Posts - April 2003

Since I have nothing to blog about today, I’m going to cheat and present something I’ve already written. I found it on my hard drive this morning. In November 2001, I participated in National Novel-Writing Month, in which you are supposed to write a 50,000-word novel in a month. For several nights in a row, I sat down at my computer and just typed, typed, typed, not editing, not looking back. I never finished, but here are the first five of the 19 pages that I wrote.

So I figured that since it’s possible I could die any day, it would be a good idea to get my life down on paper before that happens. You could die in a car accident or you could die of anxiety or you could die of something totally crazy, like hypothermia. You could die. You will die. You’d better write down your life story before someone else tries to turn it into a movie of the week with McDonald’s tie-ins.

This is all about me being gay. You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard these days. I mean, today gay people get marketed and have Bud practically forced down their open throats and march in parades with their Chinese babies and so forth. But I’m neurotic, so everything has to be hard for me.

Rubber bands. It didn’t all begin with rubber bands, but that’s the first thing that comes to mind. When I was a little kid, my parents were both smokers. They quit. I remember my dad smoking these candy cigarettes because he had to get rid of his oral fixation. He used to smoke Kools, but then it became not kool for him to do that anymore, so he had to quit.

One of the methods he used to quit, other than the candy cigarettes, was by putting a rubber band around his wrist. Every time he had the urge to smoke, he’d snap the rubber band. It was supposed to be Pavlovian. You ring the bell and the dogs start salivating. In this case, though, you pull the band and it stings your wrist and it hurts. You begin to associate smoking with pain, and it makes you not want to smoke anymore.

Eighth grade, standing in the bathroom on the third floor of our house, the bathroom only I used. I decided the only way this was going to go away was if I wore a rubber band and snapped it whenever I thought about guys. Oh, he’s hot. Snap. Ow. So’s he. Snap. Ow. And him. Ow. Nice muscles. Ow. Nice eyes. Ow! Ow! Ow!

Did it work?

Damn, he’s hot.

I guess not.

Ow.

Hanging out in the den at home, looking at the bookshelves in the corner of the room, my parents’ books from the late 60s and 70s, but seeming much more ancient. Covered with dust. Cracking plastic shiny dust jackets. One of the books looks intriguing, even to my eleven-year-old self. Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). That asterisk — something so mysterious and evil about it, the asterisk takes it out of my oeuvre.

I open the book and look through the index at the back. For the very first time, I do something that I will do so many more times in my life: I turn to the index and look up the word homosexual. It doesn’t matter what kind of book it is — a book about sex, a history tome, especially books about psychology. Are there homosexuals in it? If so, I want to know.

How did I know what homosexuals were? I didn’t know I was one, did I? Perhaps I did in some way. We all know we’re gay without knowing that we’re gay. When I was in elementary school, some jerk of a kid, Billy Hollander, made fun of someone by calling him gay. Up until then I knew what “gay” meant. Happy. In an early-20th-century-kinda way, the same era when “Happy Birthday” was written and Mother’s Day was invented and Coca-Cola was only newly free of cocaine. The founding period of modern America. Everything we see as cheesy today was invented back then. Same as the word “gay.”

But he used the word derisively, made fun of it. And it was as if I’d always known it was a dirty word. But I challenged him.

“What’s wrong with calling someone gay?” I said.

“Gay means love,” he said.

“Gay means happy,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Gay is happy and happy is love, so gay means love.”

Back then, love was bad. It was something that girls did. Girls loved. Not boys. Boys played basketball with their prepubscent non-smelly sweat, free of poisonous, troublesome, devilish hormones. Girls ran around the playground. The kissing girls. Run from the kissing girls! They’d chase you around the field, running after you, trying to kiss you, and if you knew what was good for you (and all boys did) you’d run like hell to get away from them. Girls loved. Boys played games. Boys didn’t want to be loved.

Love is gay. Boys don’t love. Boys aren’t gay. Gay is bad.

And I knew that before I knew it.

“Fag,” the entry for homosexual said. This was in a list of other derogatory words for homosexuals. There was also something about sailors. Trade. Were sailors gay? Those dark lecherous sailors on the mist-covered docks at eventide, smelling of fish, kneeling down in their sailor suits to suck each other’s cocks. Furtive. They were fags. They were homosexuals.

“He’s just a frustrated homosexual,” my mom said one day. She was talking about a teacher in her school. Okay, I thought. So homosexuals are frustrated. I’m pretty frustrated. Am I a homosexual?

Parents say so many things that they don’t think their children will hear. But we’re like flypaper. Selective flypaper, anyway. The strangest things stick to us. Tell us to remember to lock the front door and it’ll fly right through our heads, in one orifice and out another. But call someone a frustrated homosexual and we’ll remember it for the rest of our lives. Some of us, anyway.

X. Sex. HomoSEXual. It’s the X that does it. You can recognize the word homosexual from a mile away, just from the X. Read the following sentence: Arrested at the demonstration were a politician, a teacher, a homosexual, and a clown. HOMOSEXUAL. It sticks out like an engorged penis. You can recognize it anywhere.

There’s another word that leaps off the page: AIDS. All capital letters, like it’s being trumpeted. You won’t miss it. “Cures to several illnesses are crucial these days: cancer, heart disease, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s disease.” AIDS just jumps right out at you. It won’t stay quiet.

Just like those homosexuals.

Except the frustrated ones.

Today, from my lofty confident vantage point, my villa in Spain and my boyfriend and my wonderful catering business, I look back and it all seems so easy. Okay, none of that is true. There’s no catering business, no villa in Spain. These days, there’s not even a boyfriend. It wasn’t supposed to work out that way. Oh, the catering business and the Catalan bungalow aren’t important. But the boyfriend? I thought that came with the territory. You come out of the closet and you get a boyfriend. Never mind the fact that there are closeted guys with boyfriends and plenty of out guys without boyfriends. The latter must just be the weird ones. Everybody knows you come out of the closet and you get a boyfriend. Right? Wasn’t that the whole point? Wasn’t that why I decided to take the bold step, the struggle, the parental anger, the sleepless nights and the stomach in knots and the words weaving back upon themselves in my journal like Mobius strips? Wasn’t that the carrot at the end of the stick?

Instead I just got beat with a stick. The stick of singularity. Singlehood. Single guys! When I was a kid I thought the only people who were single were the ones on “Three’s Company.” Look! “Father Knows Best.” “Leave it to Beaver.” This isn’t one of those baby boomer coming-of-age stories, though. When I mention those classic TV sitcoms, I mean that I first encountered them in reruns. But in the early 80s, they could screw a kid up just as much as they could in the 50s. Their power to warp the human concept of a good society is timeless, eternal. Kids will still be watching these shows in the 23rd century and then turning off the TV and crying themselves to sleep in their Martian space pods because their families aren’t black-and-white and happy. Forever this will happen.

