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That Time Jesus Dinged Me for Jerking Off

Orin Hargraves
6 min readJul 15, 2019

Detail from a photo by Serge Melki — Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24320911

It happened when I was 13. I was not new to the game; already an old hand, in fact. I learned the basic technique from other boys in the mountain town where I grew up when I was six. We were at it all the time, singly, doubly, in small groups on the spur of the moment when the opportunity was there. They were huge fun.

But we moved away from that town and things were different now. I heard from a Catholic boy at school that it made the Virgin weep. We weren’t Catholic but Episcopalian. I was an acolyte. Father Whitefish looked at me really sternly sometimes and I wondered if he knew that I handled the chalice and the ciborium with the same hands that I used to . . . .

I’d also read things. Mom had a book, Eugenics and Sex Harmony, that she kept in the little bookshelf with a sliding door behind her bed — maybe so we wouldn’t read it. But once you looked through it and saw some of the pictures and subjects, you couldn’t not look through it. There was this picture; it sort of bothered me because along with spanking the monkey, I had puffed on cigarettes too:

This and all following illustrations from Eugenics and Sex Harmony by Herman Rubin, 1936. Public Domain Mark 1.0

And further on, I read that:

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