1959

I was 6 in a Buenos Aires kindergarten. In my class there were the then famous Diligenti quintuplets. Two were boys and three were girls. I distinctly remember being attracted to one of the girls and I often lifted her skirts.

I wonder what would happen in this century if a boy that age repeated my action. Would he be pilloried? He would probably be taken to a psychiatrist and or ejected from school.

When I was 8 and American girl, daughter of one of my mother’s friends came for a visit and asked me, “Do you want to see it?” I answered, “Yes,” and I did.

I was 9 when in the American school I was attending we read Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. It was then that I first experienced the concept of falling in love. I fell for Estella hard.

Because I was a nerd before the concept was invented, my relations with girls were subdued until I attended St. Edward’s High School in Austin Texas in 1958. It was in 1959, I was 17, that I became attracted to a short girl, called Judy Reyes who attended a Catholic school on the other side of Austin called St. Mary’s. She was a cheerleader. From my vantage point, playing the alto saxophone in the school band, we were right next to the cheerleaders during football games. I would wait for that most pleasant moment when Reyes would jump and I would see her white underwear. I felt no sense of guilt in wanting to do this.

I managed to dance a couple of times with her (I was a terrible dancer) and I remember that one of the songs was the theme song from the film A Summer Place. I even managed to go to a movie with her and even met her parents. After that she faded from my life as she had more aggressive boyfriends, one of them being my classmate Joe Davis.

About 6 years ago I located her. She was now living in San Antonio and she had a business selling cheer-leading equipment. The emails went back and forth until I mentioned the underwear. She told me she was born again and I never heard from her again.

A year after I married my Rosemary in 1968 I photographed her nude from the waist up. I was much too shy! Unlike Canadian men I posed her standing and not in a tub while pregnant. "Dear, let me take a picture of junior before he is born."

In this 21^st century, 4 years after my Rosemary died I am only interested in one woman. She is Rosemary. When I walk in my Kitsilano neighbourhood and I see a woman walking wearing a dress I often thank them for wearing one. They usually smile. I have a complete distaste for tight black yoga pants.

In my files I may have at least 60 women I photographed (many called me out of the blue and asked me for “different photographs”) wearing little or nothing. I soon found out and I now define pornography as something done in bad taste. I think my taste was impeccable.

In those TV red carpet events, I find the dresses worn by starlets, actresses and influencers as being in such bad taste that to me they are a new version of pornography that is worse than anything that I can readily find on my phone as videos.

With women now being on par with men (it was about time) why is it that men still dress conservatively?

I can only state here that what I saw as good taste and manners in the 20^th century is now gone.

Popular in Facebook is that revolving circular stage, with young women, that is an attraction in Germany. The stage, as it revolves shows you glimpses of underwear. I wonder where are this site’s awful “community standards”.

It was perhaps 10 years ago that I took a photograph in my studio in memory of Judy Reyes. I know that a print of it I cannot show it to anybody. Am I a fiend?