I have been getting frustrated with people who don’t know me making
assumptions about me that are completely unfounded. Furthermore,
there are things about me that, if you knew, you would probably have
a somewhat (at least) different opinion of me. What I detail below are
the myriad influences on my life.
I was born December 1, 1953 (not in New Hampshire), the oldest of
8 children. It is remarkable that the first four of us were born boy, girl,
boy, girl, and the second four were born girl, boy, girl, boy. So all of us
were born with members of the opposite sex approximately our own age.
The 8 siblings were born in the space of just under 12 years, from 1953 to 1965. This is important because it shows that members of both sexes had early influences over me, and because I learned the differences between boys and girls at an early age. Although the girls slept in one bedroom and the boys in another, things happened.
As the oldest I usually ended up babysitting my siblings when our parents went out for the night, once I was of age to be able to do that. That included feeding the babies, if needed, changing diapers, getting everyone to bed on time etc. In these early years, games of “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me years did infrequently take place.”
As a youngster in a liberal Catholic family I attended Catholic schools
from kindergarten to 12th grade. The last two years were my choice.
I was an altar boy, and a Knight of the Altar.
In ca. 1962 I joined Cub Scouts, completing all levels (at that time known as WeBeLoS – Wolf, Bear, Lion, Scout).
In ca. 1965 I joined the Boy Scouts (I had turned 11, minimum age for Boy Scouts in December 1964).
I’m not sure just when I became a Den Chief, a Boy Scout who kind of
shepherded a Cub Scout den through their paces. But I do know that I
was at an event of my den when Martin Luther King was assassinated, April 4, 1968. The city was put under martial law, with National Guard everywhere. I phoned my father to come pick me up, and he was detained at several spots on the way out, not for long, but no-one was supposed to be on the roads unless they were returning home.
I lived in a racially mixed city, with Blacks living on the South Side,
Hispanics on the East Side, and Whites on the West Side. I lived on the North Side, which was mixed, but was referred to by some who I worked with as “the Hood”. We had some unrest, but mostly it was okay. The NG stayed another day or two, but gradually we got back to normal.
I believe it was in 1968, when I was in 8th grade, that I participated in a classroom debate about the Vietnam War, and whether the US should have gone into Vietnam. I argued for the negative, and one of my best friends took the affirmative. 1968 under the Johnson Administreation saw the peak number of American troops in Vietnam. The military draft was in swing.
By 1970 I had left the Catholic Church, stopped serving mass, all at once My father was not pleased, but I was not punished. The priests spoke to me as well.
That was also the year that the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography came out, I obtained a copy of the final report, in paperback, from (I think) Barnes and Noble.
On May 4, 1970, the Kent State shootings took place. One of the students killed, Sandra Sheuer, was from my home town. It devastated all of us. I knew someone else going to Kent State, and contacgted her to see if she would be willing to come into one of my high school classes and talk about it. She was… but my high school shut it down rather violently, and forbade any discussion of it in the school
Also in 1970 the family moved from a suburb into the city. This was significant. As the oldest, I got my own room. While casual nudity was forbidden, and my mother especially restricted us, I began at least sleeping nude. That turned to being nude at other times (after school, while sitting at my desk in that room, etc.)
It also meant that I could get work as a lifeguard at the city pools.
The first two years I was a lifeguard I worked at what was basically an all-Black pool… I am white.
There had been tensions arising from MLK assassination, and those had not subsided much.
I came from a large family, but the extended family was even much larger. On my mother’s side of the family there were 26 first cousins. Only two of them were older than me, and they were both girls. That side of the family was close, so I often had contact with them all. The two that were older than me were able to guide me through those teen years, as they had already experienced some things that I was interested in. The older of the two introduced me to Wicca, and eventually I found the whole sphere of paganism.
Still in high school, I was part of the NFL (National Forensic League) debate team that was state champion in the 1971-1972 school year.
In December 1971 I had my first computer class, at the local university (I could walk there from home) as a continuing education class. We learned a teaching version of Fortran IV called WATFIV that printed an explanation of any errors we had made in coding. (Waterloo Fortran IV).
I graduated high school in 1972, and went straight to college (the same college I had become familiar with close to home). My first year of classes included three sequences of honors classes, Calculus, Chemistry, and English.
In 1972 the first porn film in wide distribution, Deep Throat, came out. It played at your neighborhood theater.
In 1973, October I believe, I joined the US Air Force. The draft had ended, and although I had protested both the draft and the Vietnam War, I was not willing to make a decision about the military per se until I had experienced it. That became a mantra of sorts, for the rest of my life… if you haven’t experienced something, you probably don’t know enough about it to speak about it.
After completing tech school (site development specialist) at Shepherd Air Force base in northern Texas I returned to Lackland as permanent party… Lackland was also the only AF basic training base.
