The summer I turned sixteen, I decided I was tired of being that terrified spotty kid hiding in the houseplants. I had moved to a new city in Alsace and I was ready to reinvent myself. Every day, I would go running, and I went swimming as often as I physically could go to the pool multiple times a week.
I liked it there… It was a beautiful jugendstil building, full of color, cherub statues, dolphin fountains, and half-naked bodies in tiny French speedos. Soon enough, I wasn’t just going to train, but I would go to watch, and daydream of the wet bodies I was seeing. I started noticing things, like whispers in the hallways. There was this whole new language, spoken in hidden glances between men in the locker rooms. A look I would see in the corner of an eye while I would take my trunks off in the communal showers. A peek of a tongue, when I would turn around in the mirror to dry my hair. There was a tension here, as heavy as the steam on my breath that lingered in the showers.
And one day, it happened. It was one of those sweaty afternoons, where the grass outside was burnt yellow and clothes would to stick to skin, just asking to be taken off. Everything moved slowly. In the shower, that look while lathering up would stay just that much longer. My heartbeat would be just that much louder. And this guy with dark curly hair, in his blue speedo with matching eyes wouldn’t take them off me from accross the cement tiles.
He probably smelled the nervousness on me, how much I was not even just hesitating, but just not knowing what to do. Him being so blunt in the way he was approaching me was as terrifying as it was exciting to me. I rushed into my clothes, and as we stepped out in the hot afternoon air, he came up and we started talking. He lit a cigarette, and before I knew it, we were making out in his home, all clothes off, me feeling the hair on his legs and chest against my own.
So, in my mind, being gay will always be associated with the smell of chlorine and cigarettes, and being both terrified and turned on. And I will never say no to a hairy man in speedo.
