I imagine there’s a fair amount of variation in the accuracy of these stories (especially about penis size), but the continuity and change over time was interesting to read. There was something very Foucauldian about the way men describing experiences in the first half of the twentieth century often suggested that, at least for their partners, getting off was getting off and didn’t make you gay even if you did it with another dude, whereas post-Stonewall teenage experimentation was off the table because it made you/meant that you were gay. There was a fair amount of underage—even extremely underage—content, almost but not invariably with agemates, though the extreme underage too decreased over time (perhaps for similar reasons as Americans got simultaneously more open and more concerned about sex; there’s only one non-American story). I also thought, as I read these, that slash writing vocabulary has increasingly converged with the way these writers talk about gay sex; as for content, there were a lot of blowjobs, a fair amount of many other activities, and a wide variety of tenderness, love, lust, confusion, disappointment, bliss, and simple physical release. ( )

Dan Choi, American infantry officer in the United States Army, Iraq war veteran and LGBT rights activist, has chosen to discuss Jack Hart’s “My First Time", on FiveBooks (http://five-books.com) as one of the top five on his subject - Don't Ask Don't Tell, saying that:

“…I thought this was going to be some kind of racy novel. But, actually it’s a collection of people talking about their first dating and sexual gay experiences. These people talk about all of the nervousness they have gone through, why it was such a big deal for them. And by and large it’s a story of their liberation because they can finally live their lives the way they want to, so I felt a real affinity with it…”

The full interview is available here: http://thebrowser.com/books/interviews/dont-ask-dont-tell-dan-choi ( )