The First Time
The first time I saw a penis it was in Mr. Dorfman’s Electronic Music class. It was 10th grade, in an overstuffed South Florida high school. I was fifteen and wanted to make music just like my many musical heroes at the times. I had gotten a Fender Stratocaster for my birthday and a four-track recorder. My boyfriend and I were talking about starting a band. He mostly fussed over the album art and we talked for hours about what the band name would be. I was in full-blown music obsession and wanted to do it for myself.
I didn’t quite know what to expect from a class called Electronic Music. It just sounded cool. Mr. Dorfman was earnest, diminutive and he made his affection for the music of Canadian band Rush known many times by presenting them as the apogee of musical production. We learned about different types of microphones, recording techniques, how to run live sound, stuff like that.
It may not surprise you to know the class was mostly filled with boys. Mia and I were the only girls. There were a few boys into metal, which they made readily apparent with their wearing of shirts by bands like Sepultura and Limp Bizkit. My crush Mark was in that class. He had a constant serious, dour look about him. I first noticed him because of his band t-shirts and the fact that he would read books alone in hallways of our labyrinthine high-school. While I had indeed a boyfriend, I pined away for Mark.
One of the major themes of my life is a love of music intersecting with crushes on boys. I have wondered if my feelings for most guys was mostly about how they liked the same music I did. Mark was likely one of those cases. He also loved Joy Division and I knew no one else like that at the time.
I often think my later love for boys with dense musical knowledge was perhaps about my desire to pry open their brains and spill out their knowledge for my benefit. This applies to many DJs and record store clerks over the years.
In the Electronic Music class, we had a part of the class where once a week, two students would pick a song of their choosing that they thought had interesting production and share the song with our classmates. I remember early on in the quarter Marcos picked “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus. It was my first time hearing the foundational text of goth music. I instantly LOVED it.
Later on in the school year, after buying some Bauhaus CDs for myself, I picked my own Bauhaus song to share — “Who Killed Mister Moonlight”. For the record, other songs I definitely remember picking to share with the class: PJ Harvey’s “A Perfect Day Elise” and The Doors “Horse Latitudes”. I wish I could remember the others, but alas, they have been lost to time.
A year later or so, I moved across the country with my family. I contacted Mark on AIM and managed to chat with him a few times. It was during one of those conversations that he said I only liked Bauhaus because he did.
The idea that I would only like music because of a boy felt devastating. Every part of me rebelled against this accusation. I shut the door on Mark in my heart forever. I was disgusted, but in a way I absorbed the idea and felt deep down a bit of a fraud. From there on out, I would assiduously try to learn as much as I could about music on my own. In interactions with male music fans over the years, there has always been an underlying fear that I would be found out as a fraud.
Back to the penis. I suppose it feels poetic that in a class full of boys, in the super male world of music production and in my first confrontation with the evaluation of who is a real music fan (unlike me, clearly, a fake!) that the only other girl in class snuck me a copy of Playgirl magazine one day. The first penis I saw left me vaguely grossed out and disappointed. It feels like a form of power knowing that in the depths of my first experiences with being a girl in a very male world, that I first saw a phallus in a silly, objectifying way.
Sure, I liked guys, but I have adopted a vampiric approach to them for the rest of my life. This early encounter with music fandom sexism my youth and so many others led to me both feeling a sense of disgust with men in general but also as objects to be used in more ways than one. In my own way, I wanted to turn the tables on the lessons I had learned as a young woman. But it is much like the question of nature or nurture — what came first, the love of music or the love of boys?
