Connor’s sex education started at the age of twelve. He was taking maturation at a leisurely pace. With four sisters ahead of him, this was uncharted territory. His parents felt no need to rush things along either. Still, he couldn’t do anything about turning twelve. Twelve was the age at which well-bred Mormon boys became deacons.
Before becoming a deacon, he had to have an interview with Bishop Hodgson, a friendly though timid man about the same age as his father. Bishop Hodgson greeted him with a big smile. “How’re you doing, Connor?” He shook Connor’s hand, patted him on the back.
“Okay,” Connor said, with a shrug.
Everything went along smoothly until Bishop Hodgson asked Connor if he had a problem with masturbation. Except what he actually said was, “So, Connor, you, um, you got a problem, um, with, um, self-abuse?”
Connor had no idea what the nice man was talking about. It sounded like something painful you did to your thumb with a hammer. He hesitated. The bishop grew distinctly discomfited. The way he asked the question, Connor figured it was something he wasn’t supposed to do, so he said he didn’t.
The bishop’s relief was palpable.
On the other hand, Connor’s deacons quorum advisor took to the task of moral education with a breathtaking enthusiasm. Evan Bushnell saw the enemy and the enemy had breasts, an attitude that made priesthood lessons thoroughly engrossing in a gross sort of way.
Example: The high school basketball team is going to the state championships, and they’re staying at this motel. The coach leaves to take care of some business. So they’re all alone. And the cheerleaders drop by. THE CHEERLEADERS! They’re GIRLS! That means DANGER! But do these poor slobs recognize the wolves in sheep’s clothing? NO. Just a bunch of heathen gentiles with their hormones on overdrive.
He had a half-dozen deacons on the edges of their seats. Well? well? THEY ALL HAD SEX!
No kidding!
EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM!
That’s incredible!
BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I’M TELLING YOU
RIGHT NOW!
Would it have made a difference?
THIS IS A WARNING!
Warnings usually came like that in priesthood, fast balls to the chest.
Oof! Knocked the breath right out of him. The moral of the story had to. Because once he started thinking about the details, he came up with questions like: What high school basketball team around here ever made it to the state championships?
Despite Brother Bushnell’s apocalyptic stories, Connor soon learned that women were unlikely to throw themselves at him unless he first exerted a significant effort in their particular direction. Disappointments in life came like that—in the absence of high drama.
At any rate, nobody cared that Connor was Mormon either, except for the one day after history class when all the guys decided that maybe polygamy wasn’t such a bad idea after all. “Hey, Connor,” they asked, “how many moms have you got?”
“Just one,” he told them. “But my great-great-grandfather had three.” His ancestral past left them in awe.
Scotia-Glenville High was a more conservative place than Provo, Utah.
Connor was pretty sure they were still using textbooks from the late 1950s in the Health Education courses. His first sex education class took place in the fifth grade, and everybody had to bring in signed permission slips to view what turned out to be a video about The Facts of Life that was less explicit and entirely less interesting than what he could observe on any given episode of Nature or National Geographic.
The chief topic of conversation among the guys was that the girls got to attend a separate assembly all by themselves. An affront to equality and fair play. They all filed back to their classrooms. The school nurse came in and stood next to Mrs. Van Duren, their homeroom teacher, and asked if they had any questions. After a long, pregnant pause, Jimmy Wilson raised his hand. “How does the sperm get to the egg in the first place?”
Half the class burst into a fit of giggles. The other half stared at him. Was he being serious? Did he really not know? Or was this a joke? If it was a joke, it was a good joke. Should they laugh at Jimmy or with Jimmy? It was the day’s most serious quandary.
When the nurse was finished she took Jimmy with her. Jimmy returned twenty minutes later looking a bit ashen. After the class finally returned its attention to Mrs. Van Duren, he leaned toward Connor, in the next row over, and whispered, “What she told me—she was just kidding, right?”
