Is jerking off gay
Helping a Brother Out
This send is part of Outward, Slate’s home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. Read more here.
In a September interview with GQ, Paul McCartney revealed that he and John Lennon once masturbated together when they were growing up in Liverpool. According to McCartney, they were with a group of their friends at John’s house: “The lights were out, and somebody started masturbating, so we all did.” The rock legend went on to qualify that “it wasn’t a big thing. … But it was good inoffensive fun. It didn’t injure anyone.”
Predictably, McCartney’s quote about the circle jerk slap the Twittersphere, comedians trotted out their best Beatles-themedmasturbationjokes, and the whole, uncomfortable matter seemed to move away within a limited days. But while everyone was laughing, there was one place where people took the revelation that two of the Beatles once beat off together very seriously: the website known as BateWorld.
BateWorld, now nine years old and 87,000 members strong, has been called “Facebook for masturbators.” With its red and black color scheme, it looks like a kind of Facebook After Dark. When you make a profile and subscribe on, you will be
No other way of saying it, really: Are you a man who masturbated with your friends as a teenager? Do you remember the feverish days of whacking it up and down in a sleeping bag a scant yards away from your best buddy? Do you remember, by any chance, staying up late and trying to find a Channel 5 movie saucy enough to get it up to?
If you did all this with a friend or two, you probably weren’t alone – as it were. In the heady puberty-and-constant-sleepovers era, many curious young men polished the banister in the company of their pals in the first hours of the morning – often with barely a word spoken about the deed before, during or after. This was largely what sleepovers were for, wasn’t it?
There’s a little bit of a taboo here. Because of its homoerotic connotations, talk about of the behaviour causes some men to bristle. It also seems enjoy isn’t generally something that friends continue to carry out past their A-Levels. But while wanking with your mates might not exactly be a rite of passage, it’s an extremely prevalent phenomenon in the sexual development of fresh men.
“It’s been a usual practice since the first stage of time,” says 40-year-old Jason Wimberly, a homosexual personal trainer
The Mormon church hates self-love.
Masturbation should be strictly banned because it can shift young people into homosexuals and criminals, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believes, according to a leaked guidebook issued to members.
The 1981 guidebook, released this week by the transparency team MormonLeaks, provides some insights into what many adolescent Mormons have been taught about sexual development and homosexuality over the years.
"Early masturbation experiences introduce the individual to sexual thoughts which may become practice forming and reinforcing to homosexual interests," the guidebook claims. "Self-masturbation is almost universal among those who engage in homosexual habit, and is a very difficult habit for most to overcome."
The Mormon church believes homosexuality is "of grave concern" because it may involve violent or criminal behavior and is as sinful as heterosexual adultery and fornication, the guidebook says. The publication also claims that homosexuality is a learned action influenced by unhealthy progress in early childhood, and says that absentee fathers and dominant mothers are among the main culprits for these developmental problems lead
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