Cher Recalls Choosing to ‘Loan Out’ Her Virginity at 14 and Having ‘Revenge Sex’ with a Boy Who ‘Dismissed’ Her: ‘I Was So Angry’
Cher is opening up about losing her virginity as a teenager.
In her new memoir Cher: The Memoir, Part One, which was released on Tuesday, Nov. 19, the singer and actress recalls the circumstances that led to her first sexual experience, which she describes as “massively overrated.”
Cher recalls that she had a crush on a boy in her neighborhood and that they began dating when she was 14, writing that they would kiss in her bedroom.
Soon, however, the “Believe” singer noticed that the boy’s behavior changed when his friends were around. “[He] was sweet enough when we were alone, but as soon as his friends came around, he’d treat me like an embarrassing kid,” she details.
One day, when the boys were planning an outing to a restaurant, she says they laughed and mockingly asked her boyfriend if he was going to bring “that kid” — at which point he promptly “ditched” her.
“I was so hurt when he did that, I had revenge sex with him. I had never wanted to. Otherwise I would have done it one of the five hundred other times he asked,” Cher writes. “But I was so angry at being dismissed, I decided to, if not lose, loan out my virginity to him.”
“When what turned out to be a massively overrated experience came to an end, I asked him, ‘Is that it? Are we finished?’ Then I told him to go home and never come back,” she continues, adding, “I wanted him to feel just as dismissed as he’d made me feel.”
Cher notes that the boy later tried to make it up to her, but she never spoke to him again.
The Burlesque star also shares that she heard her mother’s voice ringing in her ears after the first time she had sex. “My mother warned me that the minute I lost my virginity she’d know because she’d see it in my eyes, so after the romp with the Italian, I ran to the mirror to check,” she writes.
“I half expected to see the word SEX flashing in fluorescent letters across my forehead, but I couldn’t spot anything different, and she didn’t either,” she adds.
While she kept the experience a secret from her mother, the pop icon was sure to report back to her girlfriends, whom she says talked nonstop at the time about “fooling around with boys” but never going to “fourth base.”
“I reported to my friends that the ‘thing’ they were constantly talking about was no big deal and that they should carry on kissing,” she recalls.
At another point in the book, Cher recounts kissing actor Warren Beatty when she was 15 while driving in Hollywood, Calif. She writes that she had borrowed her adoptive father’s car one day and was cut off by a convertible on Sunset Boulevard. The driver turned out to be Beatty — who was 25 at the time and had just starred in 1961’s Splendor in the Grass.
“Ten years older than me, Warren was so drop-dead gorgeous I had to steady myself as he asked my name,” Cher writes.
The singer said he ended up inviting her to his home for something to eat. After giving her a tour of his Trousdale Estates residence and serving her some cheese and crackers, he “then leaned in and kissed” her, she recalled, adding that she “kissed him back.”