So I spent my entire hitch in Texas. That was fine, I liked San Antonio (where Lackland was), the River Walk, the Institute of Texas Cultures, etc. While at Shepherd I experienced multiple tornadoes, including one not more than 100 yards from my barracks.
San Antonio was where I eventually saw Deep Throat,
While at Shepherd a few friends and I had a very long (4-day) weekend. When we got home from school we bought 2 ½ cases of beer and sat down and played cards, mostly poker. We finally went to bed, and when we got up the next morning there was half a case of beer left… I know I drank my share.
But I had another friend who was a teetotaler(sp) and I spent a lot more time with him. I didn’t touch another drop of alcohol for about 5 years.
During my stay back at Lackland a couple of friends and I wanted to go down to Mexico, so we did. Unbeknownst to me, the driver anticipated a trip to a Mexican border brothel. After spending the required amount on drinks ($30 per beer, and each of us had to buy two, just to get in), I was taken to a room. I didn’t have any money left by that time, or at least not enough to pay for anything else. The room was dirty, the bed in horrible shape… one of the other guys got a shot of penicillin when he got back to base just because. I didn’t do anything. But I was struck by the the looks on the faces of most of the women there. They indicated complete despair.
This was significant for me. Up until that time I had concentrated on a philosophy of saving lives. I became the neighborhood first aider, always called when someone needed help, but not a hospital.
Later I became an instructor for the Red Cross in Water Safety, Small Craft, and First Aid. The Small Craft certificate was for canoeing, but at one RC summer camp I also took a Sailing beginner class. To this day I prefer quiet boating, and don’t like motor boats at all. I also can row pretty well,
Sometime in the early 1970s there were a series of cases that opened up the legality of porn. It didn’t happen all at once, but in case after case the courts ruled that porn was protected by the free speech amendment, but that communities could control it at the local level, based on community standards.
In 1974 the first Hustler issue came out. After the first few issues they started advertising 8mm porn tapes. These advertisements included child porn right along with the rest of porn. No exception had actually been included in the court rulings for it, so it was just as legal as other types of porn.
Sometime in 1975 the pullout from Vietnam began. There was no draft, although the Selective Service system was still in place. The Air Force said they had to get rid of 10% of their force, and I raised my hand. I spent two years plus a little in the Air Force. It was not a great experience, for me. But I learned through the experience. I was honorably discharged in January of 1976.
For about 9 months I just worked, lived on my own, did what I wanted. I couldn’t afford a car, so I walked everywhere, or took a bus.
In September 1966 I returned to the university under the G.I. Education bill. I declared a double major (two year technical degrees both) in nursing and child care. In the course of those studies I took courses in human anatomy and phsyiology, and developmental psychology. (Side note: after raising 8 kids, my mother always joked that whe was going back to college and major in abnormal psychology)
The nursing turned out to be not quite what I had hoped, and my instructor in child care was teaching us that children should not be allowed to fantasize too much. That last ticked me off. Fantasizing is the only way to learn, i.e., if you cannot fantasize about the relationships between things, you will not be able to see those relationships.
All students had access to an early internet at this time. I was introduced to, especially, the Newsgroups, that is sites that use the NNTP protocol. The university heavily censored which newsgroups you could access.
So I left these two majors and embarked on a Combined Science major. I already had a lot of biology, chemistry, etc., so I took courses in geology, physics, astronomy, and computer science. I worked on some of the first desktop computers. In the operating systems class we wrote programs for the desktops in BASIC.
I joined several service organizations at the United States, but found them to be to restrictive. But I did meet my first wife through them.
In 1978 I was married to a woman with whom I had enjoyed a sexual relationship almost every day after classes. But it only lasted 7 months.
I had never been told anything about what to do if a marriage failed. Parents and ministers had just said “Make it last, there’s always a way to save a marriage”. There wasn’t.
I went into a deep depression, and took three bottles of sleeping pills.
After this, I started to think about the idea of saving lives, and what that meant. The experience in the brothel came to mind. I didn’t want to admit to myself that I would not save a life if I could. It took another 10-15 years to realize that what I really wanted to do was help people get beyond despair. My attempted suicide was out of despair… I couldn’t turn to those who had always been my models, they had done me no good at all. But they were just like the rest of society, especially the politicians. In many places at that time attempted suicide could be prosecuted as a crime.
Through a lot of other experiences I realized that what I was really interested in was lrelieving suffering.
I could see the suffering of those women in the brothel; I could see my own suffering in not knowing which way to turn when all the rules were useless. I could see the medical field trying to save lives with no thought to suffering. Some troubles you can just talk people through, or they just naturally get over the suffering, or medicine actually helps them. I attempted to try to discern where the greatest suffering might be present. I concluded that despair people feel when they see no way out of suffering. This happens in war, and it happens when people are in an abusive relationship. Spouses who feel trapped in an abusive relationship. Members of a family who endure abuse from a family member.
