Posts - April 2001

New York

Riding the D train back from Brooklyn to Manhattan at night, rushing over the East River as the Manhattan skyline looms closer and closer… a feeling of duality. I’m still in New York City, but I’m seeing the Manhattan skyline.

On Saturday afternoon I was at a friend’s apartment in an area of Brooklyn called Midwood. From the World Trade Center I took the N train five stops and the D train twelve more stops. Further and further into Brooklyn, farther and farther away from Manhattan. When I got off the train I turned off a shopping street and saw… houses. Houses in Brooklyn. Houses in New York City. I keep forgetting how vast this city is.

I was at the apartment of a friend from my old college a cappella group. He and his girlfriend made chili, and a bunch of us New York-area alumni from the group got together, maybe 10 of us. We had a great time. We did some vocal jamming, tried to sing one of our old songs, ate chili in this worn apartment on the third floor of a ratty old house… I felt like I was back in college.

The singing group is less than 10 years old, so we alums are all in our 20′s. I’m astonished at the talent some of these guys in the New York area have. Several are working in the music industry now, performing and managing and so forth. A couple of them do improv and comedy skits together, and they’re also working on a screenplay. I feel so small next to them, so boring; their work lives and their social lives seem so much more interesting than mine. Their lives seem simultaneously more focused and more carefree.

Three of us rode the D train back to Manhattan — the screenplay-writing improv duo and myself. We’ve known each other forever. We were all going different places, and they were discussing the quickest way to get to Midtown. “See, if I take the blah train to blah blah blah, and switch at blah, I’ll get there faster, because I’ll be at 42nd and 8th, while if I got off at blah blah blah…” They both live in Manhattan, and they were rattling off the station names without looking at a map, and I felt so out of it.

I don’t absorb the details of the outer world as easily as some other people do. I work in broader strokes, absorbing the gestalt of my surroundings. Or I observe, Zen-like, the shape of a building. Or I imagine what it feels like to be the person sitting across from me, imagining what she’s done that day. Or I try to figure out how to put a particular experience into words.

I get lost in my own inner world. People think I’m just spacing out. But I’m not. They think I’m oblivious to the details. But I’m not.

Like them, I’m trying to master my surroundings.

I’m just doing it differently.

Three

Yesterday was my cousin’s daughter’s third birthday party. She’s so adorable — she has rosy cheeks, a big smile, and so much personality. Almost every present was Barbie-related.

I got to meet my (female) cousin’s new boyfriend; he was tall and strikingly handsome, with a shaved head, a goatee, an earring in each ear, a ring on his finger, a gold and silver watch on his wrist, and a gold cross around his neck. He was wearing a crisp white button-down shirt with the top button opened, tucked into a pair of black pants, fastened by an Armani belt with a silver buckle in the shape of the letters AXI. He spent much of the afternoon cooking. If he weren’t my cousin’s boyfriend, I would have sworn he was gay.

This small party had quite a cast of characters. Between my cousin’s throaty-voiced Italian friend, her friend’s darkly attractive, quiet Italian husband Carmine, her overly chatty other friend, and the other friend’s father, Tony, a gruff, retired window installer, I felt like I was on an episode of “The Sopranos.” If a casting director had been there, they all would have been hired.

I didn’t tell anyone what I was thinking, but I didn’t have to. Afterwards, we were back at my parents’ house, and my mom said to me, “Didn’t you sort of feel like you were on an episode of ‘The Sopranos’ this afternoon?”

I was watching my baby cousin run around the room, playing with her toys, yammering with everyone, and I couldn’t believe she was already three. It made me kind of sad. Then I thought, wait — she’s still so young. In ten years, which is a long ways away, she’ll still be only 13. She has a long, long childhood ahead.

When you’re a kid, time doesn’t seem to pass; you live in a vast expanse of timelessness. You’re a kid, you’ve always been a kid, you’ll always be a kid. On family trips, it’s your role to sit in the back seat of the car while other people do mysterious adult things up front. Your role is to go to school and encounter new ideas every day. There’s no need to think about the future, and in fact, the future isn’t even on your radar screen; because whenever it may come — if it comes at all — it’s still a long, long way off.

The Naked City

Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood is many things: a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan, an anthology of stories and poems, a showcase for obscure talent, a portrait of a city. Take a look.

Hallelujah

I tested negative. Whew! Yippee!!

It’s what I was expecting, but it was good to have it confirmed. I hadn’t been thinking about it much during the past two weeks, in order to preserve my sanity, but I had trouble sleeping last night, and I was antsy all day today. My appointment was after work; I should have just made it in the morning and got it over with. To be honest, I don’t know if I was more scared of getting the results or of returning to the area where I got mugged. A little of both.

The whole appointment was a blur. I think part of my brain had gone into dream-mode beforehand in order to protect itself. The woman who gave me my results was different from the woman who’d taken the test; this was a well-dressed black woman. I was in the waiting room, the only person there. I saw her pick up a manila folder and she said, “Let’s go into my office.” I started to panic slightly, because I thought, why is she making this so serious? What does this mean? We went into the office and she said, “It’s kinda smelly in here,” so I followed her into a different office. What’s with the small talk? Just give me my results!

She had me sit in a chair next to the desk, then she sat down, and then she said, “Okay… Your test came back negative.” I let out a huge sigh of relief. “Thank god,” I said. All the tension drained from my body instantly, and suddenly I wanted to give her a hug. I said, “I feel like giving you a hug… can I give you a hug?” She smiled and said sure, so I did. Then we talked for another five minutes, and for some reason I switched into journalism mode and asked her why she was in this field, although I didn’t much listen to her answer because I just wanted to get out of there. I mentioned I’d been mugged last time on my way back to the train station, and I asked if they could call me a cab. She said that they could, but that if I went outside and waited on the corner, the bus would come pretty soon. Since it was still light out (yay, Daylight Savings Time), I figured that was okay.

So I left the building, waited nervously for the bus while eyeing everyone nearby, the bus came, and I rode it back to the train station. Went into the station and vowed never to get off at that PATH stop again if I can avoid doing so.

In a strange way this has even eased the aftermath of being mugged. For the last two weeks, in the back of my mind, I’ve known I’d have to return to that area. Now I can leave it behind me.

And now that my two-week wait is over, I can start focusing more earnestly again on something more ordinary, more complicated: living.

Gay Men Singing

The other thing I did last night was see the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus perform at Carnegie Hall in a joint concert with the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC.

I’d never seen any of them perform before, and my biggest comment is that the Velveeta was practically erupting from the walls and ceilings. The cheese factor was off the charts. I sang in a men’s chorus in college, but most of the stuff we did was either classical-oriented or very masculine: anything from a Renaissance motet, to a drinking song, to a big choral piece by Mozart (performed with a women’s chorus from a New England college), to a spiritual. And of course, our chorus was 90 percent straight, so any homoerotic impulses were carefully sublimated beneath the ideals of brotherhood and alcohol and song and the occasional trips to women’s colleges. We were in many ways a fraternity that sang: we had a house, and we threw wild keg parties, and sometimes we even had mixers with sororities. Except for the fact that it wound up giving me lots of crushes on straight guys, the group was a blast. Actually, the whole thing was a blast; that beloved group was one of my defining college experiences.

But this concert last night was different. Lots of showtunes, lots of “jazz hands,” big rainbow flags, choreography, songs with unbridled inspirational lyrics and unabashed appeals to emotionalism, even a song from the gay musical Falsettos. I was unprepared for the level of schmaltz. But it was more than schmaltz; it was a cheesefest of Streisandian proportions. These were drag queens in reverse-drag. The tuxedos were all an act. Also, most of the members were middle-aged; from the nosebleed seats — and my friend actually got a nosebleed — I could see many bald spots, beards and paunches. Nary an Abercrombie boy in sight.

They lived out the 70′s and the 80′s in one evening: 180 guys in tuxedos sing “It’s Raining Men” while waving their arms around, and later, another chorus sings of transcending our shared tragedy so we can go on living and being happy.

And it was then that I looked at this stage filled with middle-aged gay men, and I realized, these are the ones who survived.

I found myself getting past the cheesiness and feeling moved and inspired.

It was Gay Pride on the stage of Carnegie Hall: gay men, rainbow flags, corporate sponsorship. The CEO of Fleet Boston (a major sponsor of the concert) gave a short speech at the beginning of the second half, and a representative of the Names Project (they make the AIDS quilt) came onstage to accept a check from the three combined choruses. At the end of the evening, all three choruses gathered on stage and sang a big patriotic piece by Stephen Flaherty, composer of Ragtime. There was nothing quite like seeing 500 gay men together on a stage, singing their hearts out, singing of liberty and equality and the American way.

Sex and Body

Now that it turns out I’m alive and healthy, I really should stop performing autopsies on myself. But I’m feeling torn again between two different inner impulses. I feel tension between this and this. I’ve been reading someone’s blog, reading all about his gym diary, and about his orgies in back rooms, and I think, I wish I could be more like that. And then I read someone else’s blog, the blog of someone who has much less sex and seems to feel good about that, and seems to earn the respect of his innocent peers, and I think, I wish I could be more like that. I’m torn between hedonism and puritanism, between wanting to be respected and wanting to be envied, and I’d like to find a nice middle ground.

Okay, who am I kidding? Deep down (like all of us) I prefer hedonism, and I agree with Jonno — let it always be safe. On the other hand, if I’m thinking that more sex increases one’s self-esteem — well, that does happen, actually. When I came out and realized that there were guys who found me attractive, who wanted me for my looks, who just wanted to have sex with me — that was pretty cool.

I’d like to join a gym, I think. But to be honest, I’m generally happy with my body. I have a slim, nicely proportioned build — not gym-fed bulky muscles, but more of a natural toned look. I have good starting material. I joined the gym when I started law school, but I lost the discipline after three weeks. And the trainer told me that because I’m one of those people who can’t put on weight if I tried, it would be good for me to take a protein supplement. But I thought that if I started taking a supplement but didn’t keep up with the gym, I’d put on flab. So I remained my slim non-bulky self.

I wish I were smoother, but maybe that’s because I tend to prefer smoother guys. Anyway, plenty of guys haven’t seemed to mind my body, and at any rate it’s nothing that a little waxing can’t change, if I so decide.

Lately I’ve also considered growing a goatee. I’ve had a goatee two or three times in the past, only for about two or three weeks each time, but that was pre-coming-out, back when I wasn’t paying attention to what people thought of me. (One thing I noticed after I came out was that I started paying closer attention to my physical appearance and subsequently began to feel better about that appearance.) I wonder what kind of guy I’d attract with the goatee-and-glasses look. I usually get pegged as two or three years younger than I am. Right now with the glasses and a smooth face I have the clean-cut slightly trendy intellectual look; perhaps a goatee with the glasses would add a slight air of mystery and maturity. I’ve never been good at cruising; I wonder what kind of guys such a look would bring me.

There’s nothing so cool as experimenting with your physical appearance.

Spring fever has hit. I leave my therapist’s office and it’s still light out, chilly but mild. Spring fever. Primordial rhythms take over. We are only animals, we are of the earth. I want to grow a goatee and cruise and fuck on a hot summer night in the city. I want to copulate like rabbits on a picnic blanket in a clearing by a brook. I want to exchange glances of lust with a stranger. Sweat, skin, teeth, eyes, muscles, breathing hard, rushing river, limpid trees, blowing breeze, a cacophony of birds. The weather is warm.

I think back nine summers to July 1992, the first time I ever went into a gay bookstore. A Different Light was still on Hudson Street. I was 18. Hot summer afternoon in Greenwich Village. I open the door, walk in, and enter another world. Gay men everywhere, t-shirts and shorts, browsing quietly, absorbed in their open books. I’m so nervous I don’t even look at anyone except in sidelong glances, my heart beating like crazy, excitement, danger, opportunity, fear, secrecy, disobedience. When I walk back out into the summer sun, I feel branded, and I know that in five minutes, several blocks away, people on the street will look at me and know where I’ve been. They’ll see it in my face. I’ve been in a gay bookstore. I’m gay.

