Giving Up My Gay Virginity

Peter Grandon sat moodily in his dorm room staring at his literature textbook and studying for finals. He had read the same passage four times and he still couldn’t tell what the paragraph meant. His mind was elsewhere.
He was in the middle of a crisis. In a week he was supposed to leave for home on winter break. Four weeks away from his state college—books, tests, the lousy food in the dining hall. The emphasis was on the word supposed, because it didn’t look like he was going anywhere. Not even for Christmas.
Peter was a freshman on a full-ride scholarship. This was partly due to his grades since he graduated in the upper eight percent of his high school class with a high GPA and partly because he ran cross-country in the fall and was a distance runner on the spring track team. The biggest reason for the scholarship, however, was because his family was poor and couldn’t afford to send him to the university.
The major challenge was that Peter’s southern California home was seven hours away from Sacramento where his college was located. His step-father had fallen off a tall ladder at work and injured his shoulder and had no employment to speak of at all right now. Peter couldn’t afford to spend money on traveling; even purchasing an inexpensive bus ticket was out of the question. There was simply no give in his paper-thin budget for a visit, not even to go home for the holidays. Just like the words in that old Christmas song that made him sniff and deny he was crying.
Peter knew the value of a dollar: he’d spent his high school years mowing countless lawns after school, packing boxes at the electronics store in town and lifeguarding during summer vacations. Even though he missed his...