also knew how this sort of thing went down in Japan. Nothing in the Land of the Rising Sun ever just was, nothing ever just happened. No, there would have to be ritual, and ceremony, and etiquette. A production would have to be made. But this was Kenji, and he was starting to become important to me. Sacrifices would have to be made.

Time travel is a fact of life in Japan. For someone with family back in the States, you live a day in the future ahead of them. Flying back to New York, I once boarded a plane at 4:00 P.M. and after a twelve-hour flight, disembarked at 3:55 P.M. on the same day. Surely this proved Einstein was right? But aside from the weirdness of speaking to people back home on the phone while you were eating breakfast and they were getting ready for bed, there were other temporal anomalies as well. Japanese young people, by and large, were somehow still living in the 80s. Big hair, thin ties, shiny suits, androgyny…it was all still in play. And the music…well, let’s not go there. By contrast, the generation before them was living in the 1950s. Women wore aprons, and were professional stay-at-home housewives. Men wore suits and hats, went out the door in the morning, and expected a meal on the table when they got home. Japanese home life was thus a kind of Asian Father Knows Best, a time warp that had to be experienced to be believed.

I was not disappointed by Kenji’s parents. They met me at the entrance to their home, his mother wearing the apron. She looked exactly like a shorter version of him with a wig. His father really did look like one of those Fifties TV dads, with the short, slicked back hair, a white, short-sleeved dress shirt, and a cocktail in his hand. They bowed. I bowed. We all did some more head-bobbing as introductions were made. Then they welcomed me into their home.

The older brother was there as well, with his fiancée. Introductions were made again before we entered the living room. True to form, Kenji’s mother had prepared dozens of little dishes, a bewildering variety of food. I was giving the place of honor at the table, and soon his father was filling my glass with beer.

We stuck to our story. Kenji and I had met because he needed help on his Mark Twain paper, and after that we became friends. Everyone seemed to find this plausible, but even if they didn’t, you could be sure they would show no signs of their suspicions. We drank, we ate, I answered questions about my life back home and the inevitable series of “can you eat sushi/use chopsticks” inquiries that all foreigners in Japan receive. At the end of the evening they insisted not on dropping me off at the train station, but driving me all the way home. I was cautious, but I found them all to be genuinely likeable people. His father and I in particular talked late into the evening over glasses of shouchu, a kind of Japanese gin. His mother, however, was clearly no fool. I had the sense all evening that she knew the score. Maybe mothers just make me paranoid.

Having passed through the encounter unscathed, I became increasingly wary as Kenji invited me to more and more family functions. A barbecue seemed innocuous, but then I was invited to his mother’s birthday party. After that, it was Japanese New Year (roughly the equivalent of Christmas). I was becoming part of all the family functions, treated the same way as the older brother’s fiancée. But when I questioned Kenji on this, he assured me that they all thought we were “just friends.”

Nevertheless, I still thought it was rocking the boat a bit too much when Kenji left his brother’s wedding early to come see me. The wedding had been held, coincidentally, in the same seaside town where I was living, so he took the opportunity to come pay me a visit. “Don’t you think this is all a bit too much? Aren’t we making everyone suspicious?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kenji said to me. “You don’t understand Japanese families. Maybe my family knows. Maybe not. But they will never say anything. We won’t talk about it. Ever.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Somehow, having a White Elephant in the room seemed worse to me than if I had never met them at all. Even more troubling, I was really begin to care about these people, and as months became years I started feeling guilty every time I went over there. I felt like I was lying to their faces each and every time they invited me to dinner, and I hated it.

Kenji was wrong, of course. Eventually they would talk about it, but that day had not arrived yet. Until then we lived like those lines in the old Peter Murphy song, Cascade; “We have no image, we’re just called ‘the good friends.’”

It was like being gay back in the 1950s rather than the 21^st century.

The Boy, Part Two

Seeing the world through Kenji's eyes suddenly made me realize how far I'd fallen from grace.

Once we crossed that first barrier together--getting him through his very first sexual encounter with a man--Kenji threw himself into the relationship totally and completely. We had had sex, and in his mind that meant A) he could trust me utterly and completely, B) we were officially a couple, and C) we would be in love forever. It never crossed his mind that I might have lied to get him into bed, that I might have two or three other guys on the side, that I was an emotional basket case waiting to blow up, or that I'd get bored in five minutes. All the things that run through the average gay man's mind when dropping his pants with a new partner were not running through his.

It was early in the relationship, and having discovered sex Kenji couldn't seem to get enough of it, coming over to my place three or four times a week. Always enthusiastic, I was surprised how fast he caught on, his initial clumsiness rapidly evolving into a real sense of what I needed and wanted in bed. After one particularly fantastic lovemaking session, we lay in the semi-dark of my room. He was on his back, I was propped up on my elbow beside him, my other hand resting on his naked (and incredibly flat) belly. He looked up at me and his eyes said it all; he was head over heels in love. He hadn't learned yet not to trust, to always be on guard. His heart was on his sleeve. "Later, maybe a year from now, do you want to move in with me? We could get an apartment together."