Countless Comments

Well, BlogVoices no longer lets you display the number of comments attached to a post, because they don’t have enough computer resources and they don’t have enough money to increases those resources. (By “they” I mean “Chris.”) This makes it harder to know if someone has commented on a post, because you actually have to click on the “comment” link to find out. On the other hand, blog loading time is now faster than it used to be.

Of course, I’ll still know when people post comments, because they’re automatically e-mailed to me. So if you post a comment, such as the one attached to this post, I’ll get it.

Leather Egg seems to have his own comment system, the lucky guy, but I’m not that computer-savvy.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

I’ve wanted to post some links about this ever since I saw the trade paperback version for sale a few weeks ago. Here’s the Annotated Crisis on Infinite Earths — a very in-depth site — and here’s a shorter explanation for those of you who just don’t care as much as I do.

Crisis on Infinite Earths was pretty much the greatest comic book miniseries ever, and it came out around the time that I started collecting comics in 1985. It was done in honor of DC Comics’ 50th anniversary, and it was intended to restore order to the sprawling DC Multiverse; by the time the yearlong series was over, universes had disappeared and numerous heroes had died, including such well-loved characters as the Flash and Supergirl. DC Comics would never be the same. The series had an epic scope and contained some heart-rending moments; it also had terrific artwork by George Perez, including portrayals of what seemed like almost every superhero or villain who had appeared in a DC comic in the previous 50 years — including two Supermen, two Wonder Women, and so forth. (Here’s an early picture of the two Flashes — they started the whole problem years ago.)

I kicked the comic book habit a long time ago, but for a while there, I was so into them. (Only DC, though; no Marvel for me. Batman, Superman, even Booster Gold — I was a DC loyalist through and through, maybe because I grew up on “The Superfriends.”) My entire collection is still in the basement of my parents’ house, each comic in its own plastic bag with a piece of acid-free cardboard, and all organized in boxes by title and within that by issue number…

More Superhero Stuff

Oh my gosh… The Mad Doctor’s Custom Action Figures. I always wanted to do something like this. I love his Playmobil figures, particularly the Playmobil Joker and the Playmobil Batman and Superman. And I don’t know what this is, but I think it’s funny as hell, particularly the Village People near the bottom.

Spring

April is in my mistress’ face
And July in her eyes hath place
Within her bosom is September
But in her heart a cold December

- Thomas Morley

It’s such a beautiful day out! It’s bright and sunny and warm, and the sky is a deep blue. Outside getting lunch, I see people without jackets on. April is here. I love the sound of the word “april”; I think it’s the most beautiful-sounding of all the months.

April.

April.

April!

Back in college, the arrival of spring would make everyone on campus giddy. Any UVA alum can rhapsodize about a warm spring afternoon on the Lawn. On days like this I sometimes check out the RotundaCam to see if there are any students hanging out on the Lawn — lying out on blankets, or playing frisbee golf, or just relaxing. It makes me miss it.

I finished reading The Object of My Affection this morning, and wow — Hollywood really screwed around with things when they turned it into a movie. So much is different: characters missing, new characters added, characters completely changed, not to mention some major plot changes. But the movie and the book were both great, each in its own way, despite these differences.

But the whole time I was reading the book, I couldn’t get Jennifer Aniston out of my head. I tried, I really did, but I just couldn’t picture Nina as anyone but Jennifer Aniston.

Ah, well.

Dad

Last night I had dinner with my dad. A few weeks ago I had a really honest conversation with my mom, and we each got to say some things that needed to be said, and afterward she suggested I do the same thing with him. Apparently she suggested it to him as well, because last week he called me and asked if I’d like to have dinner sometime soon. So last night I met him outside Penn Plaza in Manhattan and we went to an Italian restaurant.

It felt a little awkward. It’s harder for me to communicate with my dad than with my mom. I’ve internalized a particular view of each of my parents, and neither view is up to date, because they’ve both changed a lot in the last few years — they’ve become more understanding of who I am, and they’ve come to realize that what they want for me is not always what I want for me. Last night at dinner, my dad told me that he loves me and that I can always tell him anything. It was great to hear. And he said that if I didn’t want to talk about things right now, I could talk with him down the road.

But something’s not quite right. This doesn’t feel comfortable.

I’m so used to feeling that my father is my antagonist. It’s like I’ve always needed something to push against, and now he’s told me that he’ll no longer stand in my way. So this is what adulthood is supposed to feel like. I feel strangely free, but sort of scared, naked on a mountaintop, unprotected by anything, the wind ready to knock me off my own two feet. I’ve already told my parents I’m gay, and that was the biggest hurdle; what else is there to push against? Nothing at all? If that’s true, it’s going to be hard to get used to.

I’m also wondering, is he trying to get at something specific? I’m wondering if he knows about this blog. He has ways of finding things out. (Dad, if you’re reading — I’m onto you.) My dad is pretty swift with computers and he’s a bright guy. I’m looking for a job for next year, and he told me last night that if you do an Internet search on my name, the first thing that comes up is this gay-related volunteer position I had a year and a half ago, complete with the story of my coming out. He said this as if it’s a bad thing. I’m not sure what he thinks is the problem here: my being gay, or my forthrightness in putting my coming-out story on the Web, or both.

The thing is, he’s so much more practical than I am. Me, I’m not ready to be practical; I’m too much of an idealist, I’m too naive. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Sometimes my dad’s advice can save me from some unnecessary trouble, but sometimes I’d like a little less negativity and a little more encouragement. For instance, I told him I’m looking for a new place to live, and he said that any place in the city is going to be noisy. Okay, Dad, that’s true, but I’m sure I could find a place where I don’t have neighbors who stay up into the wee hours of the morning.

Of course, this is also the guy who wasn’t happy when my mom decided to quit her job and go back to school, because, he said, her job had great health benefits.

I don’t know. At least he’s making an effort. But I can’t totally wrap my brain around him. He and I are intellectual equals, but emotionally, I feel like he and I are in different worlds. Then again, I’m realizing that my internalized negative view of my dad from childhood doesn’t totally mesh with the man he is today. He’s not a villain. He’s a lot more complicated than I thought he was.

Diary of a Goatee

I have begun growing a goatee. This morning, when I shaved, I neglected my upper lip and chin. I think I’d last shaved three days ago (gosh, I’ve been lazy this week), so technically my goatee is three days old. We’ll see what happens. Perhaps people will start to think I’m Evil Tin Man. At any rate, I’ll have to start doing some goatee maintenance. I’ve already read up on the history of the goatee.

Whenever I grow a goatee, I notice that my facial hair has a slight reddish-brown tint, as opposed to the hair on the top of my head, which is brown. There are several types of goatees. I’m going for the conservative, more common Van Dyke look — around the mouth and chin — and not the beatnik, Shaggy, Maynard G. Krebs look.

I wonder what this will look like with my glasses? I’m planning to get a digital camera pretty soon — most likely the Umax Astracam (a cheap, decent, no frills camera) — so maybe I’ll finally post some photos of myself up here, just like Anonymous Goateed Man.

Scott and I sat on the fourth step leading up to the beach house that he and his friends were renting that week. It was three in the morning, and it was cool out.

Several nights earlier, finished with spring exams and ecstatic in our new freedom, a couple of friends and I had left Charlottesville for Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, along with a third of the university. It was Beach Week, the break between finals and graduation, when the fourth years tried to have as much last bittersweet fun as possible and the rest of us just partied to celebrate the beginning of summer.

I didn’t know Scott too well. He was a friend of a friend. He was getting ready to graduate and I had just finished my third year; I’d run into him that night at the club. When we’d got to the house where he was staying, some of his housemates had been partying outside. By now there was an empty keg underneath the stairs, and all its drinkers had gone inside to conk out in an alcoholic stupor. It was quiet, except for the occasional joyriding car or jeep revving down Ocean Boulevard, and the distant exhalations of the ocean.

We were sitting side by side in the cool air, our knees almost touching; a fuzzy blue blanket covered our legs. A breeze blew. I stared out into the darkness, feeling expectant. I could feel his leg hairs softly brushing against mine. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

As we were talking, my heart began to beat faster. I got fidgety. He was just biding his time, humoring me, waiting for me to leave. What could he want with someone five foot six? But if he didn’t want me, why were the danger flares going off inside my head? I was about to cross over to the Other Side. I was there at the airport gate, ticket in hand, stewardess ready with her outstretched arm.

And right then, right there, I chickened out.

“Well, I should probably go,” I said. “It’s kind of cold.”

“Are you sure?” said Scott.

“Yeah, I think so – you know – it’s pretty late.”

“Well, okay,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed, hook-up interruptus, or if he was glad to be rid of this short Jewish curly-haired guy. We got up, throwing off the blue blanket and disrupting its shadowy curves.

I was ready for the ten-minute walk back to the condos where I was staying with the Glee Club. I stuck out my hand.

“Well, thanks for hanging out with me tonight,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

“No problem,” said Scott, shaking my hand.

I then realized I was still wearing his jacket, which I began to remove.

“Why don’t you hold onto that for now,” he said. “It’s kind of chilly.”

“Okay – thanks,” I said, my face beginning to feel warm in the cool night breeze. I shrugged my shoulders and put my hands in the pockets. “It was good talking to you.”

“You too,” he said.

“All right, then – good night.”

“Good night.”

As I walked off, I turned and waved. He waved, too. Then he picked up the blue blanket, crumpled and lifeless, from the steps.

I was glad to be out of there. I’d escaped from the jaws of death. Never before had I been so close. I berated myself and said I must never go back there again. The jacket was too big for me; I felt like a little boy wearing his father’s overcoat. The bottom of it hung midway down my thighs, and I had to push up the sleeves, and even then they kept sliding back down past my hands. Maybe I was shrinking.

While walking back to the condo I passed another college guy wearing a white baseball cap with Greek letters. He seemed about my age. He gave me a slightly embarrassed smile; we were in complicity, each of us returning from some late-night exploit.

“Hey,” he said, conspiratorially.

“How’s it going,” I said as he passed me, feeling the jacket’s weight on me like a blood-stained cloak.

Quick Brown Foxes

Last night, visiting my parents for a weekend of Passover seders, I picked up Philip Roth’s American Pastoral from the bookshelf, sat down and started reading. His writing overwhelmed me. The English language! We’ve got the best language in the world — all in one place you have words like shampoo, jaguar, pizazz, balustrade, vermillion, fuck, crepuscular, august and snooty. It’s a real duct-tape-and-safety-pins language, we can do anything, English liberty and American know-how, creating words like we’re playing with Tinkertoys. I’m a man who likes men, so I can be homosexual or gay or phallophilic. I made that last one up. David Foster Wallace writes Infinite Jest and someone has to make an online glossary to define the obscure words he uses.

It was after midnight on a Sunday night and I needed to go to bed but I kept reading. I’d connect with Roth’s words and something inside me would give off electricity, I had to put things down on paper, save them, but there was no paper around so the energy bolts dissipated in the air. I tried to collect as much of them as I could. Eventually I had to go to sleep but couldn’t, because sentences and ideas kept forming in my head. Sometimes that happens — I read a writer so good, so damn skillful, that I’m simultaneously inspired and agonized with torture. I want to write that well but I never will. Yet at the same time I can, I can! I just need practice. I need to keep filling notebooks with words and eventually I’ll get there. Our words make us immortal. But before immortality, our words make us alive. Most importantly, I want to use my words to connect with other people. I shout into the void hoping that somebody will read these words, that my words will help, or influence, or infect. I exist.

