Nothing big I think I was 13 , his name was Jean, a kiss on the cheek. A thousand years later he told my mom that he had been a bad husband so I was lucky that it did not end up well with us.

1st grade…Robert Potter.

I don’t think so… I can remember a “kissing fest” I had in about 3rd grade. There was a neighbor boy that all we did was lay in the grass near our house (tall wheat colored grass) and kiss all summer long. To this day i wonder about the reality of that summer. I remember that it was so fun and so exciting. but i also remember that we just kissed of course. no tongue, no hands anywhere else… and it felt like “forever”. so i wonder how long we really did lay there with our lips touching like that.

In the fourth grade, Gary Grow kissed me under the Big Tree behind the school. I never will forget how soft his little lips were. But it didn’t last. He dumped me for Cindy Adams once spring rolled around. I left the necklace he’d given me hanging on his bike, and cried all the way home. I was a funny kid.

PRACTICING I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade, a song for what we did on the floor of the basement of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought: That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and one was the boy and we paired off–––maybe 6 or 8 girls––and turned out the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our nightgowns or let straps drop, and, Now you be the boy: concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry. Susan’s basement was like a boat, with booths and portholes instead of windows. Cynthia’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun, plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats. We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs, outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost in someone’s hair…and we grew up and hardly mentioned who the first kiss really was––a girl like us, still sticky with the moisturizer we’d shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song for that thick silence in the dark, and the first thrill of unreluctant desire just before we made ourselves stop. MARIE HOWE

Yes I do as a matter of fact. It was in a car with a guy named “Tex” who was wearing a cowboy hat. The really weird thing about this story is that I am from Chicago and it was in Chicago.

I remember it well. But I was a much later bloomer than most of the others here. I was 16 and the proverbial sweet 16 and never been kissed. His name was David, and I remember being so nervous I giggled. It wasn’t very thrilling and I never kissed him again, although he tried. I also remember very vividly the first kiss with a college boyfriend. It was like electricity. I spent a lot of time kissing him. And I’ve never had kisses like that again.

I don’t remember. They all run together.

I absolutely remember—it was the start of a few years feeling like a total dufus loser. I was in the seventh grade, I think, somewhere around 1956. I had a major crush on Bob Peeler, who was a year or two older, and rode his bike around the neighborhood, a super cool guy who always had record albums under his arm and who had introduced me to Elvis Presley. He was a sort of pre-hood “bad boy” with slicked back blonde hair and pegged jeans…he finally stopped by my house one evening and we went out the back door to the little brick patio—no porch light out there, and I was so excited because I realized he wanted to kiss me…I was trembling, and just as he moved toward my face I freaked and went a little sideways and his kiss landed slightly askew and kind of missed my mouth. He stepped back and muttered in disgust, “I’ll come back when you have more experience.” I wailed, “How can I get more experience if I don’t HAVE any experience!!” That was that. A few years later I heard that he got a farm girl pregnant, and started a rock ‘n roll band. I’m not sure which came first.

Research is so important. Before David Reuben’s book Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask came out, there were other, less chatty ‘manuals’ to be found, if you knew where to look. My mother had one of these, on the top shelf of her closet, folded into her Tabu-scented cashmire sweaters which lay right next to her pellet gun. When everybody had left the house, which was hardly never, I’d go into her room, gingerly reach up and grab it. I’d hunker down on her bedroom floor with my feet on the wall (next to her stacks and stacks of Perry Mason novels that literally lined half the wall under her window) - and combed through that little paperback, cover-to-cover. I can’t recall the name of this book, and there’s no excuse for that. It was pretty good, covered most bases and left me way less vulnerable to playground disinformazia. The one thing they never explained was why people actually stop. I mean stop, when they’re having sex. I guess in the interests of social convention, they’d left out that crucial detail. Back then, the goal of these books was to inform you about sex, without necessarily encouraging you to partake. As if. Research under my belt, I took the project from there.