Suddenly, I was not a thirty-something gay man. Suddenly I was starting all over again, a young man on the verge of my new sexuality, which stretched before me sunny and blue all the way to the horizon. That was the way he saw this world. He didn't know that sex was the cheapest commodity on the market, that it could be bartered and sold half price and in bulk. He didn't know that men could swear they loved you and see an endless string of other guys on the side. There had been no Shouhei in his life. No one had lied to him, cheated him. He was the boy I once was, thinking that the way the world worked was that you found your soulmate, fell in love, and lived happily ever after.

I realized that night, then and there, that I had stopped believing in love. When the hell had that happened? Had it been when the first person I ever loved walked out, telling me he'd found someone else? Had it been during the endless string of guys I dated after, trying to fill the gaping hole he had left when he went away? I remember that after he dumped me, I dated with the intention of finding new love. One by one, the pattern was the same. We would meet, connect, have sex, and then it all went wrong. He already had a boyfriend. He had a wife. He was just after sex. He disappeared without ever explaining what went wrong. Somewhere in the process, I gave up on the love and settled for just the sex. And once that happened, sex had somehow become boring. Then it had to be threesomes, or sex in the bathroom of a club, or an alleyway...anything to shoot fresh adrenaline into something that had become banal and stale. Like the man behind the curtain, all the magic had been stripped away.

But in Kenji's eyes, I saw it unclouded. That real love. That innocent expectation. That connection. Uninjured, he was content to stand naked before me with his heart in his hands, while I--layered in enough character armor to deflect a grenade--watched. It was at that moment that I understood this was my chance. It was Lucifer's chance to crawl up out of hell and hang with the angels again. A chance to be in a relationship that was not a lie.

I removed the armor, and surrendered. "Of course, I would love to live with you."

Teary eyed, he hugged me, and I realized I had meant what I had just said.

The Boy, Part One

The problem with dating younger guys is that all the growing up you did you have to go through all again. All the uncertainty, the self-discovery, and the brutal adjustment to the working world you lived through in your twenties you get to experience vicariously, sometimes with unexpected consequences.

About a year after dumping Shouhei I met “Kenji.” He was a 22-year-old university student, finishing up his last year. An English lit major, he was working on his final paper. Coincidentally the topic was Mark Twain, one of my favorite authors, and it was refreshing to talk to a guy about something other than hair, underwear, and pop stars. He was plowing his way through A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and I actually re-read the novel to talk it over with him.

The age thing bothered me a little. I was 34 at the time, leaving only a dozen years between us, but with the exception of the Seven-Eleven guy I’d woken up with after getting a bit too drunk, twelve years was the biggest gap between me and any guy I’d ever been with. Kenji was unlike any other Japanese guy I’d dated before, and I had trouble believing he was (as he confessed to me) gay. The majority of the Japanese guys interested in gaijin were on the passive side, expecting you to do all the work (both in bed and in conversation). I was aware, of course, that Japan had its share of macho, butch tops, but none of them seemed interested in foreigners, who are generally perceived as being loud and aggressive. From what I had seen of the Japanese gay universe, the line between the active senpai and the passive kouhai was deeply established, with foreigners collectively stereotyped into the former rather than the latter. As a result, I had been on scores of dates where the boys sat there like lumps, looking pretty, waiting for you to do all the heavy lifting. After awhile, it was wearying.

Kenji, however, was extremely out-going, funny, self-confident, and even playful. He didn’t have the withdrawn and guarded attributes I’d gotten myself used to in Japan. In fact, there was something so innocent about him, I found myself wondering how he’d managed to escape donning the cynical armor most gay men put on after a few rounds of the dating scene. The answer soon became clear.

The first few times we were intimate, he was very passionate, but seemed a bit nervous. He would come over to my place and we’d fool around for hours, but nothing hardcore would happen. Then one night, he decided to stay over, and as they said back in high school, things went “all the way.” As we lay there naked in bed, he confessed that it was the first time he’d ever had sex with a man, and then apologized, expecting me to be angry that I had been his first.

I wasn’t, of course. I was deeply touched. “But you told me you’d dated other guys before,” I said. He admitted he had, but things never progressed that far. Then he told me one of the most horrible (and funny) dating stories I had ever heard.

Having come to the conclusion that he was gay, he started visiting internet chat rooms, hoping to meet a nice foreign guy. He eventually found a Canadian we will call “Todd.” Todd seemed nice, sweet, affectionate. After a few dates, Kenji nervously went back to his place for what would be his first sexual experience. As they moved slowly towards the bedroom, Todd told him he’d really love it if Kenji would give him a “golden shower.” Kenji, whose English was excellent but didn’t quite extend into the bizarre depths of the sexual world, was baffled. Unwilling to reveal his ignorance, he agreed, thinking Todd wanted them to take a shower first. But as things showed no sign of moving towards the bathroom, and Todd was waiting with expectation on the bed, Kenji was forced to admit he didn’t know what was going on.

“I want you to piss on me,” Todd told him. “Please? All over my body.”

Kenji, horrified, grabbed his clothes and fled the room. The fact that this wasn’t enough to make him swear off men entirely was admirable.

He laughed when he told me about it, so clearly no permanent damage was done. “Welcome to the gay world,” I told him. “Though I’d heard much worse stories of the first time!”

He snuggled against me. “That wasn’t my first time. You were. And it was perfect.”

It was the beginning of something really great.