TEENAGE SEX – THE NAKED TRUTH!

For all the heady freedoms that, supposedly, came cascading down through the decades following the swinging ‘60s, there remain in this country pockets of deep and abiding prurience concerning issues of sexuality.  Whilst every self-respecting soap and reality show will ensure the bold representation of same-sex relationships, many amongst their hardcore aficionados will continue to judge and censure when encountering them away from the TV screen.  By and large, theory seems to have been accommodated.  Campness - preferably extravagant to the point of crass stereotype - is simply one more comic gambit in the presenter’s behavioural vocabulary.  A British audience likes nothing more than clunky gags and sniggering puns that allude to his gender preferences, particularly if directed at some hapless contestant plucked from the front row.  Practice, however, remains beyond the pale and careers have, at best, faltered when media revelations about an individual’s actual sexual activity out there in the real world have broken.

Forty years ago, of course, one would have expected nothing else.  My secondary schooling ran …between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP, during which time, Philip Larkin tells us, more with cultural than evolutionary accuracy, sexual intercourse began.

In my case he was actually on the nail.  But what casually held and shamelessly expressed prejudices preceded my own journey towards more empirical enlightenment concerning the realities of sexuality.  I attended a mixed boarding and day school established and run by a Quaker couple, Kenneth and Frances Barnes, with very advanced views on teenage sexual development.  Eschewing the standard form whereby sexual awareness had the currency of witchcraft, only to be hinted at darkly through veiled references to beastliness and sensuality, the Barnes’ employed a tactic of direct confrontation.  We would gather somewhat formally of an evening in their well-appointed sitting room, with its views across the Yorkshire farmland that surrounded the school on all sides.  Then, once we were distributed across sofa, chairs and floor – the favoured few grouped around Kenneth’s armchair, arms clasped around knees somewhat in the manner of the painting The Boyhood of Raleigh - the session would begin.

It was basically a question and answer process, resembling more a philosophy tutorial than an open discussion. There was no censorship of topics; anything could be asked. But the expectation was that any answer provided would be accepted as incontrovertible fact. In this way we learned, first and foremost, that sexual yearnings are natural and that no shame should be felt when they occurred.

However (and here the fatal caveats began), sexual energy was volatile and thus dangerous and the inchoate and primitive yearnings to which all adolescents are prone must be kept in check.  And, of course, the physical expression of such yearnings was appropriate only for adults within a properly sanctified marriage.

As for same-sex relationships, the possibility simply never arose. For the Barnes’, homosexuality was deviant.  However, a compassionate and enlightened view was proposed: in the first instance, those afflicted needed guidance back towards the properly ordained orientation. If gentle but firm leadership didn’t work then clearly medical intervention might be necessary.

So all relationships were made subject to intense scrutiny by the Barnes’.  Physical contact was proscribed: no hand-holding, no ‘canoodling’. Instead, a vigorous, wholesome, hearty companionship was demanded.  If it was suspected that anything other than brisk walks across the fields, solemn discussion of current affairs or brow-furrowing sessions around the record player listening to classical music were going on, the boy and girl in question would be summoned to the sitting room for a grilling and a private lecture.

Had the Barnes’ touch been lighter – had they injected into their earnest, worthy dedication to the cause of authentic sexual enlightenment a little humour, a little personal circumspection - then maybe a small revolution in that corner of West Yorkshire might have anticipated by four or five years the cataclysm that reordered completely the socio-cultural landscape across the Western world.

But their minute observation of our behaviour was informed by a frequently articulated belief that the teenager was a hapless victim of his or her hormones.  Adolescence was seen by Kenneth and Frances as too frequently an ugly, inarticulate condition in which order had constantly to be wrested from chaos.  Metaphorical buckets of water needed to be positioned strategically so as to be available when we all went into rut.  Pop music was discouraged to the point of being banned. Kenneth lumped all of it – rock’n’roll, which was then in decline, the anodyne pap that trailed it, the Dixieland and cool school sounds that the French teacher shared with us – under the heading of jazz. It was jungle music whose sole purpose was to inflame the carnal appetites.  And the street fashions that were burgeoning at the time were viewed with palpable disgust. “You look like common prostitutes!” Frances exploded one dance night when a couple of girls turned up in skirts fashionably flounced up like lampshades under layers of stiffened petticoats.

