No one knows exactly where the virus originated. Some say it developed among African primates. Some say the government developed it to wipe out homosexuals - but if that is so the weapon sure backfired! Although I would like to be more scholarly in my approach to recording history, so little is known about the virus's origin that I have to begin my story on a personal level, because my personal history with it is all I can be sure of.

I came out in 1980. In June of that year I moved to San Francisco, and at the end of that month I also attended my first Gay Pride parade. (Maybe some of you remember the first time you stood among masses of bare-chested men, knowing that everyone of the thousands around you had the same sexual desires you had. For a few hours, for the first time in your life, you could stop feeling like a freak of nature. You were just like every other man in the crowd. You were with your own people. You were home. It can turn your sense of reality inside out.) That was also the summer the virus first touched my life.

Like everyone else I know that has been infected, it is hard for me to pinpoint the exact contact that infected me, because the effects of the virus are too slow at first, and I had sex with so many beautiful men that summer. I can only guess, but I have come to believe it was the first man I met at the gym.

I had started working out the summer before at my hometown Y. In three months I had gained about ten pounds. My arms had started to stretch my T-shirt sleeves, and my pants had gotten a little loose inside the waistband. That initial progress revved me up. Even though I was still no Hercules, I could turn a few heads when I walked by. It was all new to me, this attention for physical accomplishment. I had never been involved in sports when I was growing up. My father died with I was three. There weren't any adults around to play catch with. Grade school gym class was a Kafka-esque experience for me, participating in games where everyone else knew what to do and thought I was stupid for not knowing the rules. For once I had the admiration of other guys, and I liked it. During the winter my studies got in the way of the gym, but after graduation I was determined to get back to it.

My meeting with Frank was on my first visit to a gym in San Francisco. It was a gay gym, but I didn't know that at the time. It was just the gym closest to my apartment. I had just finished my workout. I had pulled off my lifting gloves and was getting ready to open my locker. As I set down my workout gloves, I sensed motion beside me. I turned and my eyes locked on the face of the most gorgeous man I had ever seen.

"This your locker?" he asked. His electric blue eyes fixed on mine. He was taller than me. I'm a little over six feet, but he was about 6' 4".

His voice seemed to release my eyes from his.

"Yes," I answered.

As my gaze dropped, it stopped abruptly on his astounding chest.

"Mine's right next to it." he said.

As he looked me over, I watched the front of his towel, which was wrapped modestly around his thin, tightly muscled waist, rise an inch. "Do you mind if I pull my things out?" he asked.

"No," I gulped, but he only meant the clothes in his locker. I stood back as he opened his padlock. The thick muscles of his triceps twitched as he spun the dial on his combination lock. He pulled the lock out and lifted the latch, then loosened his towel and let it fall at his feet.

As he removed his clothes from the locker and set them on the bench, he turned toward me. His dick was bobbing, half-hard in my direction, and even though I was on the other side of the bench, it was long enough to half bridge the distance between us.

"Excuse me," he said, acknowledging his erection. "I can't help but be a little extra expressive when I see someone I like."

My own dick easily stretched an inch inside my gym shorts at his comment, but I was too shy back then to say anything. I fumbled with my lock, missing the last number twice before I got it open. I took off my T-shirt and shrugged out of my trunks with my back to him. I hoped, for modesty's sake, that realizing we were standing in a public place would steal a little of the spring from my erection before I had to turn around and look at him again on my way to the shower.

Then I saw him sitting there on the bench, his thick rope-like dick almost overflowing his jockey shorts, his stone hard abs perfectly folded atop one another under a thin light wash of black fur. I saw his lats widening like the neck of a cobra from that tight, flat waist. I saw the deep cross striations on his pecs near the top of his sternum. I saw his huge, round shoulders. His biceps bulged like cantaloupes even with his arms relaxed at this side. My dick sprang straight up towards my navel.

His eyes went cross-eyed as he looked at it. He grinned. I grabbed my towel and went to hide in the steam room until it relaxed enough for me to stand in the shower without feeling too self conscious.

I cursed myself for running away from him. How many chances do you get to meet a god like him, even in San Francisco where there were men on every corner making friendly with you? And he was obviously interested in me too, although I couldn't fathom why.

Outside the gym, however I had my second chance. Over my shoulder as I began to walk up the street to my car I heard his deep baritone.

"I didn't get a chance to introduce myself."

I turned around.

A half a head above me he towered, and now that he was completely dressed I could finally focus my attention on his face. It was easily as distracting as his body had been. He had thick, limp, coal-black hair that curled ever so slightly at the tops of his ears and cocoa brown skin, moistened by shower steam. His tall, square jaw was darkened by dark beard stubble. When his thin lips parted, then widened into a grin, as I continued to stare, ignoring his question, they revealed perfect pearl-white teeth.

"I'm Frank," he said, as he offered his hand.

"Dick." I held it as he shook both our hands.

"Do you have dinner plans?" he asked.

If I had had any, I couldn't have remembered them then.

He had a motorcycle parked in the vacant lot next to the gym. I forgot my long-standing fear of riding them in the private thrill of clinging to his impossibly broad back while he all but ignored me as he navigated the traffic.

Inside the door of his apartment he shed his tautly stretched pullover in an instant and pulled my shirttails out of my pants. He worked his ham-like hands up my front to my pecs, and rubbed my nipples with his thick fingers. He leaned forward and we kissed. As his tongue entwined with mine, I heard a slow r-r-i-i-p and looked down. His dick had torn free of his jeans. Thicker than my wrist and longer than a foot, it rubbed against the bottom of my chest. He breathed heavily, uncontrollably in my ear as he pulled off my pants. As our lips locked again, he reached his hands under my bottom and lifted me up over the tip of his cock. His fingers pulled at my hole, spreading me as wide as he could.

As the bulbous head of his dick slide inside me I felt hotter than I had ever felt before in my life. My own cock was so hard now it was practically blue. When he passed my prostate I leaned back as far as his arms would allow and shot off like a rocket. After my third volley when I could see straight again, he smiled at me and said, "I must be making a good first impression."

He bit his lower lip and lowered me down further on his cock. My sphincter involuntarily clamped tight, and a blood rush flushed my face. I tightened my thighs around his rock hard waist and pushed myself down on him, hard. His eyes went glassy a moment, his jaw slackened, and his grip on my ass loosened as he sighed heavily. He regained his footing. He began to suck on my tongue, while holding me up with his hands and pulling himself in and out of my ass. I hadn't softened a bit after cumming, and each thrust of his dick was sending jolts of erotic electricity through my groin. After a few minutes we both began to lose focus. All that we felt was the exquisite pleasure of silky moist hot skin on skin. We hung suspended in an erotic trance at the very edge of release reluctant to fall over. Then he broke our kiss, pulled up high enough to release all but the tip of him from my ass, and engulfed my prick in his hot mouth. I convulsed and fired cum in his throat. With my dick still shooting, he plunged his dick to the hilt and screamed as he unloaded inside me. After the first shot, he dropped slowly to his knees and laid me on my back as he emptied himself inside me for several more minutes.

We were both sweaty and weak when we untangled. I lowered my legs and rubbed my thigh against his enormous dick, which was still hard, although slick with what must have been a quart of his cum.

"That was incredible," he panted. "I tell you, I've been so horny lately I haven't been able to work. All I've done is eat, sleep, go to the gym and fuck."

"Yeah, there's a lot of that going around," I said with a grin. It was San Francisco in 1980, after all. Lots of people moved here, fell into the scene and dropped out of a regular life.

And then he said something I thought was strange at the time, but began to make sense in the months that followed. "Well if there isn't, there sure will be." •