I was warped by them too. Those were the married shows. You go to college, you finish college. Once you finish college, you getajobandgetmarriedandhavekids. No breathing room. No daylight at all. After all, my parents were like that, right? They were alwaysmarriedwithkids. They’d never been anything else. From before the time my DNA was my own, back when it still belonged to my mom, my parents were married and potential child-owners. Nothing else.

And then I saw “Three’s Company.”

The Regal Beagle! Swingin’! Mr. Furley with his ascots! What a happenin’ guy! The seventies! Los Angeles! Short shorts! The actress who played Terri, the nurse, doing the flamingo step with her long naked legs! Jack Tripper playing a farce! Hairy chests! Larry, the loungey happenin’ guy! Singlehood. This was new to me. I hadn’t known such a stage of life existed. You mean there’s something called your 20s?

So that was what single people did. They got into Strange Misunderstandings and lied and went to bars and lived with two women and hung around with hairy-chested guys named Larry and tried to get chicks. Nothing stable. That was what single people did.

And then one day, like in the last episode, you get married or you move in with your Committed Girlfriend.

And that’s the end of that series. “Three’s a Crowd” totally tanked afterwards.

But that’s what singlehood seemed to be, to me. This evil, lecherous, unkempt, dangerous stage of life. Was it real? My parents never did it. They got married at 21 and had me at 24. They never lived the Three’s Company life. Thank god.

And I wasn’t going to do it either, was I? No. I was the perfect kid, and I was going to turn into the Perfect Adult one day. One day soon. I’d go to college, finish, and enter the world of working and wives and wee little kids. Right? If I didn’t, that would mean that something was horribly wrong with me.

Once upon a time I met a prince and we had mad passionate sex and he carried me away with him to his secret lair in the sky, and we lived happily ever after. After what? Was there a what to be after? It was just a dream in the clouds. Nothing real. Prince Charming was a cartoon character, after all. Grotesque in his elegant golden-haired beauty. You don’t want reality when you’re a kid. You don’t even know what reality is.

Thank God.

It was a long time before the princes came. For so long it was just imagination. Imaginary friends. Eventually I would meet someone who’d straddle the boundaries between the real and imaginary. He was larger than life. Kirk. To me he was a god.

But before that time, long before, there were the stuffed animals.

I had a stuffed blue seal when I was a kid. I’m not even sure where it came from. All I know is that I had this baby seal and I’d sleep with it. The fur was particularly nice and soft, and one night I learned to rub myself against it and make myself feel good. It wasn’t just my bedtime companion; it was my bedtime companion.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized I’d been looking at the seal the wrong way.

The seal was curved, as are seals’ wont. It was concave. Held properly, there was a dip in the middle, rising at one end to the head with whiskers and eyes, and rising at the other end to the tail, with tufts of blue and white yarn at the end. That was how it was supposed to be held.

I hadn’t held it like that. I held the seal upright, standing on its tail, its head up top. Instead of curving downward to a valley in the middle, the valley was toward the side, sticking out, sticking back in the middle — curving forward up top to the head and curving downward to the tail at the bottom. Held this way — turned around and upright — the whiskers, which were supposed to be below the eyes, wound up on top of the head, like tufts of hair. I hadn’t known. To me, that’s the way it was supposed to be. It was still my seal. It didn’t matter that it didn’t look like a seal — that never even entered my mind. It was still my seal.

Then one evening my parents had some friends over, the Goldbergs. Their sons were upstairs with my brother and me. One of them picked up the seal and held it the correct way — head in front, tail in back, valley in the middle — and it was a revelation for me. Suddenly it looked like a seal. It really looked like a seal. Oh! So that’s why it was a seal! I’d never thought about it before. I’d just assumed it was my seal. Not any old seal. My seal.

I lost something that evening. Now it just looked like a run-of-the-mill seal like any other. It no longer seemed special. Held my way, the seal looked like an alien. My own private alien with velvety fur against which I could rub my little penis.

But now, thanks to Jeremy Goldberg, it was just a seal.

I had a strange therapy session last night.

I haven’t really been into therapy lately. For the last few weeks I’ve been bored. I’ve realized that I’ve been talking about the same things over and over — the lack of a boyfriend, career dissatisfaction. And the thing is, these issues are external, not internal. A boyfriend will happen when it happens, and I’m committed to my job for another year and a half (and anyway, the economy sucks right now). These things have not changed in at least a year. Meanwhile, I’m making efforts in other areas — I’m writing, I’m volunteering, I’m meeting new people. I’m doing what I need to do.

I’ve been in therapy on and off since I was 17. I don’t know what more there is to learn about myself.

So I basically spent 45 minutes last night talking about all of this with my therapist, and also about how annoyed I was at her for certain things.

It wasn’t until the final five minutes that I had a revelation. It was a revelation that made my eyes well up with fearful tears. And yet now it doesn’t seem like such a revelation, because I already knew it.

The revelation is this. Nobody is right. Not therapists, not doctors, not parents, not my friends, not me, not my boss, not the president, not the president’s opponents, not Gandhi. We’re all human beings. We’re all as clueless as the next person. We’re standing on sand. Humanity awoke to find itself in an environment of forests and lakes and deserts, and it took an eternity for us to realize that we were on a big ball revolving around a star in a vast darkness. And for all we know, that could be wrong, too.

There are no absolutes. There’s nobody judging me, and if there is, they have no more power than I do. I’m all alone. In being annoyed at my therapist for certain things, I’ve been imagining, without realizing it, that there’s some big Board of Therapists out there with gavels that’s going to reprimand her for starting sessions five minutes late and for not being absolutely perfect. But she’s alone, too. I’ve realized it’s my job to point out when she says something I disagree with, when I think she’s doing something wrong. Which I do, 70 percent of the time, but it’s not enough.

There are no certainties. My uncle’s funeral was six years ago yesterday. He died of cancer, leaving my 56-year-old aunt behind as a widow. I have no idea what’s going to happen to me. I have no idea if I’m right or wrong or whatever. There’s absolutely no way to know. How do I know the inches on this ruler are marked correctly? How do I know how long a second is? Does everyone see green the same way I do?

All I can do is listen to myself. Set my goals and try to achieve them. All I can do — in fact, what I must do — is take ownership of my life. The critics, those who would judge me, those who I trick myself into thinking will judge me, have no power over me. There’s nothing they can do.

I’m alone. It’s scary-powerful to be alone.