And the consequence was, of course, that, in this febrile atmosphere we obliged readily and rose to the challenge.  Getting away with at least a morsel of the rank feast from which the Barnes’ tried to keep us became an obligation.  G. and I would discuss ceaselessly with all the zeal of brigands planning a skirmish who we would entice to our den in the school woods and how.  We were hazier about what would actually transpire once there, but G. made it his personal quest to acquaint himself intimately with brassiere fastening technology so that business might be swiftly initiated.  And night after night in the Summer Term expeditions would take us down the fire escape and onto the flat roof of the staff room so that we could slip through the window of the girls’ dorm that overlooked it. Once in there nothing of great consequence would ever take place.  Bodies might lie stiffly side-by-side in a 3' wide bed and a little tight-lipped oscular action might take place, but after an hour or two we would climb back up the fire escape in some relief and then spend the remainder of the night marking our performances out of ten.

All of this absorbing preoccupation was, of course, heterosexual. With the clarity of hindsight, I can now identify with some certainty two of our number as gay.  At the time nobody queried the nature of their friendship.  That they spent nearly all their time together, frequently shunning the company of others, didn’t strike us as odd. G. and I were pretty much inseparable and it never occurred to us that others might see in this anything to be questioned.  And the two friends joined in the tale-telling and played their part readily in the nocturnal expeditions. Had we even suspected that they might be more interested in each other than in five-out-of-ten (hand under sweater and onto outside of bra), we would have been horrified. For all the proliferation in showers and at bath time of ‘bum-chum’ and ‘arse-bandit’ terminology and the covet glances given to each other’s evolving equipment, the notion of relationship would have been unthinkable in its perversity. And such was our feverish consciousness of our own sexuality and its uncertain nature, focus and degree, it’s likely that we would have been systematic and merciless in our persecution.

One early Monday morning in winter, as we sat peeling potatoes in the unheated kitchen, A. - normally exploring an image spectrum somewhere between languid Oscar Wilde and noisy D.H. Lawrence - was unusually quiet.  The others briefly distracted, he leaned towards me and told me that, the afternoon before, he and his girlfriend had ‘crossed the threshold’ (his uncharacteristically coy phrase) in the snow down in the pine woods. Something in the sobriety of the announcement – a certain tone of wonder, maybe – convinced me that it was his first time.  From then on, A. took no further part in the fevered discussions of what we had done and to whom in the holidays and what we planned to achieve this term.

Not long after that, early in the spring and much to our mutual surprise and delight, my new girlfriend and I also crossed the threshold.  And I too lost interest in the after hours dorm talks, my energies now engaged in the dual preoccupations of coping with a fully-fledged relationship and ducking below the Barnes’ well-tuned radar.

For all the delightful intensity of first-time love, it was in many ways a difficult and draining relationship.  But all these many years later I surprise myself by being glad of it.  From the dynamic of constant discovery, from the exhilaration of all that emotion in process, I learned my first lessons about mutuality.

I was 16 at the time and my prejudices remained intact for some while to come.  I would have had real difficulty in projecting my own pleasures and pains into any perception of a same-sex relationship conducted by two of my peers, male or female. And even if some process of reflection arising from my voracious reading at the time had provoked a little enlightenment, the febrile atmosphere that prevailed at school, emanating from the Barnes’ obsessive and prescriptive concern for our psycho-sexual health would have stifled it.

But after a busy year in the world following graduation, it was my reading (notably James Baldwin’s Another Country) and the longer view available outside the hothouse of boarding school that provided the broader perspective. By the time I went to college at 19 and encountered for the first time open (if discreet) gay relationships within my social circle, some tolerance was in place and I accepted – not without a degree of prurient curiosity – their authenticity.

I would stop short of prescribing full sexual relationships for adolescents, gay or straight, within school as a crucial component in their emotional education! Whatever revolutionary changes ought to take place in curricular organisation, I don’t really see a place for timetabled intimacy.  But I know that what minute quantity of empirical wisdom I managed to acquire at that most callow of times drew some of its substance from my conducting the very kind of relationship that Kenneth and Frances Barnes worked so hard to stifle.  I would state again: there is no universal lesson to be extrapolated from my personal experience.  But the need for informed, compassionate, non-judgemental and wise perceptions on the part of the educators in our schools is clearly paramount. It’s sad that our journey towards it remains so slow.

An earlier version of this post appeared in 2006.

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TEENAGE SEX

Is sex better
than smoking with friends
under dripping trees?

Does it beat
late-night vodka
from the bottle?

And how does it compare
to a one-hand catch
just before the boundary?