Why do I blog? Why shoot my wads into thin air when I can save them up for one good fuck? But that’s a fallacy (phallus-y). Natalie Goldberg tells us that we must be brave enough to throw away a piece of writing, to toss away something that is good, because more will always come. If you are stingy, you will never have enough, but if you are generous, you will have plenty. Our bodies are constantly producing creative juices, and whether we ejaculate these juices as semen or as words, we must have faith in our neolojism. We are all wellsprings. Potential geysers.

And in case you don’t understand, let me emphasize: Natalie Goldberg is amazing. Writing Down the Bones is the best book I have ever read on writing. Ever.

Jumps Over the Lazy Dog

Pangrammatic sentences. Fun for fellow synaesthetes.

Where There’s a Will

If you’ve never seen this, here’s some old correspondence between Focus on the Family and “Will & Grace.” I assume this is real. Read it first, then come back here.

Funny as the reply is, I’m not too impressed. I think the story editor wasted a real opportunity for communication. His snide response only adds to the perception that gay people are intolerant disrespectful jerks, and it doesn’t help anyone. Obviously the Christian radio station thought it was advantageous to post this correspondence on its website and make it public.

Sure, they’re just comedy writers. But I think that if you have the opportunity to communicate with someone who represents an opposing view, you should use it. Even if the other person is close-minded, maybe you can say something that will subconsciously work its way into that person’s brain. Disarm the other side with tact and politeness. A little less will, a little more grace.

Then again, I’m idealistic and naive.

Hunting

I have to confess: I’ve been having blog-related writer’s block lately. I’ve been pretty happy with several of my recent entries, but this has only increased my expectations for myself. On top of that, whenever I read Slutboy I feel spent; I want to throw out all my writing implements and cut off my hands and never write anything ever again. I’m in awe of Slutboy’s writing, I’m in awe of the pleasure he gets out of sex, I’m in awe of the passion he conveys. And me, some days I feel like I can’t string three words together. To. Create. A proper. Sentence.

But he’s him, and I’m me, and hey, I gotta be me, so I’ll just keep on going here.

Today after work I’m going to check out an apartment in Williamsburg, which is a part of Brooklyn that’s very close to Manhattan. It’s apparently an artsy up-and-coming area. A friend of a friend is about to move out of his apartment — a friend of CanadaGirl, actually; I met him once before. We all met up at the Phoenix one night. Then, a couple of weeks ago, after CanadaGirl politely declined my offer to look for a place together, she told me that the friend was going to be vacating his apartment. She gave me his number and she told him I’d probably be calling him.

So sometime after work I’m going to meet up with him and he’s going to show me the apartment. I’ve been having this fantasy that we go to his apartment and he shows me around and we wind up hooking up. I can’t totally remember what he looks like, and he has a boyfriend, but I just think it’s a really hot idea for a fantasy. I want to be the kind of guy that can hook up with someone in the least likely situations. A friend of mine told me about a friend of his who got a handjob on a Greyhound bus once. The guy got on the bus and decided to sit next to the most attractive guy he could find. They both pretended to fall asleep, but their hands were sharing an armrest, and their pinkies started touching, and because each guy had a jacket covering his lap, it was easy to move on from there.

Things like that have never happened to me. I’ve hooked up in a college classroom in the middle of the night, twice, which was pretty hot, but both times it was planned. Both times I’d gotten together with the person explicitly for sex. I don’t think I’ve ever had unplanned sex. Or at least unanticipated sex. But hey, I’m only 27, and I have a long life ahead of me, so this is just one more goal I’ll have to set for myself. Be all that you can be, right?

American High

CanadaGirl’s friend had to cancel on me, and we rescheduled the apartment tour for Monday. So instead of seeing an apartment yesterday evening, I was a sloth and watched four hours of television. Someone’s blog yesterday turned me onto “American High” on PBS, but for the life of me I can’t remember whose.

Whoever you are, thank you, because the show is done very well: a few students at a high school outside Chicago were videotaped, documentary-style, as they lived their lives, and on top of that, they were each given a video camera to tape what they wanted. Another reality-TV series, in a way, and at one point I had to remind myself that nobody was being voted off the show at the end, but it really got into the hearts and minds of these students, including a gay one.

On top of that, I watched “Dawson’s Creek” last night and got to relive the emotional roller coaster of the season of college acceptance packets and rejection letters.

I’m fascinated by teenagers. I want a second chance to live my teen years, to correct the things I did wrong. It’s weird — I’m 27, and sometimes I think I’m so young, that I have such a long life ahead of me. And I do. But then I forget that I’ve already had a pretty long life up to now. I forget that at 16 or 17 or 18 you’re already intellectually and emotionally aware and that lots has already happened to you. How soon I forget.

But — despite my whirlwind schedule of high school activities, despite having had a great group of high school friends, despite the fact that I spent three adventurous years attending high school overseas — I just feel like I didn’t live my teen years as fully as I could have. But you know, I’m sure I’m just romanticizing it. Television makes everything look rosy and exciting. And the Mythic American Teenager is one of the most romanticized figures in our culture, sort of the same position the cowboy held in our culture a century ago. It’s something that’s hard to live up to — that very few people live up to.

As for “American High,” the teens they chose to spotlight in these two episodes were pretty gifted. One was a female guitar player who might be the next Lisa Loeb. Another was a gay guy with a terrific body who creates art and dances. Still, who knows – I could have felt pangs of nostalgia even if they’d shown a teenager sitting at home watching TV.

But it’s not just high school that I miss. It’s college. From where I stand now, I look back at my 17-year-old self, at the end of high school, with four years of college ahead of him, a blank slate for exploration and reconstitution of the self, and I envy him. And there are some things I wish I could tell him. Among other things, I wish I could tell him to screw his parents and come out of the closet as soon as possible.

The first time I came out to someone, anyone at all, was during the spring of my first year of college, when I was 18. But after a year I went back into the closet, and it took several asexual years for me to venture out again. It wasn’t until the beginning of my last year of law school, when I was 24, that I was willing to call myself gay and had my first relationship with a guy. In between were years I could have spent exploring myself more deeply, years I could have spent meeting more gay people, and dating, and having sex.

I wish I could tell that 17-year-old guy, on the brink of college, not to worry so much about everything. I wish I could tell him to have more faith in himself, to have more faith in his convictions, to stand up for who he is, for who he knows he is, to not try to figure everything out beforehand, to live life, to do some scary things, to have more fun. I wish I could say to him:

What are you so afraid of?

I was nervous and drank more than I ate; my father carefully dispatched his steak. Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some strong emotion or other I said, more or less: It’s the beginning of the summer and I’m standing in the lobby of a thousand-story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds. On the way to the shining needle at the top I will wear a lot of neckties, I will buy five or six works of genius on 45 rpm, and perhaps too many times I will find myself looking at the snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink. I said, “I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.”

– Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Random Stargazing II

Two nights after GG “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Woo ran into someone from Queer as Folk, so did I! Tonight, CanadaGirl and I were walking down Avenue A, on the way from Phoenix to Wonderbar, and we saw Randy Harrison, a.k.a. Justin. Just like ClosetBoy did last month in Toronto! He walked past us with three or four adolescent-looking girls. I didn’t even realize it until CanadaGirl pointed it out to me. So I turned around and saw the back of this short blond guy. “No,” I said to her. “Are you sure?” So of course I had to change our plans and walk back, quickly, to get closer and see if it really was him. We surreptitiously caught up with them while they waited at a “Don’t Walk” sign (definitely not New Yorkers), and I nonchalantly glanced over, and yup, it was Justin.

CanadaGirl and I went into Starlight, and Justin and his entourage got on some line at the place next door, where there must have been some band playing. Starlight was practically empty, so we left and started walking back toward Wonderbar, and we realized that they had left the line and were walking back in the same direction we were. But eventually we lost them. Oh, well.

Scenes from Central Park on a Day Off from Work

(excerpts transcribed from my notebook)

2:20 pm

I’m in Central Park and it’s gorgeous out! I have the day off. This is glorious. I’m in an undershirt and jeans. It’s bright and sunny and warm… I’m in rapture. On top of that, a cutie just sat down nearby on this area of grass. I was going to sit on the Great Lawn but it’s not open for the season yet, so here I am.

I feel like I’m back at UVA… all week, through the sun on Monday and the rain and crap the rest of the week, I missed UVA. Longed for the Lawn. I’d open up the RotundaCam and want to bawl.

I’m in awe of the cutie. He’s sort of a punk/skater-looking guy. He’s lying on his back smoking a cigarette. Maybe 19 or 20. Navy blue t-shirt, gray pants, his shoes and socks are off.

God, this feels foreign. The weather. We’re all on another planet. We’re all giddy, we don’t know what to do with ourselves.

I want to fall in love. This is how I want my summer to be. I meet someone at the party next weekend. We start dating. It’s instant love. Every weekend we come to Central Park with some sunblock and some books and we chill out and read and talk and look around and wander through each other’s minds. He has a goatee, he’s a total top or total bottom, or neither actually, I just like the phrase “total bottom.” We spend entire weekends together. We spend the afternoon in the park and stay here in the park until it gets twilight. Then we go back to his place, have sex, change, go out. We go out to eat and then we go to bar, a club, wherever. We enjoy ourselves, we enjoy each other.

I need a bathroom. Time to get up.

5:55 pm

On the grass, across from the back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

A shirtless guy several feet from me, his back to me, he’s sitting, his arms are around his knees, causing his skin to stretch taut across his back muscles, his smooth skin so close I can almost imagine myself licking it with my tongue…

Two straight guys, one tall, wearing roller blades, accentuating his calves as roller blades always do, wearing dark blue athletic shorts and a dark blue backwards baseball cap with a white Y on it… bends over to tighten a shoe and I want to fuck him, right there…

Dark-haired young guy in jeans and white undershirt, sideburns, nice teeth, cute, sitting right behind me…

Group of Asian guys and an Asian girl, all in tanktops, throwing a white volleyball, loud and fun and muscled Asians…

People lying down and stretching their body parts after a run… half the yuppies in Manhattan jogging past…

Yeah

He had oval wire-rimmed glasses and a trim Vandyke that made him seem both intellectual and sexy, as if he attended museum lectures and yet knew how to dance.

– Jesse Green, The Velveteen Father

Yesterday was an incredible day. We government employees had the day off for Good Friday. Earlier in the week, when the sun was shining and spring had finally sprung, I’d decided that if the weather were like that on Friday then I’d go to Central Park. Alas, the weather report said showers, but then later in the week they changed it to an early morning sprinkle followed by partly sunny weather.

Yesterday morning it was cloudy and dreary and I did laundry. But it was warm out, so after my clothes were clean I decided it was decent enough to go to Central Park.

When I left my apartment around 1 in the afternoon, it was still cloudy except for a few patches of blue sky. I went to the PATH station and then switched at the World Trade Center to the subway. When I emerged from its neutral depths, at 81st Street and Central Park West, I was hit by the blazing sun. The sky was deep blue! Not a single cloud! It was warm! I smiled. I crossed the street to Central Park and walked through the park and I was still smiling. I must have looked like Mary Tyler Moore or something. I was so happy. Ecstatic even.

I found a grassy area, relaxed, did some writing about the surroundings and the sights; excerpts are in my previous entry. Had a wonderful, wonderful afternoon. It just felt so natural to be sitting out there in the sun. This is what humans are supposed to do. How the heck did we get through the winter? It just feels so normal, so right to be in the sun on a temperate day. Our species evolved on this planet, of course, we matured under the sun, we absorb the sun’s energy like plants do, don’t we? The sun is our friend. The sun is our partner. The sun is our fuckbuddy. Love the sun.

And the weather was perfect. I even got a little sunburned.

I thought about going to Beth Simchat Torah, the gay and lesbian synagogue, for Friday night Shabbat services, but instead I came home and figured I’d settle in for a boring night. But you know what’s fun? When you have absolutely no plans but you unexpectedly wind up having a great evening with a friend. My friend Nick had left a message, and I called him back, and we wound up going bar-hopping in the East Village. The East Village bars are my new playground, I think.