The problem becomes worst with the children. An adult can see suicide as a way out. Very young children cannot imagine suicide.
So in my view, I decided that chronic child abuse caused the worst suffering for the child… because they would despair of ever getting out of it.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened but it was in the late 1970s that I got my first private internet account. The local ISP was still censoring which newsgroups you could view, but not as badly as the university was.
I subscribed to the SCA newsgroups, eventually also reading the pagan, polyamory, and sex groups, including the BDSM groups, plus some of the science/math groups. I had access to the binaries groups, and subscribed to some of them. These included porn groups, which, at this time, still included child porn.
Around this time I was more exposed to homosexualitym BDSM, and polyamory. It was very open within the SCA. I also experienced camping with people from many European countries.
I think It was around 1979 that I went to my first Pennsic War. I was spend the next twenty years with the SCA, seeing 20 Pennsics… sometimes I didn’t spend the whole time at Pennsic, but managed to get over for at least a few days, or every day after work. Pennsic was held just a 45 minute drive from home, so sometimes I had to commute.
In 1980(?) I went to the 10th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. I was appalled. Everyone was there as part of a larger group… except one other person. When they lined people up for the march to the site, they placed everyone according to the group they were with. All these groups were political groups, and everyone seemed to be interested only in the group with which they were marching.
Only one other person, besides myself, were there to remember the slain students. We were placed at the end of the march, just the two of us, side-by-side. When we got to the campus, I went over to the spot where Sandra Sheuer was slain, and sat vigil the entire night.
Another slow process was the outlawing of child porn. Again, it had to do with whether local laws could control it. A case where someone was fined (some very low amount if I remember correctly) for selling child porn reached the US Supreme Court, and finally, in the early 80s, child porn was completely outlawed.
In 1983 I married again. In this case there was no prior sexual relationship. This marriage lasted 7 years.
In 1985(?) I was working at a porn shop in town, and I was to get off about 2 am, and get up early the next day for a camping trip to a wilderness. My wife had never done wilderness camping, and almost no hiking. She and I had gone out to eat before I went to work. As we entered the restaurant I looked up and saw a thunderhead, the top of which was green and pink. I mentione that I didn’t like the look of that at all. Shortly after I got to work a major tornado came through. It missed us, but tore through a neighboring state, killing 20 or so people. National Guard was again called out. The twister had also gone right through the places we were going to go camping.
This porn shop was mainly a gay cruisy place, almost right across the street from a gay/lesbian bar. So I had almost constant exposure to homosexuality during this time.
In 1987 I had graduated from college, and took a job at the Wastewater Treatment Plant. My job was to monitor industrial effluents to the local sewer system. We also tested water at all the overflows, and the river that ran through town. Eventually I was involved in planning the testing of runoff programs.
I also once took part online in testing new results apps, designed some forms for use of the city and wrote a program for saving results in Excel, which was new then.
In 1990 I was again divorced.
I can’t remember exactly when, but I believe it was in 1998 that the KKK was going to have a rally in a nearby town. With my mantra of experiencing things before talking about them, I attended. At the end of the rally the police (from about 30 local jurisdictions) tried to clear everyone as quickly as possible. One of the mounted cops (horse) got out of hand, and tried to run down a 12-year-old girl. She was terrified. I stepped between the cop and her, and prevented him from going any further. It was ten years before I could tell the whole story, and I’ve only told it twice, once on Freetalk Live and once in private. I know that the incident was filmed by perhaps one of the earliest shoulder mounted broadcast quality cameras. It was actually the beginning of my serious political activism.
(I did once have a bumper sticker that said “I’m an anarchist and I vote”, but that was more or less passive activism, not real activism).
After my second divorce I became very active in local and state pagan activities, as well as some national organizations. Drug use was fairly common, nudity was common, and on rare occasion sex was public. More often nude massages were given, and I don’t count these as sexual, although they were very sensual.
In 1999 I failed to go to Pennsic, and left the SCA altogether, over internal political differences.
In 2004 I left Wastewater Treatment, cashed in my retirement, and spent the next three years trying to figure out where I really wanted to live. Eventually the money ran out, of course, and I took a job at Petsmart, working directly with the animals, but also doing double duty as janitorial worker for almost a year.
I went to the first Keenevention.
During the last few decades, especially the last, kids have been investigated as producers of child porn when they sext each other. I do not include these things as child porn, even if the laws do.
In April 2014 I moved to NH, transferring my job to the Concord Petsmart. About a year-and-a half later I left to work for Walmart. Walmart had been my only job since then.
I am willing to answer any questions you might have, about myself. I will not answer any other questions the answer to which would include other people.