I was 12 I think, and visiting my father in his apartment. I needed to use the toilet, and while sitting there, I found my father's collection of magazines.

No, not THOSE kinds of magazines!! My father is a classical musician, and most numerous in his collection was Opera News magazine.

As I was thumbing through an issue of Opera News, I found a short illustrated biography of an Italian Diva whose name now escapes me. She was beautiful...large wide-set dark eyes, lovely dark, expressive eyebrows, flawless complexion. In short, I was smitten. Such exotic beauty could do nothing but create a stirring in my adolescent loins. An erection was raised without a single touch.

While I had not experienced orgasm personally, five years earlier, my older brother (he was a homone-crazed 13 year old when I was 7) insisted on making me watch him masturbate. At the time, I thought it kind of silly, and did not grasp the significance of the act.

It goes without saying, that the erection raised by the sight of this beautiful singer caused me to remember what my brother had shown me. I found that the stroking movement he had used came quite naturally to me, and that the sensation was curiously pleasant. I also found that the more I stroked, the more I wanted to continue stroking....its own self fullfilling prophecy of sorts.

Anyway, it was not more than several minutes before I sensed a marked increase in my heart rate, I was beginning to perspire about my eyebrows, and an increasing tension in my lower calves and ankles. While curious, I did NOT let these developments cause me to discontinue the very pleasureable stroking I had begun.

In a moment of personally historic import, the lower half of my body convulsed in a series of intense waves of pleasureable muscular contractions. I most distinctly remember the feeling of my toes curling up as if fingers in a fist. My calf and thigh muscles, already strong from many miles of bicycle riding each week, were tighter than ever before.

I will never forget that moment, or fail to appreciate what the discovery of masturbation has meant to me.

Our bodies are wonderfully made, and I consider masturbation and sexuality to be a sacred, timeless gift.