I ate dinner and showered and changed and met up with him, and we went to Wonderbar. I know, I always seem to mention Wonderbar, but that’s because it’s such a fun place. Small and crowded and filled with a diverse, good-looking, no-attitude, East Villagey crowd.

I was pumped. I felt so amazingly good about myself and the way I looked. My goatee is about a week and half old and it’s grown in nicely. On top of that I was wearing my glasses, oval and wire-rimmed frames. The coup de grace was a clingy black t-shirt, tucked into a pair of jeans. Before I left my apartment, I looked at myself in the mirror. Damn, I thought. I look good. I’d fuck me.

Nick had never been to Wonderbar, and he wound up having a great time, which made me feel good. He’s kinda quirky and ornery and doesn’t like most bars, but he liked this place. We both got drunk, we both got hit on. All in a night’s work.

At one point I was using the bathroom, and I looked at myself in the mirror and was shocked. Who is this guy with the tight black shirt and the goatee and glasses? Is that really me? Do I know this guy?

I didn’t feel like myself. I was moving through the crowd like I owned the place. I felt confident and sexy and attractive and just damn good about how I looked and who I was. The goatee is the x-factor in my life. It makes me feel more secure, like less of a sheltered kid, like less of a nerd, it gives me an air of mystery.

After three and a half hours at Wonderbar, Nick and I left. We walked west along 6th Street at 3:00 in the morning, both of us drunk and yammering incoherently with each other, two drunk friends making no sense but on top of the world. Nick stopped to piss at a payphone. Then we walked again. Then we parted ways and I came home.

What a great day, what a great night. They don’t mass-produce ‘em like this. Days like this are a rarity, each one fashioned painstakingly by hand out of tempered glass, each one lavished with care. You can’t buy days like this in bulk. When you come across one, appreciate it.

Equinox

I lay out in Central Park again this afternoon, soaking up the sun, staring at all the eye candy and reveling in the fact that it’s spring. This has been the weekend of Central Park sun. This was the weekend it really became spring.

I’m tired but I can’t sleep. The sun drained me of energy and I have a slight sunburn on my face and arms. With the sunburn, and the whooshing of the new fan I bought on Monday in order to drown out any nighttime noise, I’ve been tricked into thinking it’s the middle of August.

Winter and summer might be the extreme seasons, but fall and spring are the ones that herald change. Never mind the solstices; it’s all about the equinoxes. Perhaps I’m just conditioned from years of living on the academic calendar, but when September arrives and autumn begins, everything feels new. And I can already see down the horizon, one straight path, following an arc through new TV shows, crunching leaves, colder weather, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the holiday season, all culminating in a climax on New Year’s Eve. Similarly, when spring arrives, a new narrative arc begins — warm weather, May, June, summer arrives and the rhythms of the world change, students work in summer jobs, college kids come home, businesses slow down, people go to outdoor concerts, we fall in love and stay up late with our fleeting romantic interests on stifling hot summer nights.

Then summer ends, September arrives and another new season begins.

I’ve been craving a boyfriend this weekend. It’s been two years since I’ve had someone whom I called a boyfriend; that ended two Aprils ago, after two short months. I sort of dated someone long distance last year, but not with much enthusiasm. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have an automatic Saturday night date, to have someone who’s thinking about you, someone to sleep over in your bed, someone else’s bed for you to sleep in, someone who’s always there.

It’s the beginning of spring but I can see time stretching before me, I can see the summer in the distance, like the horizon of an ocean, with the potential for so much to happen, things I can’t even begin to imagine. Back when I was in high school, I’d sit on the airplane at the end of August, returning with my family to Tokyo, where we lived while my dad worked in his company’s Japan office; I’d sit in the airplane seat, a magazine pocket in front of me, headphones on my head, thinking about the beginning of a new year at the high school I loved: new arrivals from the States with their families, new people to meet, some to befriend, some to develop crushes on; new plays to try out for, new activities to try, so many new experiences awaiting me, new, new, new.

I feel like that now. It’s warm, it’s spring, we’re on the cusp of a new season, so much to anticipate: I will meet new people, visit new places, feel new emotions blaze inside me; there will be misunderstandings and happy moments, new things to feel and to write about and someday to remember, all against a mythic background of the echoes of the ocean and the taste of ice cream.

This is a pregnant moment.

Different

I saw the apartment in Williamsburg last night. Not my cup of tea. The neighborhood is a little too alternative for me; not only that, but the apartment is in a pretty run-down area. Kind of industrial, warehouses, and so forth.

So afterwards I was riding the train back to my apartment in Jersey City and I was thinking, you know, my place isn’t as bad as I thought it was. I have a fan now, which pretty much drowns out nighttime noise (especially when I run the fan while wearing earplugs), and my apartment is huge, and I have a very nice kitchen. If only my apartment were cheaper and in a different area.

What is it that I want? I want to live in Manhattan. I want to live as a yuppie, on the Upper East Side or the Upper West Side or maybe even in Chelsea, although Chelsea is way expensive and I don’t know if I could handle all the gay clones every day. But what is it that I really want? Sometimes, more than anything else, I just want to be typical. God, I just want to be like everybody else! I want to be a typical 27 year old. I want to have moved to New York immediately after graduating college and gone to work in the corporate world for a few years, instead of graduating college and spending a year drifting around my old college campus and then staying there for law school. Or, having gone to law school, I wish I’d gone to work for a law firm afterwards. But I just couldn’t do it. I just didn’t want to do it. I don’t know if I should commend myself for sticking to my principles or berate myself for being so stubborn and impractical. Tens of thousands of dollars in debt and I didn’t try harder to get a $100,000/year job? Even just for a couple of years? What was I thinking?

But you know what — I’ve tried. I tried during law school, I tried after law school. True, I could have sent my resume off to many more law firms, thus increasing my chances, but deep down, I just didn’t want to do it. And in interviews with law firms, I’ve never been able to convey a genuine interest, and I’ve never been offered a job by a firm. Well, once I did, a year and a half ago, by a very antiseptic suburban law firm, for 35K, but I had no desire to work there. Usually, in an interview, some lawyer will be talking to me and I’ll find myself just nodding and smiling, not really saying anything substantive, drifting off into la-la-land despite my best efforts not to, not listening to what’s being said, not really feeling like I belong there. Law firms seem filled with heterosexual back-slapping ex-frat-boys, or at least that’s always the impression I get, and I never feel like I’d be comfortable around them. Deep down I feel contempt for them, I do. Or maybe resentment because I’m not like them. Not to mention the hours. But dammit, if other people can be so flexible, why can’t I? Why do I have to be so protective of my individuality?

But I want to be typical. I want to be like some of the other people I saw lying out in Central Park on Sunday. I want to live in Manhattan so I can go running in Central Park. I want to be able to afford a cell phone and a Palm Pilot. I want to have a close group of friends and have people call me up and ask if I want to go do this with so-and-so and so-and-so on Saturday night. I want to be mister Yuppie Straight Guy, going to parties and straight bars with his colleagues and his friends and meeting women.

At the same time I know I’m wrong, right? Even if I do move to the Upper East Side or wherever, I’ll find something wrong with that. And I still won’t be Mr. Typical — I’ll still be me. I will always be me. I don’t even think Mr. Typical is really Mr. Typical. Everyone’s got issues, everyone’s got problems; people just put on good faces. We all think our neighbors have more verdant lawns, but they don’t. Even if the grass really is greener next door, the indoor plumbing is broken and there’s a termite problem. Right?

Maybe, maybe not. I think Mr. Typical has advantages. Mr. Typical Straight Yuppie is inherently more normal, taller, tanned, better-looking, more outgoing, more practical. He went to work after college or law school and has been building up his savings. He has a life of tanned success ahead of him. He and the world move in the same direction. And Mr. George Fucking Dubya gets to become president of the United States.

What do I have? I’m gay, so there’s a big strike against normalcy right there. I have an expensive law degree that was a waste of time. I’m living in an expensive apartment, I’m rent-poor, I’m not saving anything, I’m paying off my loans on the 25-year plan. I know someone my age who has his first book coming out in June; I’ve never even completed a short story. I want to be living a full life. I want to be following my calling. Time has gone by too quickly, I never had enough fun, I wasted too much time being afraid to move forward. I was too different to be like everybody else but too afraid to be myself. I wish I could just pick a fucking direction and go with it. What are you so afraid of?

As I write this, I realize that I’m probably exaggerating the bad and ignoring the good. But I’ve written it, and these are my frustrations, and they sting.

Ack!

Oh my God! I was number 6000 at East Coast/West Coast. But it says they want a screenshot. How the hell do you make a screenshot? I went to the Windows Help menu and there was nothing about it. I didn’t think I was technically challenged, but maybe I am. And my dog didn’t eat my browser. I don’t even have a dog. I don’t even have a ferret. I have dust mites under my bed, but they don’t eat. And remember, guys, I’m an attorney, and attorneys have ways of making things happen.* (Unless they work for Al Gore.)

*Disclaimer: Not to be construed as a threat under the laws of the United States or the States of New Jersey, New York, or California.

And Me With Nothing to Wear!

I’d like to thank the Academy, my agent, and the base ten number system for my big East Coast win. No thanks to Bill Gates and his evil screen-shotless empire. Also congrats to my trans-Mississippi counterpart, Psionic. RJ, I think Flip might be luckier than you…

At any rate, this is an interesting coincidence, since I’ll already be seeing RJ on Saturday night at his rootin’-tootin’ bachelor party. By “bachelor party” he means a party brimming over with single gay men. I can’t wait. Fill it to the rim, baby! RJ, I guess we can discuss the details at the party. But how are we going to talk about it without people wondering what’s going on? They’ll start asking questions, and you’ll have to tell them that I won the privilege of deflowering your revirginized body because I was the 6000th visitor to your website. All your party guests will think you’re a big whore. Or they’ll think I’m a big whore. Would that be good or bad? I guess it depends who’s at the party.

In other news, a friend of mine e-mailed me this afternoon with the news that he wants to introduce me to this acquaintance of his. The acquaintance is supposedly cute and very intelligent. “I think you’ll like him,” my friend wrote. We shall see. The friend, the friend’s boyfriend, the acquaintance, and myself are getting together on Friday night.

So I’ve realized that the key to success in this world is networking. It’s all about who you know. As my dad said to me a few years ago, “Brains are neither necessary nor enough.” Great. Now he tells me.

Bill Conti is starting to play that funky music, white boy, so I’d better get off the stage. Okay, Stick Man, I’m going…

I’ll Take Manhattan

In therapy last night I hit on the idea that sometimes I just don’t feel good enough to live in Manhattan. I don’t really know why. My therapist — whom is in Manhattan — countered that if we went out onto the street and knocked on people’s doors and asked them to come outside, we’d probably find tons of people who wouldn’t fit my criteria of being “good enough to live in Manhattan.” So where does this idea of mine come from? It’s probably related to my envy of the types of people whom I saw in Central Park the other day.

On top of that, the idea of looking for an apartment in Manhattan intimidates me. I fear unscrupulous brokers, I fear having to shell out tons of money that I don’t have, I fear having to make a snap decision because there are twenty other people who want the apartment. (Or so I imagine.) I feel like there’s this natural selection process, that the ones who are resourceful enough to live in Manhattan are the only ones who belong there. I’m sure this argument is flawed, based as it is on the ideas that I’m not resourceful enough and that it takes superhuman powers to get a Manhattan apartment in the first place.

The other thing is affordability. I think my limit is probably $1100-$1200 per month, but preferably less. I don’t really care if the place is small — if it’s in a safe area and is secure and in good condition and clean, that’s enough. I’ve lived in small rooms before and I’ve had no problem.

