My first glimpse of Andy Warhol made me begin to look at my life -- and my surroundings -- in a startling new way.
I spent no time complaining.
Individual and contextual influences on sex vary markedly from early through late adolescence.
The demands snowballed into riskier requests, and within months the gay Connecticut teen was trading sex for dinners out, designer sneakers and other luxuries.
A few months into my experiment in the astronomy of chasteness, my Sunday school teacher announced that, for the first time, I would join my fellow young men on a trip to the temple to perform baptisms for the dead, one of Mormonism's most sacred and, for better or worse, distinctive rituals.
Instead of sympathy, he says, his driver told him bluntly he had no way out — he was a prostitute.
My great-great-grandparents were among Utah's earliest Mormon pioneers.
It was a practical way for me to serve my mission, to share a bedroom with other young missionaries, without betraying my sin to my church, my family, my friends, my neighborhood, the whole Mormon world at large.