When I was 13 years old a buddy of mine tried to convince me to fool around. I wasn't into it, and he told me it's not gay if you're wearing socks. I didn't believe him, went home, and asked my dad.

That's 'gentleman's gay', hardly gay at all. Don't see it much these days.

The 50s were a different time. What were we to do? We were typical boarding school boys, rich with vigor, skin slick with drying sweat and gritty earth from a game of pigskin.

At night our young, virile bodies filled the dorm with sweet-musky vapors, like game-meat stewed with apple and peppercorn. You'd awake in darkness to the hushed, melodic rhythm of two pairs of white tube socks, barely visible in moonlight, bouncing on the hardwood floor.

The deep bond of male friendship played like a thousand different human instruments. The wet claps of skin on skin, the gentle thud of heads on backboards, frenzied cries in the throes of climax. Wilbur, so fat and soft like tapioca pudding. His breasts were so like the real thing, what we fantasized of our future wives. Unwilling, defenseless Wilbur, so slow and uncoordinated in the dark. 10 of us would glaze his bare, pink flesh like a giant raspberry danish. He once had the audacity to tell Headmaster Redford. But Redford was a Deerfield boy once, he understood. So he joined us on our midnight hog hunts.

Through college and years after we'd find time here and there, away from the wives at a family lake house. But it's been decades now - the times have certainly changed. If you wanted to do something private with another man, in your socks, it wasn’t ‘gay’. It was just two men, celebrating each other's strength.

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