When he was twenty or twenty-one he first had sex with another man. His partner was a fraternity brother at the University of Washington. After a night out drinking beer, they came home, and collapsed in bed together. "We kept our clothes on," Kopay wrote in his autobiography, "but I had an orgasm just from rubbing against Ted and holding him." They repeated the experience numerous times while they were in college together, eventually having intercourse and oral sex.