I was actually raped for real when I was 20 by a brawny air force cadet in full uniform and a very rough demeanor, kind of young convict look - swarthy and masculine but more mean than sexy looking, not a good look in my book
An older friend / boss picked him up as a hustler off the street while we were leaving work. The rape happened at my boss/frIend’s apt, while the host had to be in a room isolated to take an urgent phone call for business leaving me behind in the living room alone with the hustler
The thug asked to have a shower, and to bring him some fresh towels. I did so, and before I knew it I was in a head lock, pushed against the wall, penetrated without spit or any other niceties. I didn’t have time or the presence of mind to understand what was exactly happening because I was choking in his super strong arm directly pressing on my carotid and literally strangling me. All I could think of was “I can’t breathe” while my mouth was gagged by his other hand. I felt a sharp pain in my anus, nothing like sex, as if somebody rammed me with a bottle or something.
He came in me, bareback of course, with a grunt and lasting barely one minute. Obviously he just used me as the naive twink that I was. I didn’t know what hit me. My friend kicked the thug out after I told him about what had just happened
I had been introduced to my future rapist as my older friend’s personal assistant, which I happened to be at the time, since my friend was a successful business man and I was somehow his protegee (it was a purely non sexual arrangement and to my friend’s credit he never harrassed me sexually, being a perfect gentleman and also admirably out as a gay man in a country were such honesty can cost you even your life)
This all happened in 1991. The Aids holocaust was raging, and I was living in a god-forsaken shit hole in the Middle East. Being gay there guaranteed social and professional ruin. To get tested for Hiv you had to know people as back then tests weren’t widely accessible, much less to a penniless 20yo intern who had been kicked out of home at age 17 by the violent cunt of a father I unfortunately had (he will never be dead enough for me)
Somehow, after a few weeks of wallowing in despair, l managed to muster the courage and got tested at the public hospital for std “special cases” (prostitutes, queers and junkies). The contempt of the doctors when I explained my predicament still singes my soul with excruciating shame
Yet, the indignity of being looked down by the hospital staff turned out to be a light jest in comparison to the agony of waiting for something like six months for the results to come back from the Pasteur Institute in Paris
During this excruciating wait I collapsed silently, unable to speak to anyone about the fear eating me alive, and thus swallowing a nervous breakdown in one gulp
I spent all my free time rehearshing my suicide, compulsively counting the steps I would have to take from my bed till the ledge of my sixth floor bedroom window from which I had decided to jump had the results been Hiv+ (miraculously, I turned out to be neg)
A few months before me being raped, I spoke for the last time to another good friend, this time one from childhood. Growing up together as classmates and besties, he was the first person that I ever knew was gay besides me.
With him I shared, as a platonic best friend but often partners in naughty teen fooling around, our difficult path to becoming adult gay men.
That last time I spoke to him was onthe phone, when he told me that he refused to see me “for a last time” before he died of Aids at age 19. He had been very ill for almost a tear, wasting away irreversibly
His last words to me were “even if you visit I cannot see you, I’ve gone blind and will soon will go deaf too, so let’s just say goodbye now over the phone while at least I can still hear you”
A rape in the forest of farewells