And the dumb thing is, at 7:15 last night it seemed like this big holy revelation, but 10 minutes later, walking up Sixth Avenue, I thought, Yeah? And? I already knew this. I know it, and yet I can’t seem to apply it. My instincts to listen to others, to let others judge me, to seek their approval, are so strong and embedded in me.

I’m just as clueless and clueful as I was last night.

Last night I got stood up for a dinner date. I wasn’t surprised. To be honest, I was glad.

Back in August, I had lunch with this guy I’d met in a chat room. He was relatively handsome, and masculine, and Jewish — all pluses. On the other hand, he kept taking work-related calls on his cell phone, and we had nothing in common. At first I wondered if maybe we’d have some postprandial passion, but he mentioned several times that he didn’t like casual sex and he implied that there was something wrong with people who did, so I stifled those hopes. After lunch, he drove me back to my apartment, and before I got out of his car, he said it would be really great to get together again.

We never got together again.

I left him a message about a week after our date, just for the heck of it, but he never called back.

The next time I saw him online was about two months later. He initiated a chat with me. He apologized for not getting together again and said that he’d been really busy with moving and with transitioning into his new job and that he really wanted to get together again. (I hate it when an excuse is simultaneously doubtful but totally plausible and irrefutable.) He told me he’d call.

He never called.

The next time I saw him online was Saturday afternoon.

He said hi to me. At first I didn’t even know who he was. Then he told me, and I remembered. He asked how I’d been, and he apologized and said he really wanted to get together again. I expressed doubt, given what had happened before. So he said this time we should set a definite date. We chose Wednesday night. He said we should talk again Tuesday to confirm our plans. I suggested we talk right then. So I called him, and we decided he’d come by my apartment on Wednesday night and I’d choose a restaurant. Once again, he suggested that we confirm on Tuesday.

After the short phone call, I went back online, and he told me that he had a secret: he’d thought I was really, really cute and had wanted to give me a goodbye kiss after our date, but he hadn’t thought I was interested. He’d even hoped I would invite him up to my apartment.

I responded that I hadn’t thought he wasn’t into that sort of thing. He said he usually isn’t, that he’d only hooked up once after a first date, but that he’d hoped I would be the second one. He said maybe our second date could end differently than our first. He said he was really looking forward to Wednesday and wished Wednesday were tomorrow.

After we finished chatting, I thought about it, and I realized I wasn’t all that interested in seeing him again. Nevertheless, I called him on Tuesday to confirm our plans. I left him a message during the day.

He didn’t call back on Tuesday.

I wasn’t surprised.

While I figured he still could call on Wednesday, I actually hoped he wouldn’t, because my alternative plans were seeming more and more appealing: staying in, watching “Angel.”

He didn’t call yesterday, and he never showed up. Of course not.

And I had a perfectly enjoyable date with a take-out sandwich and the WB.

Tomorrow I’m heading down to Virginia for a long weekend, because my old college a cappella group, the University of Virginia Academical Village People, is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a couple of concerts. It’ll be a blast.

While I’m gone, I present a special guest blogger: nobody.

See you on Monday!

I’m back.

I had such a wonderful weekend at UVA. On Saturday it was hot and sunny. I got color on my face and sunburn on my neck.

It was the 10th anniversary of AVP, the Academical Village People. It was our Decademical. I saw lots of old friends. We reminisced. We ate. We rehearsed. And we alumni all got up on stage and sang — first with the current group and then by ourselves. We sang Aerosmith’s “Angel.” “Billie Jean.” The Back Street Boys’ “Everybody.” “Footloose.” It was a blast.

And I’ve come back a different person.

Or, rather, I’ve reconnected with a long-lost part of myself.

I’ve re-learned things.

One, I’ve remembered how much I loved being part of a brotherhood.

Our weekend festivities ended yesterday with a brunch. About 40 guys — most of the 15 current members, and a majority of the alums who hadn’t already left to catch flights or whatnot — sat in chairs in a circle, and each of us had a few minutes to talk about himself and his memories of the group. I laughed harder than I’d laughed in a long time. I laughed so hard that tears came into my eyes.

And then — two hours later, after we’d all spoken — we all stood up, put our arms around each other, and sang a slow 40s-style barbershoppy song called “Softly.” As I sang, I looked around the circle at all these guys, all of us, singing together. And tears came into my eyes again.

And there are SO many cute guys in the group now.

But — sex seems so foreign. Singing with these guys, with my brothers-in-song, performing with them, just being with them — it was so much better than sex. It was more real. It was more me.

And now I know why it took me so long to come out of the closet. It’s because for so long, being part of a brotherhood was enough for me. It was what I wanted — what I’d always wanted: to be one of the guys. And I was one of them. And they accepted me.

And I wanted so much to be one of them, I wanted so much to be like them, that I hid my difference.

It’s so much easier to be part of a group of guys than to be part of a couple. It’s so much easier to lust after them and not actually have to do anything about it. And it’s so much easier to be the same as everyone else, to be accepted.

It’s so hard to be different when all you want is to be one of the guys.

And there’s another thing I re-learned.

I’d forgotten how much I love to sing. But not just singing. I’d forgotten how much I love to bust out and perform. To rock with nothing but your voice. To express yourself. To expend energy and be artistic not just in an introverted way, which is what writing is, but in an extroverted way, which is what singing and performing are. There’s nothing like it. It’s been so long.

I love to perform. I get a visceral pleasure from it. I did it in high school, I did it in college, I did some of it in law school. I want to do it again.

But I think I’m living in the wrong place. I couldn’t make it as a performer in New York, could I? I couldn’t possibly. This place is too big.

I’m daydreaming now — it’s just a daydream — but I’m daydreaming of moving to a smaller town, someplace quieter, slower, less expensive, someplace with less competition, someplace where I could have a solid group of friends. Maybe live with a bunch of them, or at least live in the same building. Instead of being alone all the time. I don’t want to have to take the PATH train anytime I want to hang out with someone. I don’t want to live in a place where everyone is so busy all the time.

So, I want to perform again.

And I want to be part of a brotherhood again.

I want to live a life where I’m so busy with things that I enjoy, where I’m so busy doing things that fulfill me, that I don’t have time to think about things that don’t matter.

Everything was so much more real back then. Everything was so much more emotionally real back then.

I need to be that guy again.

I need to be me again.

I’m back.

I still feel strange and disoriented from this past weekend. It doesn’t help that on Saturday it was 80 degrees and sunny where I was, and now there’s snow on the ground. Oh, and we’ve had a time change. I don’t know what year it is, what month it is, what hour it is.

I feel like my entire life since the summer of 1999 has been fake. Like all the people I’ve met have been mere figments of my imagination. I’m all confused. Everything at UVA just feels like it was more real, as I’ve said.