Anyway, I decided that I need to break it down into small steps so that I’m not intimidated. So last night after therapy I picked up a copy of the Village Voice to look through the classifieds. Just to look. Just to see what prices are like in different neighborhoods, what’s available, and so forth. And since my newly-bought fan is doing a good job of drowning out noise, I feel less of an immediate need to move out of my current place. My lease ends on October 1, so I should use this to my advantage. Okay, I’ve looked at the classifieds. Next week, I’ll actually look at some apartments to see what I can get for my money.

I may as well make a plea to all my New York readers: if you know of any apartments that are opening up soon, or if you have any ideas, let me know, okay?

* * * * *

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here at work with my headphones on, listening to my old college a cappella group’s most recent CD, which came out a year ago. Last April I headed down to UVA for the group’s spring concert and I bought this CD. It was on a beautiful spring weekend that left me incredibly nostalgic for my UVA days. Driving back up north, listening to this CD, overcome with nostalgia for my eight years in Charlottesville, I started bawling. And a year later, I’ve been missing UVA a lot again lately. I guess that’s what spring can do.

Regrets

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about something that happened to me almost seven years ago. I’ve thought about it from time to time in the last few years — it’s one of those experiences that you file away and always remember. It haunts me.

Toward the end of my first year of college I came out to someone for the first time. It was a magical spring. Then, following a tortuous summer of introspection and self-exploration, I returned to school and started to come out to a handful of other people. Throughout my second year of college I slowly ventured out of the closet. One of the people I came out to that year was my gay friend Mark, with whom I sang in a mixed chorus at UVA. He was a year older than me and he was probably the closest of my few gay friends at the time. Mark and I were going to be living in the same dorm during the following year — my third year, his fourth.

But a few days before I went back to college for my third year, I came out to my parents, and they told me how unhappy they were, how they just couldn’t accept this from me, and I decided to go back into the closet. I figured I’d just put things on hold and hope that my feelings for guys would go away.

It was actually pretty easy to go back into the closet. I hadn’t told that many people. And when I returned to school that fall, I dissociated myself from the very few gay people I’d known. This was easy, as I was moving into a new dorm and the university was big. Except I couldn’t dissociate from Mark, since we were going to be sharing a bathroom with only six other people and I’d see him almost every day.

But a few days after we returned to school, he and I were going for a walk, and a sexy shirtless guy ran by in the late August heat. Mark made a comment to me about the guy, and I told him that I wasn’t interested in guys anymore. He seemed surprised, but he didn’t say anything.

Although I saw Mark several times a week throughout the entire academic year, and we had conversations about various things, we never again talked about my sexuality. I gave him no further explanation, and he never asked. That was that.

I began a year of asexuality. I had never had sex anyway, but now I wasn’t even going to give myself a label or come out to anyone else or associate with any gay people at all. I was just going to be me — well-behaved, asexual me. I still noticed guys, but I didn’t do anything about it or think about it. I didn’t think about the future; this was just the way things were going to be. That fall I joined the Glee Club, which helped; strange as it may sound, joining this brotherhood of fifty good looking, singing straight guys helped me sublimate my gay desires. I was too busy being one of the guys.

The long academic year went by — fall, winter, spring — and eventually it drew to a close. I was 20 years old.

One day in late April or early May, around the time of final exams, I was using one of the sinks in the bathroom when Mark and this other student came in. They were washing a hot pot or something — I guess they had been making a meal. Mark introduced me to his friend, whom I’ll call Scott; Scott lived in the dorm next to ours, and I’d seen him before. He was a fourth year like Mark. He was cute. I suspected he was gay. We said hi, and he smiled at me, and that was that.

Final exams came and went, and after that was Beach Week, the big week after finals and before graduation when it seemed like a third of UVA went down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for several days of partying. At Myrtle Beach I stayed with the guys from the Glee Club.

There was this dance club at Myrtle Beach called the Spanish Galleon. Everyone went there, gay or straight; there was no real gay dance club nearby, which didn’t matter to me anyway, since I considered myself asexual. Every year I’d go to the Spanish Galleon several times, dancing in big circles with groups of friends, male and female. Every night I’d feel this strange longing, unable to satisfy it. Most nights I’d leave the Spanish Galleon in this really poetic, romantic, yearning mood, feeling tortured and pained because I knew I didn’t have it inside me to do what would make me happy; the price was unthinkable. I was destined to live like this forever.

This particular year, I went to the Spanish Galleon one night. I was having a decent time, and then I noticed a bunch of guys all dancing in a circle together. One of them was Mark, and I think I recognized a couple of the other guys. I suspected that most if not all of these guys were gay. Uh-oh, danger flares going off. Get away, get away. I said hi to Mark, and before I knew it, he was drawing me into the group. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I sort of stood there, lamely attempting to dance, not really wanting to be there, because of what it might mean.

Then I realized that I recognized one of the guys near me. It was Scott, Mark’s cute gay friend from a few weeks earlier. He said hi to me, and my heart did a little dance. I said hi in return. We made some small talk. Then he asked me a casual question, just making conversation.

“Are you gay?”

Oh my god. He’d caught me completely off guard; I was stunned. I couldn’t think. I didn’t know what to say, or what I wanted to say. Of course you know what to say! Say no, you idiot! But I hesitated. And that did it. I’d given myself away.

“Uhh…” I said. “I guess I don’t know…”

I can’t really remember the details, but I think we talked for a little while, and then we decided to leave the club and go for a walk. We walked out of the club and onto the beach. We walked along the sand, underneath the starry night sky, the ocean waves crashing next to us. It couldn’t have been more romantic — it was straight out of a movie. As we walked along the beach, I told him all about my history of coming out of the closet and then going back in. He was going to be graduating that upcoming weekend and then going to Tulane Law School in the fall.

We continued to walk, and eventually we got to a segment of beach that was near the house where he was staying with a group of people, mostly females, I think. So we walked off the beach and walked up to the house.

When we got there, the night’s party was winding down. Scott went inside and got a blanket, and when he came back out, everyone else had pretty much left. He and I sat next to each other on one of the outdoor steps, side by side, a blanket covering our legs, my right leg almost imperceptibly brushing against his left leg. We were both wearing shorts. Pretty soon we were the only people outside. We sat there talking and talking. The sky was filled with stars, a breeze was blowing, I could hearing the waves crashing in the distance, and I was sitting next to this cute gay guy. Oh my god. This was amazing. I had never been in a situation like this. This was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me.

We talked for quite a while, I have no idea what about. This was not at all what I’d been expecting when I’d gone to the Spanish Galleon that night. At this point it was around 3:30 in the morning. Where was this going to lead? What was going to happen?

I can’t remember how it happened, but I eventually found myself deciding I had to leave. It was late and I was kind of tired; at least that’s what I told him. So we got up, and the spell was broken.

I was going to leave, just like that, but then he gave me his jacket because it was chilly out. “You can just give it back to me tomorrow,” he said. Tomorrow? Was this just a way for him to make sure he’d see me again?

I put the jacket on. I thanked him for the jacket and for talking with me, and we said goodbye, and I left. I began walking back to the straight world of the Glee Club.

Walking along Ocean Boulevard, the thought that I was wearing Scott’s jacket made me giddy. But thinking about the events of the evening, I was so confused. I was excited but nervous, scared, guilty. I’d broken my pledge not to come out to anyone else, not to associate with any more gay people; I’d broken my self-imposed pledge to be a good, well-behaved son and not to anger my parents.

I don’t know how well I slept that night. I don’t know if I dreamed about anything. But when I woke up the next morning, the jacket felt like a murder weapon. I got up, got dressed, and brought the jacket over to the house where Mark was staying. Mark wasn’t there, so I gave it to this other guy there who knew him and Scott. I gave him the jacket and asked him to make sure it got back to Scott.

I didn’t see Scott for the rest of the week. Then Beach Week ended, and everyone went back to UVA, and all the thousands of fourth years graduated, including Scott. I didn’t see him at all during graduation weekend.

But I saw Mark as he was moving out of his dorm after graduation. Mark’s boyfriend was there with him. Mark was leaving. This was goodbye. I’d inexplicably changed our friendship at the beginning of the year, telling him I no longer liked guys, becoming more aloof from him without further explanation. But I’m sure he knew something had happened that night at the beach; I’m sure he’d seen me and Scott leave the Spanish Galleon; and he must have known about the jacket.

I gave Mark a big, long hug. There was so much we had never talked about, so much I had never explained to him.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said, still hugging him.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he said.

And we said goodbye.

As for Scott — after that night at the beach, I never saw him again.

I wish I hadn’t left him there on the steps that night. Or I wish I’d looked for him on the beach the next day so I could return the jacket. After all, there had been a couple more nights of Beach Week remaining. A couple more nights to hang out.

But I did nothing. I chickened out. I never saw him again.

I’ve regretted it ever since.

Why I Write

I have a particular vision of Heaven. In Heaven there’s a big library. In this library — along with every book ever published in any language — there’s a special place that consists of miles and miles of shelves of special books. There’s one book for every single human being who’s ever lived. Each book is sort of a cross between a daily journal, a biography, and a multimedia experience. It contains a narrative of that person’s entire life. You can step into any moment of that person’s life and read about what they experienced and did and felt on any particular day, from that person’s point of view. Or you can read it in narrative form. You can even experience any moment of that person’s life through that person’s eyes, as in Being John Malkovich.

When I was 12 years old I read this book, and I immediately decided I wanted to start keeping a diary. After I turned 13, my parents gave me one as a Hanukkah present. It was a big blank book with lined pages and a painted cover, and it had a lock and key. I wrote my first entry on January 2, 1987. Although I haven’t written every day — somtimes days will go by without writing, sometimes a few weeks, and, rarely, a few months — I’ve been keeping a journal ever since. After I filled that first book, I bought another blank book and filled it. And then another one. Eventually I decided to start using spiral notebooks, because they’re cheaper and you feel less intimidated by grand expectations when you write in them.

And then, just over three months ago, I began a blog. I don’t know why I started it. But this is kind of comical in retrospect. At any rate, I rarely write in my spiral notebooks anymore. Now I do most of my daily chronicling here.

In the preface to his own published diary, A Diary of the Century, Edward Robb Ellis writes that there should be an American Diary Depository, a place where people can have their diaries sent after they die. Then anyone who wants can go and read about their lives. Edward Robb Ellis died in 1998. I wonder if he ever read any online journals? I wonder what he would have thought about blogs?

Keeping an online journal is kind of like NASA’s Voyager. But instead of sending out the Brandenburg Concertos and the structure of a DNA molecule, we send our thoughts and feelings and perceptions out into the ether for others to stumble across. And you know what? It’s just as important. What one person thinks about one little thing on one particular day is just as important as the greatest accomplishments in the history of humanity. Because it’s those little things that mean we exist in the first place, that make existence worthwhile.

That’s why I’m a devoted chronicler of my life and of the things that have happened in it. Because I exist. Because someday I’ll be gone, and I want it possible to be said: He lived. He was here.

Wow

Thanks to everyone who’s been e-mailing or IM’ing or commenting in response to my previous entry. I’m glad my words have been connecting with people. I’m getting a kick out of corresponding with some new bloggers and reading their blogs — that’s what this whole thing is all about, right? Seriously, it’s great to hear from people whom I don’t know, and I’m reading everything and trying to respond. So, thanks again — it means a lot.

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled TinManAngst™ to bring you the following Survivor-related thoughts.

Colby, Elisabeth, Keith and Tina. Tina, Elisabeth, Keith and Colby. Elisabeth and Colby and Tina and Keith… We’re going to be hearing a lot about them over the next two weeks. I’m sure they’ll be on the covers of Newsweek and TV Guide and given prominent consideration for next year’s Pulitzers, the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the Emmys and Tonys and Grammies and Obies and Clios and Razzies and Bloggies. (Oh my!)

