The Swimming Pool
The Swimming Pool
I’d had a constant inferiority complex, comparing myself to my older brother, who was physically larger than me, more capable, someone I admired, but at a distance, as you might admire the strength of a tiger in the forest, but yet be wary. I was smaller than the others in my school class, being younger than most, and also slow to develop. So, gym, and sports, were never something that I looked forward to.
Gym: exposing myself in the locker room, and comparing myself, as I felt others were comparing me, to boys older, more developed, with larger equipment, was not a happy time. There was no escaping it: you had to go, you had to shower with the others, you had to compete with the others. I was a child, and they were men — no getting around it. They would tease me.
The worst may have been swimming. In junior high school, swimming lessons were in a pool, that was in the basement with windows along the walls next to the ceiling. It looked a lot like this. Classes were entirely in the nude. Nude swimming, for boys, was the thing at the time. Here’s a rather in-your-face web tumblr site about it Everyone would be lined up at the side of the pool, showing our stuff: and my stuff was invisible. The other guys were built, and proud of their builds, and showing off their stuff, and I had very little to show off. I wanted desperately to have, but it was not happening just then. So I felt humiliated.
Naturally, I admired the other boys. I thought their equipment was just fine. Beautiful! There are fewer things more beautiful than a 14-year-old boy — so fresh, so, well, ripe, bursting with youth or whatever that thing is that’s bursting to get out of them.. So, those boys, so near (irght here next to me!) and far (hands off, faggot!), both intimidated and attracted me.
May not seem such a difficult thing now; but at the age of 13, it’s humiliating.