Is it you... or is it cold in here?

At the end of my junior year in high school, after a compelling assembly, I found out that I could volunteer for Ptown AIDS Project as a Teen to Teen Peer Educator. At the time it was a new program, and I was to be part of the first group that would be trained to teach fellow teens about HIV / AIDS awareness, prevention and protection.

This program was designed to have our group travel as teen educators to schools, churches, and at-risk groups sharing with them a peer prospective about the issues surrounding HIV / AIDS and their prevention. I never had sex in high school (ish- #68) yet I would stand before classrooms, congregations and youth centers with a “bag o’ treats” so to speak, and do a presentation.

This black bag held various dildos (the black one was indeed bigger than the white one), vibrators, condoms (of random colors, glow-in the dark, and flavors) dental dams, anal beads, and pretty much any sexual toy or protection one might be able to imagine. I never used all of the items the bag during one of these classes, but I had fun many-a-evening breaking out the bag and playing show and tell with the Project provided "pleasure chest" with my friends.

In the classes I would role-play in front of teens, their teachers, the counselors and sometimes their parents about how to get out of “uncomfortable situations” with boyfriends, instructed on the disease process that is HIV and the “how to’s” of using dental dams and putting on condoms… when never having been in a situation(ish) of needing to use them myself.

I specifically remember one event when we had gotten a new director to the Teen Program. He accompanied another Teen Peer Counselor and me to one of the presentations so he could get a better feel of what it was we did out “in the field”. This new director was a very portly and very “flamboyant” gay man.

While I stood in front of the class with condom and banana in hand beginning my step by step instruction of properly placing it on the penis (“squeeze the tip allowing for no air but room for the semen…”), Mr. Tubby interrupted me and with over dramatic hand gestures explained in GREAT detail how a condom should be placed on an uncircumcised penis, and the ramifications if done improperly.

Now I get that some men are uncircumcised… and I get that a high-risk youth camp should know the proper placement of a condom should one encounter such a “turtle-necked” partner… but the last thing that my 18-year-old-self (or 30-year-old, for that matter), as well as a room full of late-teens wanted to have burned into their memory was Mr. Tubby providing this information with hand gestures suggesting that perhaps it was he whom he was describing.

Urg.

I looked at him, trying to keep the throw-up in my mouth and turned out to a sea of saucer shaped eyes looking at me, pleading for help. I thanked Mr. Tubby for his interjection, and continued to roll the latex down “fully to the base” of the banana… I couldn’t take my eyes off of the banana throughout the short remainder of the manual presentation while I attempted to regain my thoughts and place in my prepared speech.



I was a volunteer for three years with the Teen Program, until I graduated turning twenty…too old to participate any longer. I remember things here and there about the entire experience, but hardly one has stuck with me as much as learning how to properly... turtle-neck love… and I still can’t eat bananas without thoughts of that day going through his my head.