AM I ? HOMOPHOBIC.....COULD I REALLY BE HOMOPHOBIC ?

      If you read my blog and know a little bit about me you might come to understand why I sometimes question this. In the ages between 13 til about 20. I was a commodity in as much the men whom would be using me for the meat between my legs I would use for drugs , clothes and the psychological side of being needed. I was about 16 when it caught onto me that these men did not want me ( Michael) , they wanted a piece of meat younger or better looking or whom would roll over and take it for the benefit of the "relationship". I remember being at Gordon Fowler's house one day after track practice my Sophomore year , I was 16 and he picked me up so I could go swimming , he gave me his sons' speedo and started to bring up the fact that we never really where having sex...I was  gobsmacked at the discussion and then he casually brought up the fact that I would not fuck...so what was all the other stuff prior to all this...I mean shit this was way before Lewinsky and the blue Gap dress. I had always been upfront with people about not letting anyone get control back there...I think the memory of briefs full of blood and rectal bleeding that went beyond a couple days would be enough to scare someone silly. It came to me then that this relationship was not all about what I thought it was...a 16 year old's warped possibility that a 47 year old man could love him and not his 16 year old cock and ass. Gordon told me there was someone who would be willing to trade spaces with me for all that he gave me...I saw a different side that day and looked at the past year and a half at the time he would take me to parties and introduce me to friends who would slip their numbers in a hundred dollar bill or a promise to go to dinner...listen it was Appleton , Wisconsin and the dinner spots included a Shakey's Pizza , a few places that had Cod nights...a Rustler steak house and such...I was never taken anywhere nicer than those places because the majority of these men where business men in the city and or married.
      In looking back at the treatment of myself and other teens by these gay men and really I can subject it to all men in general ...but it is the way youth is treated in and idolized in a community that has for decades been fighting other prejudices that it has really never been looked at. It can come across as a Norma Desmond like despair as middle aged men find themselves clinging onto their glory days of past while the youth of today gaily run amongst them without a care in the world while many of us have the battle scars of the Aids era , homophobia ( in a much broader sense pre-AIDS)...we forget about those young men whom are picked up and treated like nothing and left to fend for themselves while AIDS ravaged a community ( which mostly was portrayed by rich white gay men) ...the concept of the young being devoured by the men whom would promise to get them out of the slums of Harlem/Bronx all for some need to feed their mid life crisis...while I watched as young men , I'll rephrase that... boys!.. would lose their lives to AIDS at such an age as 15 , while men with connections could get treatment for them and their lovers...in the meantime their former tricks from the baths,bookstores and the piers where being kicked out of family homes, apartments and hospitals for lack of insurance ...it's these times that left such a bitter taste within that has resurfaced after reading a memoir on this period...so many are gone but it seems the privileged and successful are remembered while thousands are just a statistic...but in truth they are the ones whom truly laid their lives down for a new generation whom seem to forget the era of erasure of a generation of wonderful men.