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It’s one of those games that everyone has played, but no one really knows where it started. I guess there is an equivalent in other countries… though I can’t say for sure. Just in case, let me define the game for you:
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Truth or Dare
- a game for two or more players in which each person takes a turn challenging the others to either answer any question the challenger asks TRUTHFULLY or perform a task of the challenger’s choosing as a ‘punishment’ for not answering the question.
- Ages 9 - 17
Of course, there is another purpose for this game:
- a game for two or more players in which it quickly becomes a game of “do something to me that you want me to do to you.”
Such was the case on my 13th birthday.
Randy Stokes was the coolest guy I knew. We met in the fifth grade when I apparently, having a bad day, walked up to him in the lunch line and punched him squarely in the stomach. I guess I was jealous of just how cool he was. We were virtually inseperable after that.
Before that fateful night, we had played a game of TOD during a backyard campout a couple years earlier. It involved tasks like naked jumping jacks, handstands, and somersaults. I recall one particular Dare that he made me perform… standing on the top of our tool shed with a trouble light in my hand like a 10 year old Statue of Liberty singing “God Bless America.”
Yeah, Randy was cool like that.
Nothing happened that night, well, a couple of mosquitos got fresh with me, but that was it.
I’m transported back to my first night as a teenager, lying in my gigantic waterbed completely naked and scared to death everytime I hear Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up,” Ton Loc’s “Wild Thing,” or the song that I consider my offical virginity loss song, “Hold on to the Nights” by Richard Marx.
I know, you want gory details, but believe me, the fumbling, scared, excited groping of a 13 and 14 year old who have NO idea what they are doing really can’t adequately be described in a manner as funny and horrifying and… liberating as it was.
I learned a very important lesson following that night; sex changes things. Randy and I started drifting apart, he started avoiding me at school. We would only get together on weekends when no other friends were around. We messed around a few more times, not always under the guise of the ‘game.’ Though “Wanna play Truth or Dare” became our code for “hey, how about a blowjob?”
I moved away to Kansas City the following year, and Randy got into some trouble with the law and drugs. A pretty commonplace problem in the small town of Joplin, MO. I helped bail him out and the last time I talked to him, he was married to a great girl named Lisa, and had a son. He was living in Witchita.
I do believe that homosexuality is genetic… something we have no choice over… and I also truly believe that everyone falls somewhere toward the middle of the Kinsey Scale. Randy’s not gay. I am. Randy didn’t make me gay anymore than I made him straight. It’s just the way things go.
But Randy, if you’re out there somewhere reading this post… email me. I dare you.
