What I Didn’t Understand About Jörg Until Much Later

One of my friends in ninth grade was Jörg. He sat two rows over in homeroom, wore lip gloss, shaved his armpits completely smooth, which nobody found particularly strange because half the boys at school had gone metrosexual the moment they heard David Beckham did it. He dated a girl from our year for about two months, then came out as gay. She mentioned afterward that he’d had no idea what to do with her—lost, completely, around female anatomy. I assumed inexperience. It was not inexperience.

Until then I hadn’t spent much time thinking about gay men and vaginas as a combination. I figured the only meaningful contact happened at birth and from there the two parties went their separate ways. The internet, naturally, disagrees.

The lesbian couple Bria and Chrissy run a YouTube channel that mixes comedy with low-stakes social experiment, and their signature piece is Gay Men Touch a Vagina for the First Time. You can reconstruct the whole thing from the title alone: enthusiastic gay guys coming face to face—or hand to face—with anatomy that is hairy, soft, and wet in ways that bear no resemblance to the tight back doors they’re used to. The reactions cover a spectrum from wide-eyed curiosity to barely-suppressed dry heaving, and the whole thing is genuinely funny rather than mean about it.

Mostly I watched it thinking about Jörg. Some things are easier to understand in retrospect.