Dan's Tale

In 1981, I answered a classified ad in The Advocate offering "Corporal Punishment 'For Real' Stories" for $25. I sent a money order to a post office box in San Francisco and a couple of weeks later received a package of photocopies of newspaper clippings. About a month later I received the letter below. 
 

   
 
 
Dan
3851 Twenty-first Street
San Francisco, CA 94114
March 31, 1981
 
 

Jim,

Thanks for the $25. By now, you should have received the corporal punishment material. "For real" means that it is non-fiction (a lot of which exists). I have collected stuff through the years, as it interests me, and have my own experiences and those of other guys I have met to corroborate some of the statistics. If you are interested in receiving more material, let me know.

Spanking was common where I grew up in the Mid-West, and I can send you my own personal story, and those of other guys I knew who were beaten by their dads or at school or by others while growing up. Woodshed discipline was the rule rather than the exception in central Illinois in the fifties when I was a kid, and public school as well as church school paddling was common. Later I lived in both Wisconsin and Texas and attended public schools that permitted paddling.

In the small, German-settled town where I lived in Wisconsin, juveniles were strapped five licks on the bare buttocks if arrested and taken to the police station before being released to their dads who were told to "finish the job." I was beaten when I was 14 for shop-lifting by a corrections officer. An illustration hung at the front desk at the station. It showed a guy beating his son with a strap, and "parental responsibility" was written on the strap. The dad was beating the kid in the "woodshed," and the kid was howling. "Woodshed Discipline" was the title, and it was encouraged by the cops. "If this happened at home, you wouldn't be here," etc. Because of this policy, school paddling was often severe, and, with parental permission, they didn't have to count the number of licks they gave you with the board.

My own personal experiences might interest you and those of my brothers. I could write them up in general or refer to specific incidents in detail, whichever. Friends I grew up with were also beaten, and there were guys at school, like myself, who were called "repeaters" and were frequently physically punished by teachers and administrators. In Dallas, a discipline record was kept, and paddlings were given and became part of your report card.



My dad used the paddle on my brothers and me for any kind of infraction. We had to bend over for swats or licks--sometimes with our pants down, bareass and holding up our balls. We got these both as kids and teenagers until we left home. He was a big guy and if you didn't obey him, you didn't eat. It was as simple as that. I got the same kind of licks at school, and when they were reported dad gave me a whipping at home. His whippings were far worse. Those were not just 2 or 3 swats, but down in the basement or out in the garage and hurt like hell. This was woodshed treatment and resulting in a black and blue ass and large welts. He'd hold you down and wear out a board or strap on your ass.

I'll write some of these up in detail if you want and can send another $25. I got my first when I was six and the last when I was sixteen, and quite a few in between, especially from 14 to 16 when I knew my dad mainly as a disciplinarian.

Dan

(Enclosing a picture of myself)

 
 
 
 
 

I recently located a picture fitting Dan's description
of the one he saw in the police station:



I didn't take Dan up on the offer, but a few months after receiving his letter I had occasion to go to San Francisco on business. I contacted him in advance and arranged to get together with him for a discipline session. He proved to be a very hot guy with a nice, easy-going manner. We had a good play session and went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. In conversation, it turned out we had been at the same mid-western university at the same time; I wish we had met then. He also told me about having recently been paid by a guy in New York to fly there and take a severe paddling from him. His ass had only recently recovered from the bruises from that paddling.

A few years later Dan became famous throughout the United States as a long-term AIDS survivor and AIDS activist. He must have acquired the virus around the time I met him, perhaps during his trip to New York. Anti-retroviral medications then were not as effective as those available now. Dan died in 1990 at the age of 42. In an online search for information about him, I discovered he had once served as secretary to Tennessee Williams. He was well known in San Francisco's theatrical community.

  





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