Vacations can screw you up. Or change you, at least.

In March 1998, during spring break of my second year of law school, I went on a weeklong tour of the South with the Glee Club. It was during that week that I fell hard for a guy for the first time in years, and I realized, at last, that I wanted to be gay again. I was 24. I hadn’t felt like this since before I’d gone back in the closet at 19.

When I returned to law school, I felt all out of alignment — dislodged, like I’d gone over a big pothole. A puzzle piece warped by the sun, unable to fit back into my proper position. I couldn’t sit still, and I couldn’t participate in my law school identity anymore — I could only hover over it, observe it; my inner motor was racing too fast, faster than the speed of life. I bought Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room is Empty and devoured it. I was feverish.

The events of that spring break set off a whole chain of events that led to my being an uncloseted, sexually active gay man.

I feel a bit like that warped puzzle piece again. Things don’t feel quite the same as they did before the weekend. I worry that as the days pass, it will all fade away, and I’ll forget everything I learned, become complacent again, once more let my dissatisfaction whisper around me so softly and diffusely and not-immediately-painlessly that I accept it as part of The Way Things Are and forget that it’s fixable.

It’s like in “Afterlife,” in which Buffy has just returned from the dead and is faced by an incorporeal demon that she can’t fight until her friends magically give it solid form. (“Buffy” is always minable for psychological allegories.)

I want these thoughts and feelings to remain in solid form. I want to remain concretely dissatisfied with the current state of my life. I want to remember that things don’t have to be this way. I want to remember how this weekend felt. I want to remember who I used to be. I want to remember what I need to do.

I want to write about something else I realized this weekend.

The gay community is fucked up.

Okay, that’s a rhetorical flourish. By “the gay community,” I mean the gay community as I and many others experience it, which is through bars and chat rooms.

(I want to point out that the gay blogging community is different. Gay bloggers for the most part seem to like each other and get along well. We have our own little family here on the Web.)

I experienced such an overwhelming sense of togetherness and brotherhood this weekend with my fellow males. We all had the music in common, and we sang it together, and we felt close to each other. We were a big family. For me, it was so emotionally authentic. It was the realest emotion I’d felt in a really long time.

But of course, that makes perfect sense, because nobody wanted to sleep with each other.

And then I came home, and I turned on my computer, and I thought about the chat rooms. And the bar scene. And I realized that I’d just returned from a world where men treat each other with affection and laughter to a world where men treat each other like shit.

How many times have you tried to say hi to a guy, only to be ignored (online) or coldly dismissed (at bars)? And how many times, despite having good hearts, have we done that to other people ourselves?

I guess that’s what happens when you’re looking for your next fuck as opposed to your next friend.

And the sad thing is, I didn’t even realize the abnormality of it all until I returned from my weekend. I’d accepted all this crap as normal! I’d accepted it as unfortunate, yes, but normal. But it’s totally not normal. In fact, it’s laughable. The shirtless smooth chiseled men on the pages of HX? Laughable. Guys who shut the chat room window on you? Dorks. The Roxy? Ridiculous. The conformity? Contemptible. Why do we put up with this crap? Why does a hugely visible segment of the gay community do this?

When I sang in those men’s groups in college, nobody cared what you looked like, or how much you weighed, or how tall you were. It was all about who you were as a person. Basically, if you weren’t an asshole, you were accepted.

Male bonding is a good thing. But gay men — in many situations — can’t seem to do it. We’re afraid of each other. We retreat into our little self-protective bubbles, stare at each other like little baubles.

No wonder so many gay guys have self-esteem problems.

We’re in a SHAFU here. Situation Homosexual All Fucked Up.

Again, I’m talking about only a segment of the gay community. There are other ways to meet guys — volunteering, cultural activities, blogging!

But I do wonder if it’s something endemic to gay identity itself. Or even endemic to the nature of sexual attraction.

This is going to be another rhetorical flourish, but guys get along better when they’re not concerned about sleeping with each other.

Today is the Day of Silence, and I’m proud to say that it began at my alma mater, the University of Virginia. In fact, it was begun by two people whom I would have known had I been out of the closet and active in the LGBT community at the time. A good friend of mine was good friends with them, so I can at least feel pride by association. And this is even cooler, only because it means the idea has become so widespread that it gets certain people in a snit.

I wonder if the Day of Silence is why nobody is leaving comments on my blog today.

I have an earache today. It’s in my left ear. My left sinus has felt a little clogged lately, so I bet I have a sinus infection or something. I seem to be prone to sinus infections.

I wonder if my doctor will ever get tired of seeing me. At least four times in the past year, I’ve thought I’ve had an STD, and when I’ve gone to see the doctor, he’s told me I haven’t. I’ve had chronic springtime allergies for several years, along with the sinus infections. I’ve had stomach issues my whole life. Last spring I was having some sort of gum issue, which happened toward the end of a weeklong case of the flu; part of my gum seemed to be separating from the tooth, and it turned out that because I hadn’t seen a dentist in about two and a half years, I needed to get a thorough gum cleaning, which involved three dentist visits, each involving a shot of novocaine, to get out the bacteria that had lodged itself in the pockets of my gums. Recently I had a hemorrhoid. My neck is very sensitive to razor burn. Three years ago I had to get a colonoscopy. Almost two years ago, some chapped skin on my upper lip healed improperly, and it had to be burned off and I had to get stitches. Lately I’ve had a dry skin issue on my left shin. One time I thought I had crabs, but I was wrong.

I want to be a cyborg.

My freshman year of high school sucked.

At the suggestion of my teachers — and against my will — my parents had made me skip seventh grade. So in eighth grade, I took all my classes with people I didn’t know too well. They’d all known each other since kindergarten, of course, and because I’d skipped a grade, they immediately branded me a grade-A nerd. Worse, I was a nerd. Even worse, I’d skipped with a friend of mine, who adjusted much better than I did and then stopped talking to me.

Meanwhile, twice a week I still went to Hebrew school with my old friends, but I always felt out of their loop, because I didn’t know the people or incidents from school that they were gossiping about.

Things got even worse the next year, when I was a high school freshman.

At least, as an eighth-grader, I’d had the consolation of running into my old friends in the hallways or taking random electives with them. But now I was a freshman, a ninth grader, at a different school from all my old friends. I was already nervous about going there, because when we’d visited the high school on our eighth-grade tour, I’d seen students smoking as they crossed the street between the high school’s two buildings between classes.

During my freshman year, I biked to school. And I wore a helmet. I’d arrive at school and chain up my bike along with the other dorks, watching other students arrive on foot or, better, in cars driven by upperclassmen.

