Sex.

Welcome to the famed Weekend Gene Pool, in which we ask personal questions and invite your answers, confessions, and observations, a feature for which we expect to win Substack’s first Pulitzer Prize and deliver peace in the Middle East. Sometimes, we raise important issues of global importance or social significance, and sometimes we’re just obnoxiously nosy, such as today.

We begin, as always with a Gene Pool Gene Poll.

As it happens, that’s also our question for the day: At what age, and under what circumstances, did you first discover your likely sexual orientation? (Feel free to elaborate if there were two separate discoveries, at different times, with possibly different results.) The more details of all these disclosures, the better. Also, the funnier the better, as always. But poignant is good, too. And, as always, you will remain totally anonymous.

Please send your disclosures to our nosy orange button.

When I was about four, I had a recurring dream, night after night. In it, I was myself, but the size of a mouse, and I kept crawling around on the lap of a normal-sized, woman. Or maybe she was a giantess and I was normal-sized. It wasn’t entirely clear; I knew nothing at the time about the fine art of hierarchical proportion, or distortion of scale.

There was nothing overtly sexual about the dream — I didn’t know what sex was, the woman was fully clothed, and I wasn’t doing anything except crawling around. She didn’t ever seem to notice me, or interact with me, which is, in retrospect, intriguing and possibly … self-revealing. I do remember liking this dream for reasons I could not have articulated, but I had a naive and infantile sense of what it meant — that I’d probably get married to a tall lady, or something. So my answer would be “four or under.”

My feelings about this evolved to a better understanding when I was seven, and I wrote about it in this 7,000-word story, which explains who I am better than anything else I have ever written. It’s about taking out for a date, 40 years later, the girl I secretly loved in second grade. I am a damaged guy, but interestingly damaged.

I had a friend who discovered his sexual orientation in a somewhat less innocent way. He was about nine, as I recall, and was staying at a friend’s house, and when used the bathroom, he saw a laundry bag hanging on the inside doorknob. He looked in and saw, at the top of a pile, a pair of lady’s underpants. His friend had only a brother, so, like Encyclopedia Brown, he skillfully deduced that these belonged to his friend’s ma.

He was transfixed. Obsessed. Just stood there for a while trying to figure out what to …. do. He wanted to, uh, examine them. But he was a nice, polite kid and he knew that it would be naughty, and so after agonizing for a while, he left the panties in place, used the bathroom and left. But he kept going back to the bathroom, every half hour or so — just standing there transfixed, confused, torn by decency and curiosity and desire. Each time, he chickened out and left, but made sure to flush the empty toilet every time. I’m sure his hosts thought the poor kid had diarrhea. The kid, however was old enough to kinda know what it actually meant.

I don’t know any personal stories about gay people’s sexual realization moments, but would be grateful for some.

Again, send your memories here.

Also, if you are a mind to it, please send your monies here.

Also, why do we say “a pair” of underpants? And why is it “pants” not “pant”?

See you on Tuesday.