Eye-Candy

1982-86—Stanford University (Palo Alto), California

After graduation from the police academy, I was hired by the Stanford University Department of Public Safety. As I went through my field training, the period in which a rookie is trained by a seasoned officer, one of the first things I noticed about the student body was the overwhelming number of attractive males. They outnumbered women 3:1, and were mostly white. While the other officers complained of this, I was pleased to see so many guys out and about while I was on patrol. The collegiate eye-candy kept me entertained on quieter days.

When I started working at Stanford, it was May and the weather was warm. The afternoon temperatures begged many a young man to shed his shirt and don a pair of shorts. They were everywhere: on the soccer fields, basketball courts, tennis courts, at the pool (swim suits instead of shorts), the track, around the quad, in front yards, the fraternity houses and on and on. I couldn’t get enough boy-watching on any given shift.

I couldn’t explain it, but it was like an itch. I was nearly obsessed with befriending as many of these hotties as possible. Had I known I was gay, that there were other men like me, I wouldn’t have been so obsessed because these guys were 90% straight…maybe more. If I had known, I would have gone to San Francisco (30 minutes away) where the odds were a little more in my favor. But I didn’t, so I just kept trying to scratch an itch I couldn’t find.

I loitered my patrol around the dorms, fraternities and intramural fields on the watch for the errant bicyclist, motorcycle or car to run a stop sign or commit some minor traffic violation. If it was serious, I’d stop the person and take appropriate action. If the violation was really minor, and if the guy was cute (not a conscious motivation) I would stop him and give a verbal warning as I tried to initiate a friendly conversation. Girls rarely got stopped. I did make some friends this way and to this day a few still are, but none are gay (that I know of).