My French teacher barely spoke a word of French, and he barely kept control of the class.

My earth science teacher was this like 90-year-old woman.

My Family Life (i.e. Health) teacher was this mean angry lesbian who had accidentally given my cousin a black eye when she’d been the gym teacher back in middle school. She frightened me.

I actually liked my geometry class. Except one day, for homework, our teacher made us memorize a poem, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare. When it was my turn to recite it, I zipped through it like a scared raccoon. Nobody clapped.

I’d really wanted to take history, but for some reason I didn’t get signed up for a history class. Instead, I got assigned to study hall. During most of study hall, I’d do my homework or read Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels. At the beginning of the spring semester I decided to try shop class instead. I hated the other kids in the class. On the first or second day, I was pushing a piece of wood through some electric bandsaw using one hand, and the shop teacher ran over and placed one of his hands on the piece to steady it, and then yelled at me because apparently I’d almost lost an eye or something. Terrified, I quit shop that day and returned to study hall.

I’d done lots of acting in middle school, but I was too scared to try out for the high school productions. So I joined the Chess Club. It was my only extracurricular activity. I never won a game.

My only friend was this guy from geometry class. We never hung out outside of school, but during the school day we’d eat lunch together in the amphitheater and play this weird science fiction game.

Really, I had like no friends. Outside of school, I mainly watched “Days of Our Lives” and read DC Comics. That was about it.

Lots of kids in the late 80s wore jeans jackets with various big buttons containing messages. My one attempt at coolness was my own jeans jacket. I had one button on it, and it said, “Leave me alone, I’m having a crisis!” I thought it was cool. No wonder I had no friends.

My life sucked.

Fortunately, the following fall, we moved to Japan, and my life improved a thousandfold. I acted, I had a circle of friends, I felt cool, I enjoyed my life. Moving to Japan saved me. If we hadn’t done that, I don’t know what would have happened.

If I ever have a kid, he’s not going to skip seventh grade if he doesn’t want to.

The most amazing thing happened to me last night.

After seeing “Phone Booth,” a friend and I went to Barracuda and had a couple of drinks.

Two hours later, we left.

And my clothes didn’t smell like smoke!

And then this morning I needed to go grocery shopping. I was about to throw on last night’s clothes, and for a split second I thought, Oh, I can’t wear that shirt. It smells like smoke. Then I remembered, No it doesn’t! My clothes don’t reek!

And they don’t.

I love the new anti-smoking law.

Today another of my old college singing groups, the Virginia Glee Club, was in New York City to perform Mozart’s Requiem with the choir from Smith College. After the concert, I got to ride the bus with the Glee Club across town from the concert venue to the reception. Being on the Glee Club bus brought back some wonderful memories, and as we began riding through the streets of midtown Manhattan, the president gave me the microphone, and I regaled the group with half-senile ramblings about my time in Club. It was a blast.

We drove through Times Square, but unfortunately I didn’t witness this.

Someone on the bus gave me a can of beer, which I didn’t get to finish because we arrived at the reception. Once there, I had an Absolut Mandarin with cranberry juice.

Despite having only a drink and a half, I was buzzed by the end of the event.

Back on Madison Avenue, I watched the Club guys chaotically pile back onto the bus. (Some things never change.) Then I left the brotherhood of Club guys behind, saying goodbye to my past for the second time in two weekends.

After that, I walked down Madison Avenue, head swimming, contemplating my own future.
—–

This may sound boring, but trust me, there’s a point to this:

I want to read a book, but I can’t find one to read.

I went to three bookstores yesterday evening. I went to the Barnes & Noble on 6th and 23rd. Then I went to the Strand. Then I went to the Barnes & Noble on Union Square. And I found nothing I wanted.

Replace “the Barnes & Noble on 6th and 23rd,” “the Strand,” and “the Barnes & Noble on Union Square” with a bar, a chat room and another bar, and you’ve nearly described many of my weekends in the last two and half years.

Why did I go to three different bookstores when they all have the same books? It’s because I saw the new paperback of Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography at the first Barnes & Noble, and then figured it would be half-price at the Strand. So I walked all the way to the Strand, but the Strand was out of it. So I went to the second Barnes & Noble, which was closer than the first Barnes & Noble, to buy the full-price paperback.

But after flipping through the pages of the book, I changed my mind and decided I didn’t feel like tackling it right now.

Also:

I looked at The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown.

I looked at The Dante Club by Michael Pearl.

I looked at The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand.

I looked at What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by Bernard Lewis.

I looked at Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.

I looked at books by Don DeLillo.

I looked at books by Richard Powers.

I looked at At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O’Neill, but I couldn’t get past the Irish Joycean dialect.

I looked at Atonement by Ian McEwan.

I looked at Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

I looked at A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace.

I looked at The Dive From Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer, but the story seemed too similar to the last book I read, Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me — an accident transforms the life of a woman in the Midwest and she goes/returns to Manhattan.

In the end, I didn’t buy a thing. Instead I went home and watched the first half of “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” on DVD.

I think I want to read a book right now, but I can’t seem to commit to one. I can read New Yorker articles and the New York Times Magazine, but I can’t commit emotionally or intellectually to a whole book.

And I don’t feel like spending money right now on something that I’ll abandon halfway through.

There are libraries, of course, but then you can’t keep the book when you’re done. And library books are all hardcovers, while I prefer paperbacks.

Also, I am sensitive to font. Is anyone else sensitive to font? If I don’t like a book’s font, it’s hard for me to read it.

I am so hard to please.

Who knew I could stretch the books/boyfriends metaphor so far?

Lately, both just seem better in theory than in practice.

Excuse me. This is for you.

Nearly two years ago, I got cruised on the PATH train.

(You know, I had a general idea of when this incident had happened, and I knew I’d blogged about it, so all I had to do just now was search my monthly archives from around that time and do a search on the word “cruised.” First I checked April 2001; then I checked May, and there it was. Isn’t blogging the coolest?)

Anyway. So. On May 29, 2001, I got cruised on the PATH train.

Then, one cold night about three months ago, I was exiting the PATH station after returning from the city, and I saw him again. He must have been ahead of me in the crowd getting off the train, because he was standing there now, across the street, in front of a restaurant, staring at me, with a hint of a grin on his face. I looked at him for a moment — he looked familiar, and then I remembered who he was. But I was too nervous to say anything. So I continued walking. Then I saw him walk down a different street, so I turned back and began following him, but he was walking too fast for me to catch up. So I lost my nerve and went back to my original route.

I saw him again tonight.

I was standing at the 23rd Street PATH station, waiting for the train to whisk me back home. A man walked past me, slowly. I looked up, and I recognized him. He was sort of looking at me, so I knew it was him. He had a beard now. Neither of us said anything. I pretended not to see him, but I could feel him looking at me. So I glanced over at him, and our eyes met for a split second.

