Free Three Ex Presidents and James Franco by John Buchanan

told him he would do well to direct his efforts in the Midwest. The sperm count was going down in these states. All the pesticides they used on crops drained off the land into the water. Whatever cocktail of chemicals was being used seemed to inhibit sperm production in men. His eyes lit up, he smiled, he banged away on his keyboard again.
     
                  On leaving him I was frustrated about something unrelated to his sperm adventure. There was something in particular I'd wanted to talk to him about. With all of his theories about cognitive dissonance and shades of grey, I wanted to know his opinion of a plan of my own I had been hatching. I was in the process of seducing Eric.
     
     
    35. There is always something appealing about the jock. There are the obvious attractions. In Eric there was a man who was charismatic, popular, good looking, well built and confident.
     
                  But there were other reasons that appealed perhaps more to gay men then anyone else. His easy and sensitive physical familiarity with his friends, the back slapping, the hugging, the affectionate though manly touching. A jock's world, screaming at me that I'd never be a part of it.
     
                  There was the blatant manliness. An inability to adequately describe or deal with his feelings. This was expressing itself in his heavy drinking as he came to terms with his injury that was keeping him off the football team. Night after night he could be found down in the Station, emitting mating calls to the passing girls. Squeezing out the last life of being the most popular man on campus. His ambition seemed to have slipped away, and his girlfriend with it, but he refused to be outwardly upset.
     
                  In socio-biology they try to walk the line between the nature and nurture arguments when it comes to the gays. I t’ s a bit of both, so the theory goes. When we're kids we have a genetic predisposition to doing some things and not doing some other things. Boys play football and girls don't. And so the boys and girls start to hate each other. Boys are rough and dirty and girls are stupid, and so on.
     
                  Then puberty hits. All the boys who hate the girls suddenly start getting strange urges towards them and re-evaluate their opinions. Girls are no longer stupid. They're hot. The process is sometimes called the exotic becoming erotic. What we hate we grow to love when we hit sexual maturity.
     
                  Caught up in this are the gays. The boy who plays football because he thinks he has to, to conform, but secretly hates it and secretly hates his team mates for making him play. He is not genetically programmed to play the game. So he plays a game of deception, deceiving himself most of all, with his love of the sport. Then around 12 or 13 the changes happen. The boy on the football team, or the boy who refused to play football, finds his hatred for the football players ebb away. Suddenly football players aren't all that bad. Suddenly, in fact, they start to give the kid a very real sense of pleasure, and he doesn't know why.
     
                  All bullshit obviously. If we start finding people attractive because we hated them as kids, then the world would be full of people with a school teacher fetish. But I mention it to give some kind of sense of the feelings I was developing towards Eric. The explanation isn't one simply of animal attraction. He was the epitome of the boy I had hated as a child, then grew to love. In a manner I felt he had created me.  All my life had been a constant attempt to confront and conquer this man.
     
     
    36. I needed some sort of a plan of action.
     
                  There was no desire in Eric to be part of this scheme of which he was not aware, so I needed to invent some sort of incentive. Or at the very least make it seem like something minor which he could in good conscience