I’ve only seen five episodes of Survivor II, but when I haven’t been watching, I’ve been reading the great weekly recaps over at Salon. And now it’s feeling exciting and tense again. Isn’t it weird how it sneaks up on you? At first the place seems so crowded and chummy, all these people competing in teams to win immunity challenges, all this group fun. Yay, let’s jump off cliffs! Team spirit! And then the tribes merge, and then there are fewer and fewer people, and then there are six, and then five, and things seem quiet and desolate and bleak, and you’re on the edge of your seat and your eyeballs are glued to the screen.

But… not really. I mean, I’m trying to feel like I did last August. I really am. I want to feel it. Yet isn’t there something missing from these final episodes? Last time there was Richard and his cool, calculating determination. This time, there’s, who, Keith? As with most sequels, it just doesn’t seem quite as exciting this time around. If you watched it last summer, it was such a phenomenon; you didn’t know what was going to happen, or what it was going to be like, and the nervousness and tension and suspense you were feeling were so unexpected. And that final two-hour episode — my God, there had never been anything like it before on American television. It was all so new. Even now, whenever I hear the tones of that opening shofar, or whatever it is they play at the beginning, I’m inexorably pulled back to memories of sitting on the couch on warm Wednesday nights in the apartment where I lived last summer, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, eating a chicken-with-broccoli combination dinner from the local Chinese take-out place, wondering what was going to happen. (And then switching to NBC at 9:00 for repeats of “The West Wing.”)

So, it’s not quite the same this time around. But it’s still interesting. I was a little creeped out to hear Elisabeth call Rodger her “outback daddy,” but he does seem like a sweet guy. As for Visa, I guess it really is everywhere you want to be. Hey, honey! Let’s go to the Australian Outback! They got Visa! I’m just glad they didn’t actually show Tina shopping online, Wheel-of-Fortune style, buying five hundred bucks’ worth of ceramic cats and Quasar TVs and stuff from Amazon.com and Pets.com and PlugYourCompanyHere.com. And they set up an iMac? In the Australian Outback? Okay. Why not.

And at least there’s Colby. Mmm… Colby.

And my bet on next week’s surprise visitor is Richard Hatch himself. Maybe not, but that’s my guess.

So we’ll see what happens.

Now back to your regularly-scheduled TinManAngst.™

If you’ve never done this before:

1. Dial Deutsche Bank/National Discount Brokers at 1-800-888-3999 (toll free in the U.S.)
2. Listen for option number 7.
3. Press 7 and listen.

The Ivory Beast

First things first: I need to address the big elephant sitting on my blog right now. (Hello, elephant? Would you mind moving your trunk off my keyboard? Thanks.) As cool as it’s been to have all these new eyeballs passing through since yesterday evening — and believe me, it’s been very cool — it’s made me even more self-conscious than I usually am. I’ve found it hard to write about personal things today. I mean, the Tin Man writing about Survivor? Come on. In all honesty, I do find the endgame of Survivor to be more exciting than most television, and also, I did feel like my blog needed a break from all the doom and gloom lately. So, in the eerily prescient words of Bob Dole in 1996, “I can be another Ronald Reagan if that’s what you want.” But if I start being so self-conscious about what I’m writing that I drive myself mad with writer’s block, that won’t be much fun. So I guess all I can do is acknowledge that this is a little weird for me right now and move on.

A friend of mine was supposed to be introducing me to this friend of his tonight — “I think you’ll like him,” he wrote. But it turns out the guy has someone visiting for the weekend. He could meet tomorrow night, but tomorrow night I have other plans, so I guess we’ll be introduced at a later date. Meanwhile, I’m still going out with the same friend and some other people tonight; we’re starting off at Barracuda, and then the plan is to go to this new place. I assume the new place is Heaven, which recently opened in Chelsea. There’s already a bar called Hell, so why not? Being gay can be equal mixtures of both. Maybe they should open a bar called Purgatory so we won’t have to make up our minds.

As for those other plans I have tomorrow night, I’m psyched! I can’t wait to go to the party at RJ‘s place. And the bonus, I learned today, is that Sparky will be there! Sparky intrigues me, and I’m really curious to see what he’s like in person. He has no idea what I look like, while I’ve seen those nice photos on his website, so RJ may have to do a little introducin’. I’m looking forward to it.

Whenever I hear about someone who regularly jacks off three times a day, I worry that there’s something wrong with me. First thing in the morning? Forget it. I’m usually too tired. So I was relieved to read that there are others, like me, who will sometimes go several days without killing it.

Cruising

Last night wound up being uneventful. I met up with my friend, whom I’ll call Arch, and his boyfriend, whom I’ll call Carrot. Arch is a black guy with glasses, about 5’8, and Carrot is a fair-skinned, red-haired white guy, about 6’4. I wouldn’t peg them as a couple if I saw them together, but then again, everyone’s the same in bed, right? It’s a Benetton world.

On the way over to meet them at Barracuda, I ran into UrbanPlanner and his boyfriend. UrbanPlanner and I will be seeing the Beaux Arts Trio on Sunday for $6.50 — not a bad price for a legendary chamber music group.

I got to Barracuda, and Arch and Carrot arrived a few minutes later. It was strangely uncrowded. Too uncrowded. So we walked through Chelsea, down Eighth Avenue, and over to the new place — which was not Heaven, as I’d thought, but rather another new place called XL. There was a line outside, a long line of identical tight-shirted buzz-cut Chelsea boys. No thanks, we said, so finally we wound up at g.

While Barracuda had been desolate, g was packed. g has a circular bar, and to get anywhere, you have to move along the donut-shaped path that runs between the bar and the wall. We squeezed ourselves along like toothpaste. Arch and I each got a Corona, and the three of us stood there and talked and looked at the boys. I’d decided to wear the same outfit that had made me feel so good last weekend — tight black gay-boy t-shirt, jeans — but I didn’t feel as good as last time. g has so much New York attitude and smugness, and we remarked that there didn’t seem to be much cruising going on. Perhaps, like me, everyone was too afraid to cruise. Or maybe it was too crowded to cruise. Or maybe I just didn’t look glamorous enough. Whatever. Take me back to the East Village.

We didn’t stay for very long, so we left and wandered around, and Carrot felt like going home to Queens, and I felt like going home to sleep, so we split up less than two hours after we’d met up.

Morals:

1) I don’t like Chelsea. I always forget this. Chelsea is the Los Angeles of New York City. Everyone and everything looks the same, and it’s just too intimidating; everyone is trying too hard to impress. But I can’t hang out in the same places all the time, and it’s nice to have a change every so often. It just makes me appreciate my preferred hangouts that much more.

2) I can’t cruise. This I’ve known. I’ve written about it here before. I just can’t do it. I have a mental block. Maybe it’s Chelsea; what average guy could cruise in a place like g? It seems a little less threatening in the East Village, and a little easier. Arch told me that he thinks the East Village bars are probably more my style. But really, I think cruising just isn’t for me, at least not now. Other than the sheer fun of it, the reasons for cruising are:

Reason #1:To find romance. But I seriously doubt I’m going to find the love of my life in a bar — yes, I know I shouldn’t say that; why close off potential opportunities? But really. The possibility that the random guy over there will not only be attractive, but will also turn out to be totally compatible with my soul and my personality and my desires to boot — it just doesn’t seem likely. There has to be some sort of filtering process. In the last few months I’ve decided that the way to get a boyfriend is by having your friends introduce you to other people. That’s one of the best filtering processes: if you share a friend in common, then there’s a better chance you’ll have some common interests as well. There’s no better recommendation than that of a friend.

Reason #2: To find sex. I can’t cruise in public for sex, though. If I’m going to find a hookup for the night, I go online. It feels lame and antisocial and furtive to write that, but I think I have a hangup about anonymous sex, as fun as it is. It’s something I try to get out of my system, something I tend to do more impulsively than not, something I prefer to do from behind the comfort of my own computer screen. I think I need to become more comfortable with my sexual desires, let them out in the open a bit more, be more comfortable publicly advertising a desire to get laid.

But my biggest barrier to cruising is that I’m just plain shy. If I see a cute guy at a bar or club, and we make eye contact, I get nervous. I look away. Oh, if there’s an initial hello, that’s different. Get me into a conversation and I’m fine. And I can talk to people at parties, where it’s less goal-oriented and more enjoyable. But starting up a conversation with an anonymous person at a bar — that’s harder. It’s this barrier that I can’t seem to get past.

The Party

I got home from RJ’s big bash after 4 in the morning, went to bed around 4:30, and then, for some stupid reason, I woke up at 7:45 and couldn’t fall back asleep. Great. On a weekday, when I really need to get up, I can’t, but on the weekend, my body’s just rarin’ to hop out of bed with the early morning birds. I think my body and I need to have ourselves a little talk.

So I’ve spent the entire day exhausted. This afternoon I met up with UrbanPlanner to see the Beaux Arts Trio, which was fabulous, despite the fact that I nearly fell asleep several times. I have a thing for chamber music. A chamber piece is like a conversation among friends: there’s one instrument per part, and you can listen to the interplay among them. A piano trio, you may or may not know, consists of a piano, a violin and a cello. The Beaux Arts Trio has been around forever, and the pianist, Menahem Pressler, is this cute rotund dwarf with a very expressive face; he’s so much fun to watch. The concert was terrific, made up of works by Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert.

We had lunch beforehand at Junior’s in Grand Central Station. Sitting next to our table was this Adonis eating lunch by himself. Oh my God. He was blond with incredibly clear skin, and he was massive; his smooth muscled arms were rippling beneath his tight white t-shirt, which was tucked into a pair of tight blue jeans. I couldn’t take my eyes off him during the meal. He was so hot that I was actually still thinking about him during the concert.

But anyway, you don’t care about this, right? You want to know about the party.

RJ and his roommate were super hosts. There was plenty of alcohol, a huge spread of food, a great apartment full of interesting people. These two know how to throw a party, and it was great of them to open their home to all of us horny homos.

It was a blast to meet some more fellow bloggers. First, there was the dashing and droll Troy. Then there was the joyfully charismatic and charming Sparky, with whom I talked for quite a while. (You can read Sparky’s account of the party; he’s totally pegged the embarrassment of explaining to someone that you’ve met the person standing next to you because you both have blogs.) And finally, of course, there was our host, whom I’d already met a few weeks ago — RJ, the man with the deep blue eyes and the heart of gold.

As for me, I was bubbling over with neuroses at this party. I’d been looking forward to it all week, but by the time Saturday evening arrived, my excitement had turned to nervousness. Could this party possibly meet the expectations I’d created in my mind? Would I meet someone for a hot one-night stand? Would I meet the love of my life? I’d pegged all my hopes on this party; I’d made it out to be the only social event of the entire spring season, the only opportunity to meet people between now and the time the leaves start to turn orange again. You can’t function well under that kind of pressure. Something has to give.

I wore the wrong shirt. I should have worn my black t-shirt. Instead I wore a dark blue short-sleeve cotton button-down shirt over a white tee. I was surrounded by all these gay men wearing tight t-shirts with short clingy sleeves to show off their upper arms, and I felt slightly out of place and unattractive. I saw potential targets, but nothing happened. I even would have slept with the guy with the black t-shirt and the big arms whom Sparky knew, the self-described “power bottom,” even though the guy was sort of weird. Jeez — you know, when it comes down to it, I really am a horny bastard. But I think I have to work on my vibes. Either I didn’t give off “have sex with me” vibes, or people just didn’t find me attractive enough, or maybe they weren’t horny. I was wearing the wrong shirt, or I should have worn my contacts instead of my glasses, or I shouldn’t have had a goatee. Although to be honest, most people left without a warm body for the evening. And you know what? That’s really all I wanted. Sex would have been great, but not necessary; most of all, I just wanted to cuddle up with someone warm.