Then I looked down at my feet and tried to suppress a grin — without success.

I looked over at him again, smiled and nodded. He returned the smile and the nod.

I thought of going up to him and saying hi, but it was very quiet on the platform, and I was conscious of other people hearing us.

The train came, and he got on first. He took an empty seat. There was an available seat directly across from him (the PATH cars are set up like NYC subway cars), but I didn’t want to sit there, because I knew we’d play eye tag for at least 10 minutes, and the thought of doing so made me nervous.

Instead, I sat in a different part of the car so I couldn’t see him.

But I’d already resolved that once we got off the train, I’d say hi, maybe chat with him for a few minutes, and give him my phone number.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, the train approached our stop.

I saw him stand up and glance over at me. And then… I realized he was talking to some other guy.

A friend or something.

Dammit!

Clearly they were going to get off the train together. How was I supposed to make my move?

So I opened my bag. I took out a pen and a scrap of paper. I wrote down my name and my phone number. I’d just slip him the piece of paper once we got off the train. Yes. Excuse me, this is for you, I’d say, with a flirty grin on my face.

The train arrived at our stop. The doors opened. They got off. They were ahead of me going up the stairs. I was a mere five feet behind them.

And I said nothing.

They walked to the top of the steps and out into the cool night air, and they continued to walk away, lost in chatter.

Five feet in front of me.

And I said nothing.

I crossed the intersection to follow the route back to my apartment.

I tossed the scrap of paper into a trashcan.

Excuse me. This is for you.

Dammit.

My review of last night’s “Buffy.”

Last night was the first night of Passover, and therefore we had the first of two Passover seders.

I got to thinking about my most unusual Passover seder, which happened four years ago.

During my last year of law school in Virginia, a couple of weeks after spring break, I started to feel sick. I developed a fever, and then I got a sore throat. My throat got worse until it was incredibly painful for me to swallow. I felt miserable. I could barely sleep. After a few days, I finally went to the doctor, and after doing some tests, he told me I had mono.

I called my parents to tell them. Within a day, my mom decided she was going to drive the seven hours from northern New Jersey down to Charlottesville, Virginia to take care of me. She reserved a suite for us at the local Marriott Residence Inn, where she could watch over me for a few days — a bedroom for me, a small living room with a couch for her to sleep on, a kitchenette with a small table.

She arrived at the Marriott in the early evening. I packed some things and drove over to meet her there.

It happened to be the first night of Passover. So she’d brought a seder with her.

She brought a tablecloth for the table. She brought matzoh. She brought some of the food intended for the big seder back home: brisket, and matzoh ball soup, and vegetables, and potato kugel, and one or two other side dishes. She brought macaroons. She brought two Haggadahs. I think she brought a seder plate, with the appropriate items stored in little bags or containers. She brought ginger ale, which I drank instead of wine.

We basically just went through the motions; it was about 30 percent religious observance, and 70 percent an excuse for me to eat well.

It was the best seder I’ve ever had, and it’s one of the many reasons I love my mom so much.
—–

I’m feeling a bit lonely. I have no plans tonight, and I have no plans tomorrow night. This is, unfortunately, too often the norm for me. I think it’s because I live by myself, because I’m shy about calling people to do things and can never think of things to do anyway, because I live in a city where there’s not a whole lot going on, and because crossing the river to Manhattan every frickin’ time I want to socialize gets to be a chafe.

I live in the “sixth borough,” as Jersey City/Hoboken is known, and there’s nothing to do here. I’ve complained about this for just about as long as I’ve had a blog.

There are apparently lots of gay men here in Jersey City, but the only place to meet them is online. There used to be a gay bar here, but it changed ownership a year and a half ago and is now a thriving heterosexual dive that hosts little-known alternative-music-type bands.

Because the only place to met gay men in Jersey City is online, I’ve met lots of gay men in Jersey City once, and only once.

Hah. When I typed “online” just then, I at first accidentally typed “alone.”

I dearly love my apartment. It’s quiet, it’s huge by Manhattan standards, it’s pretty, it has lots of windows, it has a washer and dryer. But perhaps when my lease ends I’ll move to Brooklyn. The commute to Newark would be long, but there seems to be so much going on in brownstone Brooklyn, and everyone seems to live there. I adore Park Slope, and the rest of brownstone Brooklyn is really nice, too.

Then again, if I lived in Brooklyn, I’d be as far away from Manhattan as I am now, and in some cases even farther away. (I live approximately here.) So my Friday and Saturday nights would be just as impeded socially as they are now. Unless the greater number of potential friends in Brooklyn, and the presence of actual gay bars in that borough, made the presence of a river barrier unimportant.

It’s Friday night and I’m tired of waiting for the phone to ring.

What do you do with your time?

Do you ever find yourself mired in a place of self-disgust, in which you think that you totally suck and that you don’t know how to make decisions about anything in your life, but you don’t want to write about any of that on your blog, because when you started blogging again you vowed to yourself that you wouldn’t write things like that anymore, but nevertheless you sort of do want to write about it, because writing about things helps you process them, and at least it’s more interesting than writing about cheese sandwiches, and the more interesting your entries are, the more readers you get, and you might as well mine your neuroses for material?

No?

OK, then, have you ever noticed that when you brush your teeth with an electric toothbrush and watch TV at the same time, the TV screen vibrates, as does everything on it, but nothing else does? Not the TV itself, not anything else in the room — just the TV screen?

It’s really freaky.

This isn’t the New York Times. This is a weblog. I am interested solely in hyperbole, ridiculousity, hystericity (is that a word? hystericalness? See? I don’t even stop to SPELLCHECK!), and retardation: mainly my own. This website is a sexploration of narcissism. Mostly, it’s a joke. It’s meta-meta. Or whatever. It’s not!

One thing Choire taught me, a very long time ago, is that it’s OK to unbutton myself verbally if I want to. So, fuck it all, it’s time for a verbal striptease.

I have been so fucking down on myself and frustrated these last few days, and the reason I haven’t written about it here in more detail is because when I’ve written about these things here in the past, it’s all tended to come off whiny and earnest and depressing. Depressing thoughts in blog entries are best when mixed with a little sugar, or sometimes irony, which is basically spiced sugar, or sour sugar, I’m not sure which, but anyway, depressing thoughts are more palatable that way. Pure, unvarnished depressing thoughts are best shared in private, perhaps in therapy, which is something I didn’t realize during my first go-round at blogging. Anyway, that’s just my opinion, except when it’s not my opinion. And sometimes I’m good at mixing my depressing thoughts with a little sugar and spice, and sometimes I’m not. I do know that I’ve read genuinely depressing entries by other bloggers before, sometimes for a week at a time, or more, and by the end of that week, I usually want to either slap the blogger or shoot myself. I’m not sure which. Certainly, it’s up to anyone to write whatever they want to write. It’s just that I don’t want to be that depressing guy. But fuck that, it’s time for ridiculousity, hystericity, and retardation. Exclusively my own.

