#13: My first Playboy Magazine
I was 11 years old when I got my hands on a Playboy Magazine. At least I was an early bloomer in something.
There comes a time in a boy’s life when he encounters his first milestone in his sexuality. No, it’s not the first time he kissed a girl or his pubes grow in. It’s when he gets his hands on his first nudie magazine.
Other kids at school didn’t get their hands on something like this until they were in middle school to early high school, usually through their older brothers or resourceful friends. But I was an early bloomer in this department. I got my first Playboy Magazine when I was 11, and I received it from the most unlikely source of all…my mother.
Out of the blue one day, she decided to pick me up a Playboy Magazine. I was given the magazine and a drill speech on how I wasn’t supposed to show it to friends, it was for my private viewing only, I needed to keep it hidden, blah blah.
I was holding something in my hands that only adults read and that any kid at school would have killed to flip through. I remember the issue too. October 1991. Tai Collins. The woman that Senator Charles Robb couldn’t resist. Whoever the hell he was. I tore the plastic off and dove into the book.
I squealed like a little girl as my young virgin eyes rested upon a nude woman for the first time. She gazed back at me with a seductive and suggestive look. Her breasts were large and her nipples were perky. Her pubic area was trimmed perfectly. This was a very pretty and mature woman I was staring at, quite unlike the young girls at school barely carrying “raisins.” An airbrushed woman, but a woman nonetheless.
You might think I did what any other guy does in private with these, but to be truthful I didn’t put two and two together for a little while. So before then, I did what anyone else would do…read the articles, stupid.
That’s when I came across some interview article where the guy made mention of his discovery of masturbation and how he thought he invented it. Wait a sec…was this what I was doing all along? Damn it all, I had a patent ready and everything. Gee…way to kill my genius, Hef.
I didn’t understand at the time why my mother was so open-minded about buying something like this for her 11 year old son. (She bought me several more, too.) Any other parent hearing about that would be scolding her and calling her a bad mother. Maybe she was just trying to be a “cool parent” at the time to make up for lost time. Perhaps she acknowledged that there was no male figure in my life to properly talk to me and perhaps wanted me to have some outlet to discover the opposite sex on my own. Maybe the fact that she grew up with three brothers educated her about how even young boys need an outlet for “release.”
Or quite simply, maybe she was worried that my grandmother was going to turn me gay and she wanted to head that off.