Connor was happy to discover that when it came to sex, he wasn’t the dumbest kid in the class, after all.
Connor learned about the birds and the bees the novel way—by reading novels. Starting with the first half of Hawaii, he worked onward and downward from there, all the way to Anaïs Nin. He never brought Anaïs Nin home from the library. There were times when it was better not to test his parents’ respect for the First Amendment.
Yes, his parents were supposed to be the ones leading him by the hand. But Connor was glad they didn’t try very hard. Bishop Hodgson was bad enough. His parents no doubt figured that if they could count on common sense and upbringing to impart the principles of good grammar and proper etiquette, they could count on parental osmosis to impart other lessons as well.
They counted pretty much right.
Not that he hadn’t been tempted by the dark side. There were the Playboy magazines his best friend Billy Bragg smuggled out of his granddad’s room. Perhaps the quality of smut in upstate New York was wanting back then. Or Billy’s granddad had dated tastes. But Connor couldn’t remember coming across anything half as good as what was in his mother’s art books, except that the Playboy nudes were markedly less corpulent. As far as he was concerned, Billy Bragg’s dirty magazines were another big coming-of-age nonevent.
Leaving home didn’t change things much, even as a freshman in the BYU dorms, where sin lieth not only at the door but walked in and introduced itself. Or arrived courtesy of the United States Postal Service.
Bart Lowe, who lived down the hall, spent spring break in Hawaii with his father (attending a Nu Skin convention). When he wasn’t surfing, Bart killed time catching rays on the beach and mailing postcards (in tightly sealed envelopes) of unclothed Polynesian lasses back to Provo, where the snowpack was still heavy on the mountaintops.
Connor got ratted out. On his way to class, the dorm mother stopped him and gave him a “you ought to know better” lecture. That was one of the dangers of living in BYU on-campus housing: informants everywhere.
Admittedly, Bart was leading them astray with pretty tame material. Bart might have been a gentile, but he was a conscientious gentile. He had taste, in other words. Howie Bradshaw had not so much.
Howie was one of three guys Connor shared an apartment with during his sophomore and junior years. Howie worked on the janitorial crew, and said that when the crew was on the dorm rotation, they’d find a couple of Penthouse magazines in the trash every Monday morning before room inspections. The dorms had apparently slid further downhill since Connor lived there.
Trevor Phillips had just gotten engaged, and Howie thought he knew how to warm the waters a bit. So he snagged a Penthouse when his supervisor wasn’t looking and used half a roll of transparent packing tape to fasten the centerfold to the inside of Trevor’s closet door while he was at class.
“Got you a wedding present,” Howie said. “It’s in your closet.” Trevor thought that was the funniest prank Howie had pulled in ages.
Once his fiancée found out, she wanted to see it too. Howie told his girlfriend and she wanted to see it. The only person who didn’t take a gander was Connor’s roomie, Roger Hollingsworth. Roger wasn’t going to take a step inside Howie’s room while that thing was in view. They all respected Roger’s wishes. Roger was a clean-living, clean-thinking Mormon boy if there ever was one.
The Roger Hollingsworths of this world made the Brother Bushnells of this world very happy.
Of course, Roger hadn’t become a Mormon until he was twenty-three, and had gotten his riotous living over with during his undergraduate days at the University of North Dakota. Besides alcohol and sex, he observed, there hadn’t been that much else to do all winter. “When I joined the Church,” he told Connor, “chastity was the tough one.”
Roger got married at the end of Winter semester. Roger was twentysix, long-overdue by BYU standards, and well on his way to an MBA. He was eligible as hell. As the Apostle Paul said, better to marry than to burn.
Pretty much the prevailing attitude at BYU. Provo had more married students than any other university town in the known universe. Utah Valley Regional Medical Center boasted the busiest maternity ward in the country. Connor did not think he would be contributing to these statistics anytime soon.
Because for some people, chastity wasn’t the tough one, after all.