My insecurity built over the course of the night. I was one of the last people to leave. I was feeling rather down on myself for various reasons, and I was feeling some things that were confusing, things I don’t think I want to go into here. I walked out onto the street and wandered around the East Village for a few minutes, trying to be all poetic, filled with hopeful visions of walking around brooding until the sun rose over the Brooklyn Bridge, just like a movie. But I was too tired to act out a drama on the streets of Manhattan, so I turned myself back around and walked the several blocks to the PATH station. Shortly thereafter, I got home and went to bed, and shortly thereafter, I woke up, exhausted.

That pretty much brings us full circle, doesn’t it?

Never a dull moment here at The Tin Man. Last night I received the following e-mail in response to my latest post. Here it is in full. I won’t use his real name since I didn’t ask. The first paragraph is what he quoted from my post.

********
Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 23:58:35 -0400
From: __________ <____ @paxemail.com>
To: fois25@yahoo.com
Subject: Your latest post.

“Sitting next to our table was this Adonis eating lunch by himself. Oh my God. He was blond with incredibly clear skin, and he was massive; his smooth muscled arms were rippling beneath his tight white t-shirt, which was tucked into a pair of tight blue jeans. I couldn’t take my eyes off him during the meal. He was so hot that I was actually still thinking about him during the concert.”

How disgusting! We’re talking a GUY talking about a GUY! I can cope with gay men until I start thinking about what they do….putting one guys dick up inside the anus of another man. How gross! (Not to mention un-natural.) No wonder AIDS gets passed around with guy’s cocks constantly ripping anal fissures inside the anus of other men. Easy mix for blood, sperm, and an entry into your bloodstream! This was a disgusting post as it got me thinking about just what it is faggot’s actually do with each other. Do you talk like a fag? I have always been curious why – if it is truly biological – why gay men have to throw in that feminine flaming voice. Back when gays were “in the closet” they didn’t have that! But now, since you guys feel so “accepted” you flame with that sick, girly, sing-songy voice that makes those who hear it want to turn and vomit. REAL men don’t suck dick. REAL men want hot young blonde FEMALES. AND, they want to place their penis within the walls of a nice, wet pussy – not force it in the exitway for SHIT! God, that’s gross.

********

Here’s what I wrote back this morning. (As usual, I had verbal and mental diarrhea.)

********
________,

Thanks for writing.

From the tone of your message, I’m not sure if you wanted a response or if you just wanted to express how you feel. At any rate, I figured I’d respond. I see that you have a PAX e-mail address, so I’ll assume that you have strong beliefs. I will tell you what my own beliefs are. I did not ask you to write me, but I read your message, and I ask for the same in return. If you are right, you are right, but I ask that you keep an open mind, even if only for a few minutes.

First off, you have every right to find gay sex disgusting. Nobody is telling you to have sex with a man. You are a straight man and you like women. I am a gay man and I like men. Live and let live. This is America. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

You asked me, “Do you talk like a fag?”

Are you asking, do I talk with an effeminate voice, with a lisp, that sort of thing? The answer is no, I don’t. Actually, I would venture to guess that a majority of gay men don’t talk that way either. A majority of gay men are indistinguishable from most straight men in the way they talk. And to be honest, personally I tend not to be attracted to effeminate men. Some gay guys like effeminate men, some don’t; it’s really a personal thing.

“I have always been curious why – if it is truly biological – why gay men have to throw in that feminine flaming voice. Back when gays were ‘in the closet’ they didn’t have that.”

I’ve actually wondered about that very same question. I tend to think homosexual attraction is mostly biological — there have been genetic studies that provide some evidence for this (the book “The Science of Desire” has an overview of the genetic research). Others say it’s psychological or environmental, and others think it’s a combination of factors.

You ask, if it’s biological, why do so many gay men have effeminate voices? I have no idea, to be honest. But how come so many gay men do *not* have effeminate voices?

Not even all straight men speak the same way. Some speak in a really butch voice, while others speak in a more neutral voice. Which of them is more of a man? I even know a few straight guys who have effeminate voices. I think the way people talk is explained by environmental factors, but I think sexual attraction is explained by biology. You’re free to refute this of course.

You say that back when gay men were in the closet, they didn’t speak in effeminate voices. Actually — if you read some Edmund White — especially “A Boy’s Own Story” or “The Beautiful Room is Empty” — he writes about gay men in the 1950′s and 1960′s, and even back then, there were gay men who were effeminate. There are lots of men who talk that way and just can’t help it. It’s not that gay men start speaking in effeminate voices after they come out of the closet — some gay men just speak that way from the time they’re kids and still hide the fact that they’re attracted to men. They just can’t help but speak that way. I don’t really know why. But again, I think the way people speak is tied to psychology and environmental factors.

“No wonder AIDS gets passed around with guy’s cocks constantly ripping anal fissures inside the anus of other men. Easy mix for blood, sperm, and an entry into your bloodstream!”

You are right on that point. HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) is spread much more easily through anal sex than through vaginal sex. That’s why it’s so important to use condoms during anal sex, whether a guy is sticking his cock up a man’s ass or a woman’s ass. Unfortunately there are still people who don’t. But I think anyone who has anal sex had better use a condom if he or she wants to remain healthy.

“REAL men don’t suck dick. REAL men want hot young blonde FEMALES.”

Actually I have to say that you’re wrong on that point. What makes a man? A man has an XY chromosome and a penis and testosterone. That’s about the only thing that defines a man. Within the category of men, there is wide variety. After all, there are more than 3 billion men on the planet.

And there are actually plenty of big, buff, strong, tough guys with beards and muscles and hairy bodies who talk like truck drivers and love to watch ESPN but who also like to take it up the ass or fuck guys up the ass. You may not believe it but it’s true. Are they real men? I don’t think it makes sense to define a real man by who he has sex with.

“AND, they want to place their penis within the walls of a nice, wet pussy – not force it in the exitway for SHIT!”

And the pussy is the exitway for piss, so I don’t see your point.

Look, I don’t expect to change your beliefs, but I know there are people out there who have concerns about gay people and their desires. I honestly think the best way to answer those concerns is for people to discuss these things. Gay people and straight people should both take the time to listen to those who feel differently from them. People of all types should truly listen to each other. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, of course, and I think the best way to test one’s beliefs is to discuss them with people who disagree.

The fact is, I’m attracted to men, sexually and emotionally. I’m visually attracted to the curves of a fit man’s body, to his muscles, to the smell of a well-groomed guy, to a man’s good looks. And it’s more than that. I am sure that when you are in love with a woman, it’s about more than just sex. It’s the same with gay people. It’s about who I want to settle down with and care for someday. It’s about what a guy is like on the inside as well as on the outside.

I don’t know why I’m gay, and it doesn’t really matter why. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just who I am. Heck — half the human population is attracted to men, so it’s not exactly unusual. And more than 90 percent of the world is straight, and it will always be that way, so why not just be satisfied with that, and live and let live?

Thanks again.

********

A little while ago, he wrote back:

********

Jeff,

Okay, I am still put off by gay sex. However, I must say I am surprised at your measured and well tought out response. I will ponder. By the way, you mentioned the Pax e-mail address. I was confused what you meant by what you said about since I had a Pax address I must have strang feelings. I found them through a “free web-based e-mail” page full of links and love the simple interface. I haven’t the foggiest what Pax is. So, I went to their home page and checked it out. Now, I see why you might have thought that it had something to do with my note. In fact, It didn’t. In fact, I am not a Christian, I do not believe in “God” and my motto is: “Faith in Humanity – Not in Gods and Dollars”…..
I read my e-mail again and I realize I was totally out-of-line. I really was.
I am not sure what the attraction is – it seems different for sure, but who the hell am I?
Sorry if I hurt you in any way. I feel ashamed at this point and don’t know what else to say.
Have a good week, Jeff.
______

********

Makes me feel better about having written this.

I’m feeling really good about humanity today.

The Vagina Monoblogues

First of all, thanks to everyone who pointed out my ignorance of the female anatomy. It turns out that piss does not come out of a woman’s vagina, because the urethra is separate from all that other plumbing. Or something. Anyway, Keithers sent me this lovely illustration, which would be enough to make me gay if I weren’t already. Or maybe I’m just saying that because I’m gay.

But enough about vaginas. Please?

Thanks.

Dean took my thoughts on gayspeak and ran with them to places I wish I’d discovered first. As usual, he’s thought about the things I wish I’d thought about and written about them with elegance and intellectual incisiveness. That’s why they pay grad students the big bucks. (Okay, okay, stop laughing! It’s just a saying.)

These two accounts of a chance meeting four years ago absolutely gave me tingles and a whole lot of hope. It makes me think of something that someone’s mother (not mine) once said, and it’s among the best advice ever given: “Go! You might meet someone!”

Finally, Mike has written a quite beautiful and heartfelt entry about Buffalo; I think it’s one of his best blog entries ever.

See the Tin Man

There was apparently a Tin Man sighting this weekend.

Be nice.

(also saved here)

Normalcy Revisited

My recent thoughts on normalcy, particularly this from last week, have evoked some responses. So I wanted to go back to that subject.

Yesterday, a young gay professional in Manhattan wrote to tell me that he lives a life very similar to the one I was envying. But:

My very environment I fear has slipped me into the perversely routine stride of the gay man who very rarely even has opportunity to enjoy the company of another gay man. Even as I make plans for yet another evening of dinner and drinks with three heterosexual couples who all “can’t believe that I haven’t been snatched up by a great guy” I perpetuate and fear that acute normalcy. I look at my life and I realize that it is exactly that satirically comfortable “normalcy” that is preventing my contentment…

Can you see why your entry made me smile an ironic smile? I suddenly realized that I in some superficial manner I possessed some of which you felt you were missing but at the same time I was reading envious at your exploits and companions in the electric gay world of New York that seems to me so far from possible reach. Envy is so clever in the way it produces absurd ironies, I could not help but grin at us both.

It made me think. I think most of my visions of “normalcy” are a fantasy; they come from TV, and from images of fresh young Gen-Xers living their fun, yuppie, straight lives. And when I really ponder it, what I want is not to be straight; what I want is to have more of a classic 20-something social life. I’m having the very ordinary syndrome of looking at other people’s lives and imagining that they’re having much more fun than me, that they’re all part of this big happy group of people, just like on “Friends.” Perhaps this kind of “grass is greener” feeling means that I’m actually an optimist; after all, I’m seeing that what I want to have is actually possible — only I’m seeing it in other people and not in myself.

And if I’m having this very ordinary syndrome, I guess that means I’m normal after all.

And more recently I’ve realized that my social life here is gradually developing. I grew up only half an hour from Manhattan, and my family and I would visit the city all the time — my parents’ lives have always been very Manhattan-centered — but I’ve never really lived as close to it as I do now. I spent three years of high school in Japan and then eight years living in Virginia. It’s only since I’ve moved to Jersey City that Manhattan has become the center of my social life. So, familiar as I used to think I was with the city — all the snobbery I used to feel when I’d tell people that I grew up in the New York City area — in a way it’s actually a new place to me. A couple of people have told me that when you move to a new city, it can take a good two years to develop a solid social life. But I’m developing one; it’s happening.

Lord, maybe I’m normal after all. Or nobody is. Or both.

* * * *

I realized that today is my 100th day of blogging, and that’s probably significant only to me, but that’s okay. It feels like it’s been a lot longer. This thing has taken over my life. I’ve created a monster, and it’s sprouted various tentacles. Remember that Japanese toy, the Tamagochi? That’s what it feels like. And like this. Feed me! Update me! Change my diaper! And I love it. It’s my virtual baby.

Epiphany

Someone online asked me the other night if I wished I weren’t gay. No, I don’t wish I weren’t gay. But I used to.

