I had a dream in high school. The most effeminate boy in my class was trying to have sex with me. When I protested, he said it's all right, and he revealed that he had a vagina instead of a penis.

I didn't think much about the image of a man with a vagina. All the dream did was add more heft to the question that dogged me for decades--why do I feel so gay when I am attracted only to girls?

And it has taken until now for me to connect that image to the subject(s) of my current favorite magazine, Original Plumbing. Now that I have, it has brought back another memory whose persistence has confused me.

My fascination with female bodies preceded my erotic attraction to girls and, at an early age, I was a secret subscriber to Playboy under the nose of my father (who would likely have been proud, or at least relieved, had he found out). I was frustrated by the lack of genital explicitness in the pictorials, and I was positive there was something amazing between women's legs that they weren't letting us see. I didn't know what it looked like, but I had no reason to assume it wasn't an appendage something like my own. Locked away in my bedroom, I examined the glossy pages with a magnifier to discover the forbidden female sex organ. Then one day, I found it!

The model was hanging off the side of a pier, one leg straight, the other bent. Her pubic thatch was clearly visible, and hanging from it, set off by the dark wood of the piling, was her thing!

It was much lighter than the tanned skin of her hips, and it was wedge-shaped, tapering down to a couple of soft, nubby tentacles at the end. It was so clearly defined, I couldn't believe their censors had missed it! I had a tantalizing new shape to complete my mental image of the female form.

Many days, if not months, passed before I figured out that the appendage was in fact her foot, tucked up under her bent leg and stabilizing her as she hugged the piling. Not long after, Hustler came out and swept away the bulk of my misconceptions about female genitalia.

I'm pretty sure the dream about my effeminate school friend was several years after the Playboy episode, but it is awfully pretty to think about myself entering adolescence with the idea that gay boys have vaginas and girls have external genitalia. I now live in a world where any gender presentation could come with any permutation of genitalia and orientation. I like those odds!