I’ve been too much inside my own head lately. With Good Friday off, I had a three-day weekend, and during that weekend I met up with just one person. One. My phone barely rang. It’s not that I don’t have friends; it’s that they don’t call me. Or something. I should take the initiative, and find things to do and invite people to them, but I’m kind of shy, particularly when it comes to other gay men. Even if I just want to be friends with them! Straight people have this nice little dynamic, wherein they have friends of one gender and romantic interests of another gender; me, my friends and my romantic interests are usually of the same gender, which could create confusion. Besides that, I feel inhibited by where I live. Walk the ten minutes to the PATH train. Wait for the fucking PATH train. Ride the crowded fucking PATH train. Et cetera. I have about seven different complaints about the PATH train:

1) too many recorded announcements in the stations, most of them by this guy with an annoyingly friendly sing-songy voice;

2) no place to sit while you’re waiting;

3) the trains don’t come often enough;

4) on Friday and Saturday nights they spend too much time waiting at Hoboken;

5) they move too slowly;

6) the cars are too old;

7) the “bing-bong” every fucking time the door closes, even if it opens and closes and opens and closes because someone is trying to push his or her way into the car, is the most excruciatingly annoying sound God has created on this earth.

What do you know, that turns out to be seven.

I want to live in Manhattan. Duh. And when my lease ends on November 1, I’m doing it. I swear this time. Really. I’m scared, though. I’m scared of too much noise, and I’m scared of feeling claustrophobic in a small apartment. Please slap me now.

On Sunday I browsed around the classical music section of Tower Records near Lincoln Center, and then I walked around the Upper West Side alone. As the afternoon wore on and I grew more bored and alone, I felt more and more frustrated about having to cross a river in order to get home and not living in Manhattan. So that evening I resolved to ask my landlord if I could end my lease on June 1, five months early. I figured that this would give me the impetus to get off my ass, swallow my fears, and look for a place in Manhattan. Someplace in the West Village or Chelsea, preferably for no more than $1300.

And then later I decided I didn’t want to ask him that, because it would be just another sign that I’m irresponsible and act haphazardly and don’t know how to plan ahead or act like an adult, and also I began to worry that I wouldn’t be able to find a decent new place and I’d wind up moving into some craphole where I’d get depressed and break down in tears every night. I also began to worry that my parents and my brother would rail against me for making such a stupid decision, and for being incapable of living as a functional, responsible, adult human being. My parents don’t talk like that anymore, but my subconscious thinks they still feel that way about me, or at least my subconscious wants to think they still feel that way about me, because my subconscious has so little confidence in me and my ability to fend for myself that it would rather imagine it is being judged than be left cold and alone in this world.

My brother, whom I love, bless him, is about to start a job in which he will earn the same salary I earn, even though he is four and a half years younger than me and doesn’t have a law degree. He is also straight, and he has a steady Jewish girlfriend who my parents think is great, and he’s outgoing and outspoken, and he doesn’t care what other people think, and he dresses well and has lots of friends, and he’s taller than me, and he doesn’t understand why I’m working as a government lawyer when I could be making a hell of a lot more money at a law firm. The fact is, I don’t want to work at a law firm; I don’t even want to be a government lawyer. I feel humiliated by the amount of money I make; I haven’t had a raise in the year and a half I’ve been here; and my work is excruciatingly boring. In fact, I don’t even want to be a lawyer at all. I went to law school because I wanted my parents to respect me, I wanted to be normal, and I wanted to make lots of money. The first two goals turned out to be stupid, and I haven’t achieved the last one, because I came to realize what was involved. I want to go back to school, get an M.S.W. and become a therapist.

As for my brother, about the only way in which I’m better than him these days is that his weight fluctuates, while I remain slim with a high metabolism. It’s humbling. I was always the older brother and the academic star, and he was the one whom my parents always yelled at for screwing up in school. And he turned out to be the shrewd, fearless one, while I turned out to be the confused neurotic fuckup.

I have no clue why I’m so scared of everything on this planet, but that fear is the cause of all my problems. I’m scared of making decisions, because any choice I make will be the wrong choice and will inevitably result in my brother — who has taken lessons from an earlier incarnation of my dad on how to treat me and whose opinions, I now realize while writing this, I fear and resent even more than those of my parents, because he’s younger than me and because he represents peer opinion and because I’m competitive — will inevitably result in my brother telling me what a fuckup I am.

This hasn’t been very well organized, but ridiculousity, hystericity, and retardation don’t have to be. I could have been a lot more tongue-in-cheek about all of this, but the sugar would have diluted the acid. Can sugar dilute acid, or does the acid eat it up?

Whatever. I just hope I made Choire proud.

Thank you all for your thoughts and comments. It means a lot to me. What I love about blogging is how it brings people together in unexpected ways. I feel more upbeat today, and things will somehow work out.

Fortunately, I had therapy last night, and it was very helpful. About halfway through the session I lay down on the couch. I usually sit on one end of the couch, facing my therapist, who sits in a chair, but I was just so wiped out that I said, “Do people ever lie down on the couch?” She said yes, so I lay myself down. I hadn’t lain on a couch in therapy in nearly five years. It gives therapy a slightly different feel; it makes it less about the interaction between you and the therapist, and more about you. (And of course, it’s all about me.) I found myself able to concentrate a little better on everything.

We talked about the decision-making process. One reason I have trouble making decisions is that my thoughts tend to bubble over and bump into each other like billiard balls, all disorganized and scattershot. I realized that the first step in making any decision is to clarify for myself what I want. There needs to be a beacon. That beacon has to be me. You can’t make a decision when you’re trying to please three or four different constituencies inside your head. It’s a subconscious process, trying to please those phantoms, and I have to become more adept at recognizing when I’m doing it. And knowing is half the battle. Yo, Joe!

I know, that’s totally primary school, but sometimes we forget the basic lessons — or sometimes we never learned them in the first place.

Anyway, enough wallowing. I want to write about less personal things tomorrow.

And again, thanks!

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was going to talk about ‘man on dog’ with a United States senator, it’s sort of freaking me out.”

I just had to quote that. I love it! It’s wonderful. It deserves to go down in Bartlett’s.

Now onto the issue.

