I lost my virginity at age 19 with a stranger I met on the Internet.
He drove 45 minutes from another town to pick me up. I was in summer school at college. We spent two days at his place. His roommate, a girl, was away for the weekend. He drove me back to campus. He was about five years older than me. Looking back, I’m lucky he wasn’t unstable or dangerous.
He was patient with me. I was nervous and had never really even kissed a girl. He wanted to go “all the way” but I wasn’t comfortable with sticking my you-know-what in his you-know-where. Actually it was about three years before I did that… but I digress. There was nothing romantic about it, but he was “nice” if not emotionally distant.
As I wrote in a previous post, the Internet plays an integral role in the explosion of homosexual and other sexual deviances washing over our culture. Before online chat rooms, smartphone apps and craigslist existed, guys met other guys at shady bookstores, or gay bars, or bathhouses, or public restrooms, etc.
In the two years that followed, I had a handful of additional Internet hookups. I told myself I was bisexual, holding onto the hope that I’d find a girl, date, get married, have kids, and all the rest. I did have a friend in college who was “out.” My friends accepted him. But for me, coming out was unthinkable.
Who knows how different my life would be had I been born 20, 30, 40 years earlier. There wouldn’t have been an Internet to introduce me to other guys, or gay pornographic photos. The prevailing cultural forces would’ve pushed me towards dating and marriage. Who knows how different my life would be had I had a different childhood, more supportive and nurturing parents, a stronger male role model than my father, and so on.
Yet one can’t go through life lamenting all the “woulda / shoulda / coulda’s.” As a confessor once told me, I have a cross to bear, as did our Lord. It will never leave me. In this case, it’s not about the journey, it’s about the destination. (Heaven.)
The Four Marks 