It was a hot summer's evening in South Kensington and I was sitting in my room in our Catholic student hostel. I'd just broken up with my girlfriend and was feeling alone and depressed. The thumping heartbeat of a disco came from the basement. There was one every week. The music got on my nerves at times like this. There are two things I can do, I thought. I can sit here and be miserable, or I can go down there, get pissed and maybe hit it off with a chick. I chose the latter.
Down in the basement it was dark and stuffy. The air was thick with the smells of beer, cigarette smoke, sweat and human passion. Beneath the flash of disco lights a mass of heads bobbed up and down in rhythm with the crashing beat. I was too shy and depressed just to plunge into the middle of them so I stood by the bar and downed several beers, one after the other, eyeing up the girls. This was the age of the miniskirt. There were more girls than boys, and many were dancing barefoot with each other, their feet intersecting, their toes twisting on the floor, their long, graceful legs bending and thrusting forward, sometimes between the legs of their partners. My cock swelled. Some were dancing alone. I caught the eye of one of them, a cool, slender leggy blonde wearing a tight, silvery miniskirt. I went over to her and asked her to dance with me.
So there we were, bobbing away to the tune of The Police's 'Message in a Bottle'. We moved closer to each other. I placed my hands on her hips then began running them back over her buttocks.
"Don't do that," she said.
"Why not?" I asked.
"I'm a nun," she replied, smiling sweetly.
"A WHAT?"
"A nun." She drew out a cross from between her tits to prove it.
So there you have it, I thought. This was the Seventies, of course, the age of the 'liberated' Church. The dance ended. I thanked her and went to get another pint. I downed it in one. I just had to get out of there; I'd never had any luck picking up girls at discos anyway. There was always some silly answer as to 'why not?', although I'll never forget this last one.
Outside on the street it was cooler - at least in comparison with the basement. A few people stood around, taking a break. I lit a cigarette. There was a guy there, a dark-skinned Asian type with close-cropped black hair, dressed in tight blue jeans and a brown leather jacket. I knew him by sight. I'd often seen him around the hostel, though I guessed he didn't live there. He was about my height, slim and very good-looking. I caught his eye and went over to him.
"So how's the disco?" he asked.
"Boring."
"Let's go round to my place and have a beer."
"Sure."
Anything to fill the vacuum.
He lived just round the corner, in a small bedsit at the very top of one of those large typical terraced houses in South Ken. The room was hot, darkly-lit and smelt faintly of incense. There was a futon on the floor, and beside it, an old, battered leather sofa. He went to a small kitchen alcove and pulled a six-pack out of the fridge.
"Want some dope?" he asked.
"OK."
We sat on the sofa and guzzled away, sharing a joint and talking. Our studies, religion, Life, the Universe and Everything. His name was Chad. He was an engineering student at IC. I was studying music at the RCM.
We got more excited and giggly, and our talk inevitably drifted to girls. It seemed he wasn't having any more luck in this area than I was. We edged closer to each other.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" I asked.
"There was this girl. She shagged me once, then disappeared."
He'd been very upset. He'd built a small altar to Krishna, but had smashed it in a rage. It was hardly the Krishna's fault, I suggested. It was just that the girls were so snooty.
"Never run after a girl, or a bus," I told him. "There's always another one coming round the corner."
He laughed when I told him the story of the swinging nun. Girls were a bad lot, we decided. Male friendship was so much better. Men understood one other better. Men knew how to love each other better. We were perched on the edge of our chairs now, our faces so close we could feel each others' breath.
There was an awkward silence, a sudden tension in the air. Chad looked away and stared at the floor. Then he glanced up at me shyly.
"Do you want to try this homosexual thing?" he blurted out.
My heart thumped. I felt a hot flush at the back of my neck and a quite unexpected surge of lust. I'd had crushes on a couple of boys at my single-sex school, but I never thought I'd go so far as actually doing anything with another guy. I'm not gay! But then why not try it? Man-to-man body contact? My cock began to uncurl and thicken at the thought.
"All right," I croaked.
"Let's take our clothes off then."
My heart pounded away as we stood up and stripped, casually tossing our clothes together in a heap onto the sofa. First jackets, then shirts, revealing hairy chests and stomachs. Off came shoes, then jeans. We peeled off our socks and threw them on top of our shoes. Clad only in our briefs, we paused and glanced at each other, grinning nervously. My eyes ran over his broad shoulders, his chest and stomach, his slender waist, his almost feminine hips, his thighs and legs, then on down to the floor, where two pairs of long, bony bare male feet stood planted apart facing each other, toes digging into the carpet. Would those feet soon be touching during homosexual contact? I was almost shocked at how aroused I was, and I could see he was excited too. There was a telltale bulge beneath each pair of briefs.
This was the moment. At this point we were still just two friends relaxing together in a hot room, wearing just our briefs, right? But once they came off - well, that was something else. We'd have crossed the Rubicon. Who was going to get naked first?
"Both together on the count of three." I suggested. " Ready? One - two - three!"
Whoosh! Down and off they came. We tossed them on top of the heap of clothes and stood with our legs apart, two men face to face, naked together.
Our eyes ran over each others' bodies. I'd been naked with other boys in the showers at school of course, but never alone and in private like this. I'd never felt so totally nude, so exposed, with my bare, white body facing the bare, brown, hairy body of another man; a man with whom I was about to exchange body fluids. Two thick, uncircumcised cocks, brown and white, jutted out like flagpoles from bushes of pubic hair, their moist tips just inches apart. I caught odours of pheromones and sweat, plus a faint whiff of freshly-bared feet.