It took me forever even to classify myself as gay — or at least it feels like forever — because although I knew I liked guys, I wasn’t sure how I felt about women. My attraction to women is not zero; I find women aesthetically pleasing, even attractive. Yet I don’t feel that spark with them that I do with men. With men, I feel pure electricity.

But I did fool around with a woman once.

I’d known her for nearly two years. She and I had become good friends, because we clicked; we were both from New Jersey, and I’d drive her back home from UVA sometimes. She played the piano, which is a skill that impresses me, and we were both interested in classical music. But there were always unresolved emotional questions between us. I was never really sure what was going on here.

In January 1998 I drove her back to school after a monthlong winter break. I was in my second year of law school, and she was in her final year of college. It was still a couple of days before the masses started returning, and we had nothing to do, so we went out to dinner and then rented a movie and took it back to my apartment. My two roommates hadn’t come back from vacation yet.

My bedroom had a double-sized futon, which easily folded up into a couch, so we sat there in my bedroom on the couch and popped in Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway.” Just sat there in the dark, watching the movie.

And then, towards the end, stuff started happening.

We’d somehow moved closer together on the couch. I was 24, and I had never really done anything with a guy, let alone a girl. Her hand was on my arm, and then my arm was around her shoulder and she was sort of leaning against me, and then the movie — of which I’d long lost any awareness — ended, and the credits rolled, to the tune of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave.” I was sitting there on the couch, my arm around a girl, my heart beating faster, listening to the words, “They say that bears have love affairs, and even camels… we’re merely mammals… let’s misbehave!” It must have been a sign.

Her pants stayed on, and the only thing her mouth touched was my mouth, but other than that, we did lots of exploring. For me, it was exciting primarily for its novelty; I’d always wondered what a woman would be like. But except for the novelty, it didn’t really do much for me.

I didn’t let her spend the night — I drove her home. A few days later I told her — through e-mail, real classy — that I valued our friendship and I wanted it to stay that way. She wondered why, but she let it be, and we stayed friends.

It didn’t end my confusion, though. I still didn’t know what I was. Was I gay? Was I bisexual? Was I straight and merely repressing my feelings for women because I was scared of them? And after all, if there was any possibility that I could feel something for a woman, what right did I have to pursue men?

It was only about three years ago — several months after that movie night — that I realized how silly this all was. It hit me in an epiphany on a summer afternoon. That summer I was working my way through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, getting in touch with my inner artist and my deepest desires. One of the exercises was to write about your ideal day. Somehow I found myself writing about leaving work on a Friday afternoon and driving up to Litchfield, Connecticut, where I’d meet up with my boyfriend at our weekend home. I think we had a dog or two. I was writing this and felt so happy, so wonderful, and something just opened up inside me. Why now? How do babies know when to be born? It was just time.

I suddenly realized, none of the confusion matters! None of this matters. I don’t have to “prove” my sexuality to anyone. It’s not a math problem, it’s not a court case. Very simply: This is what makes me happy. I don’t have to wait for someone to give my emotions and feelings the respect that they deserve. There’s already a person who can do that, and that person is me. For the first time, I could really see a happy future for myself.

Over the next several months the closet doors flew off. (Except with my parents; that came later.) My last year of law school was the first year I felt truly out. I told my friends, I wrote articles in the school papers, I started dating, I started having sex. It was terrific.

I’ve really come to like being gay, or perhaps I’ve just become comfortable in my own skin. Which is good, because it’s the only skin I’m ever going to have.

New York Night

Last night, after watching “The Colby Show” — oh, I’m sorry, “Survivor” — I went out drinking with a rather charming guy. We started out in Hell and eventually ascended to Starlight (sheesh, those New York bar names). Four hours of intelligent conversation, three and a half Coronas, one and a half bourbon and Cokes, and one Peanut Butter Twix bar later, I came home and went to bed, nicely buzzed. I woke up four hours after I’d gone to bed, picked up the phone, called into work to say I’d be using some of my sick hours, got back into bed, felt nauseous, got up, nothing happened, went back to bed, felt nauseous again, got up, nothing happened again, got back into bed, fell asleep. Woke up around noon, had a bowl of Crispix and a glass of OJ, showered, dressed and came into work. I still feel a little hung over.

It had been a long time since I’d gone out on a Thursday night and gotten myself nicely drunk. It was just like those good old college and law school days. I’ll have to do this more often.

Random TV Notes on a Hung-over Friday Afternoon

You know that if Colby doesn’t win the immunity challenge next week, he’s toast. Go, Colby, go! We know you can do it again.

“The Simpsons” will be entering its 12th-and-a-half season on the air next fall.

“Friends” will be entering its 8th season.

“ER” will be entering its 8th season, and it’s always been in the same timeslot.

“The X-Files” will be entering its 9th season.

“Frasier” will be entering its 9th season.

“The Late Show With Conan O’Brien” will be entering its 9th season.

This year is NBC’s 75th anniversary. That includes radio.

In January “The Today Show” will celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Kelsey Grammer has been playing Dr. Frasier Crane for 17 years.

If it was supposed to be the opening night at a New York gay bar, why was it so empty?

Contradictions

Yesterday afternoon, nearly halfway through the weekend, I was looking ahead to a lonely Saturday night with no plans. And I was also craving a change. I needed to get out of the city. I was missing Charlottesville, Virginia, where I went to school, and I craved an all-American Saturday night: dinner at a generic fern-bar-type chain restaurant, followed by a movie at a multiplex. Driving around in a car. It was consuming me, I was missing it so much. At around 3:30 I called up my former roommate, whom I’ll call Mack, in central New Jersey. “Do you have any plans tonight?” “I have no plans,” he said, and so I packed some things for an overnight stay and took the New Jersey Transit train down to New Brunswick.

I lived with Mack before I moved up here in the fall; I moved into his guest room last March after needing to get out of a bad roommate situation. Mack is a 35-year-old gay attorney with a great condo and great finances, and we have a deep friendship. We’re both gay, we’re both Jewish, we’re both lawyers, we’re both from New Jersey (albeit different parts). We click in that way. I’ve known him for about a year and a half.

Mack picked me up at the New Brunswick train station and we drove the 20 minutes back to his condo. His yellow labrador puppy greeted us; I was still living with Mack when he bought her, so she has a deep affection for me and goes nuts whenever she sees me. Given that she’s a yellow lab puppy, she’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen, although she’s a lot bigger than she was eight months ago.

After watching the most recent episode of “The West Wing” on tape, we went out to TGI Friday’s for dinner. It was exactly what I needed. And since I’m nearly broke, it was on him. While waiting for our names to be called, we walked across the parking lot to Wal-Mart, where Mack bought puppy supplies and I looked at all the white trash. How do they make it north of the Mason-Dixon Line? And why do they always go to Wal-Mart? (No offense to any intelligent self-proclaimed white-trash bloggers who live in the East Village.)

As we were walking over to Wal-Mart I decided I didn’t want to see a movie afterward. Instead, I suggested we go out to one of the gay clubs he likes, where I used to go with him when I still lived with him. So after a long, hearty, generic TGI Friday’s meal — mine was a house salad followed by Jack Daniel’s chicken with a pineapple slice and green beans and a baked potato slathered with bacon bits and sour cream — all very fulfilling — we went back to his place, changed, and then hit the road.

We drove all the way to bucolic New Hope, Pennsylania, to go to the Cartwheel. (The link has a photo.) The Cartwheel is about a 45-minute drive from Mack’s place. We drove along dark, quiet, rural roads, listening to a Saturday night dance mix on an FM radio station, Mack’s brights on so we could look out for deer.

I hadn’t been to the Cartwheel since September, and I was preparing myself for a nice change: none of that New York gay attitude, much less glamour, and more friendliness. But the place was packed with plenty of broad-chested, tight-tee-shirt-wearing guys, and there was a bright glitzy dance floor and earsplitting music. In my mind I’d exaggerated the differences. Gay life turns out to be the same everywhere.

We had a nice time, and we ran into several people that Mack knew. Running into someone you know rarely seems to happen in an New York gay bar, at least in my experience.

After a couple of hours, we drove back home, back along the winding country roads. It was 2 in the morning and I saw the brightest stars I’d seen in ages; I opened the window, stuck my head out and looked up at the twinkling night sky, the wind whipping my face, just like a dog. Then I looked across the fields at the mountains in the distance, silhouetted in black against the dark sky that looked only gray in comparison. I gulped down the scenery thirstily, thinking, This is what I’ve needed. How can human beings live without nature? I need and love nature just as I need and love men. Nature is erotic. Nature arouses you. Nature is as necessary as sex.

Eventually we got back to Mack’s place and I went to sleep on his couch, where I had vivid dreams.

Around noon today we went out for brunch, which Mack subsidized again (although I paid five bucks as a token gesture of chipping in). It was a beautiful spring afternoon, warm and brightly sunny, so afterward we decided to take the dog and drive out to the Delaware and Raritan Canal. Mack let her off the leash and the three of us walked through the woods, along a dirt path, stepping over fallen tree trunks, looking up at the bright green baby leaves and the light blue sky above them and then down at the grass and the wildflowers. Next to us was the rushing river. Nobody else was around. It was pure heaven. We got to a bank and Mack would throw a stick into the water and the dog would run in, fetch it, swim back, shake herself off dizzily, and make Mack do it again and again and again. She was adorable.

I took off my watch and put it in my pocket, and I thought, why do I want to live in Manhattan? I could move back to central New Jersey, and I could have a car again, and cheaper rent, and I could go to the Den every Friday night, a friendly gay club where Mack has gone almost every Friday night for almost ten years, except when he’s been on vacation in one foreign country or another, which he does several times a year. I could become a regular at the Den, and I could make friends like Mack has, and maybe even meet a special guy.

And then I think, but I’d be living in central New Jersey, and I’d have to drive to and from work again, and deal with rush hour traffic, and boring suburbanites, and have nothing to do on weekday evenings. And I’d have to live among the cookie-cutter condo developments and McMansions that have sprouted up across central New Jersey like kudzu over the last decade, in the wake of all the office parks that have sprung up along bland Route 1, clogging the meager roads and highways that were built during George Washington’s time and creating sprawl and ruining the wilderness and keeping everyone apart from each other in their safe, cozy homes.

Why does everything have to have a cost? A tradeoff? Why does everything have to have an up side and a down side? This is why I can never make decisions. I keep looking for the choice that doesn’t come with a downside. I am fickle, easily swayed, easily unsatisfied; I want it all. I want urban culture and crowds of sophisticated people, and I want quietness and nature. I want to have a car and listen to FM radio and NPR (which I haven’t done in ages), and I want to commute by train. I want excitement and I want the comfort of regularity. Can you have both excitement and comfort? Is that possible? Can you just possibly get by with only one of those? But is that any way to live?

I also know that one reason I’ve strived to make Manhattan the center of my life is because I think it’s the only place I’ll find a boyfriend — that the chances are greater sheerly because of quantity. There are so many more young gay men in the city, so isn’t the possibility stronger that I’ll find him there? Maybe, maybe not. But I know that somewhere inside myself, I want to wade into the city, find me a man, and drag him back out — grabbing his hair in one of my hands and a club in the other.

I don’t know what the hell I want out of life. I wish my goals wouldn’t keep changing. I wish I could have everything I want, right now, even if everything contradicts everything else. I’m impatient. I want it all now.

Tin Men

www.tinman.com

www.thetinman.com

www.the-tin-man.com

www.tin-man.com

www.onthesquare.com/tinman40.nsf

www.tias.com/stores/tinman

www.tinmandental.com

webby.umeedu.maine.edu/coehd/tinmanst/tinmanstudent.htm

www.diamondcuttersintl.com/womens_only/the_scarecrow.asp

www.fastcompany.com/online/03/boss.html

pages.prodigy.net/jschla/tinman.htm

www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004T8RL/103-9566816-5038244

www.sisterfriends.com/relationships_wjuly.htm

www.tinmanonline.com