The thing about arguing with an asinine politician is that you can never tell whether that asinine politician actually believes what he’s saying or is merely saying it out of political calculation. Nevertheless:

Law and morality don’t mix well. Legal arguments are based on logic; there are two whole big sections on the LSAT, the law school entrance exam, about logic. Moral arguments, however, have nothing to do with logic.

I always used to love mathematics. I loved the fact that one could always arrive at a right answer. I particularly enjoyed geometry, with its elegant, unassailable proofs. I grew to trust logic.

Logical arguments start from a set of axioms. Merriam-Webster’s (oh, I wish I could access the OED online) defines axiom as “a maxim widely accepted on its intrinsic merit.” The origin of axiom is a Greek word meaning “something worthy.”

The problem is, widely accepted by whom? Widely accepted when? Worthy of what?

If you don’t believe in the axioms of mathematics, all the logic in the world isn’t going to convince you that an answer to a math problem is right. Sure, 2+4=4+2. But is it true that 32,547+4,981=4,981+32,547? Is it always true that a+b=b+a? How do you know? We take the commutative property of addition on faith. Mathematics is cold, pure logic, but even mathematics is based on some core ideas. We implicitly agree on those core ideas, so mathematics has some universal truth for us.

Societal issues are murkier, though.

Are anti-sodomy laws right or wrong?

You could say one of the following:

A1: Anti-sodomy laws are wrong, because sodomy is acceptable behavior.

A2: Anti-sodomy laws are right, because sodomy is unacceptable behavior.

But you could also say, for example:

A3: Anti-sodomy laws are right, because although I think sodomy is acceptable behavior, the majority, as represented by the state legislature, thinks otherwise.

A4: Anti-sodomy laws are wrong, because although I think sodomy is unacceptable behavior, it’s not my business what people do in the privacy of their homes.

But:

What if we change “anti-sodomy laws” to something else?

You could say:

B1: Laws against smiling are wrong, because smiling is acceptable behavior.

B2: Laws against murdering your child are right, because murdering your child is unacceptable behavior.

On the other hand, it’s unlikely that you’d say:

B3: Laws against smiling are right, because although I think smiling is acceptable behavior, the majority, as represented by the state legislature, thinks otherwise.

B4: Laws against murdering your child are wrong, because although I think murdering your child is unacceptable behavior, it’s not my business what people do in the privacy of their homes.

Points B3 and B4 seem ridiculous to most people. If you think something is morally right, then no amount of logic will convince you it’s wrong; if you think something is morally wrong, no amount of logic will convince you it’s right.

What some of us don’t get is that there are people out there who believe that homosexual sodomy is wrong, absolutely wrong, as wrong as murdering your child. And if someone believes so strongly that it’s immoral for me to stick my dick in someone’s ass, then no amount of logic or reasoning is going to convince the person otherwise.

That’s not my point, though.

Back to that asinine politician:

He said, “Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does… this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family.”

OK, prove it.

“You say, well, it’s my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that’s antithetical to strong, healthy families.”

Again, prove it.

“Whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, where it’s sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.”

OK, again, we get what you’re trying to say, but why is this necessarily true? Is sodomy really the same as the first two? And is “traditional” synonymous with “healthy, stable”? Is “nontraditional” inherently bad? Tell me, asinine politician. Explain to me. Why is your statement true?

Presumably, it’s true for the same reason that laws against anti-gay discrimination allegedly give gay people “special rights”: because I said so. (The “special rights” argument particularly enrages me, and it deserves its own post entirely.) No logical argument, no exposing the statements to the illumination of sunshine.

But that wouldn’t help, anyway. If you believe gay buttsex is wrong, logical arguments won’t change your position. It’s beyond issues of logic.

Which raises an interesting question.

If the asinine politician believes homosexual sodomy is morally wrong, why is he even pretending to make logical arguments in the first place?

Why doesn’t he just say, “I think homosexual sodomy is morally wrong and that’s that?”

It’s either because he doesn’t have full confidence in his own convictions, or because he’s trying to fool people who may be unsure of their own stances on the issue.

In a weird way, I find this reassuring. It means either that he doesn’t really believe what he says he believes, or that he’s afraid lots of people out there will disagree with him.

It means that these solid, unshakeable, widespread moral beliefs really aren’t as solid or as unshakeable or as widespread as he’s pretending.

In other words, it means that logic still has a chance. It might not be able to change the views of an asinine politician, but it might be able to change the views of lots of other people.

Logic still has a chance.

Things worth reading:

We Are All Sodomites Now, by Andrew Sullivan. A month old, but very relevant.

And:

“Once the news conference got underway, the President did not recognize reporters who raised their hands. Instead, he called their names from a list prepared by news secretary Ari Fleischer, the man who told reporters after Sept. 11 that they should watch what they say. When CNN’s John King attempted to ask a question, the President told him to wait because, the President said, ‘This is scripted.’ Then he called the next name on his list: John King.”

From The Press and Freedom: Some Disturbing Trends, by NPR “Morning Edition” host Bob Edwards. An essential but depressing piece.

This blog is not going to turn into a politics blog — in fact, I will make a non-political post later — but I wanted to point these out.
—–

How long should you wait before having sex?

Three dates. At least.

That’s what I paid 25 bucks to learn last spring. A friend and I went to a one-night Gay Dating Workshop, run by a gay dating coach. The flyer promised that we’d learn the answers to several questions, including, What are the best places to find men? How can you get a date in one minute flat? How long should you wait before having sex?

I was most interested in that last question, since that’s the topic that has most mystified me during my relatively short time out of the closet.

Unfortunately, the answer was smuggled into a long monologue toward the end of the workshop:

…yadayadayadathat’swhyIsayyoushouldwaitthreedates beforehavingsexyadayadayadaya…

You could see all the ears in the room grow fully erect. Heads swerved. Pencils scribbled. People whispered. “How many dates?” “I didn’t hear him. What did he say?” One guy raised his hand, hoping for an elaboration, but the workshop came to an end, and there was no time for group questions.

Since the coach (Go team go! Homosexuals rah rah rah! Fuck that ass! …sorry) didn’t bother to explain his three-date rule, I had to guess the reason on my own. I came up with the following possible explanations:

1) After three dates, the sex will be more meaningful and enjoyable, because sex is more meaningful and enjoyable when you know the person better.

2) You’ll cut down on the amout of casual sex you have, and maybe this is a good thing.

3) You’ll cut down on the confusion; you’ll have a better idea of what both guys are looking for; it’s less likely you’ll later have to ask yourself, or him, “What did this sex mean?”

4) You’ll improve your interpersonal skills.

5) You’ll the avoid the problem of having sex too soon, then abandoning the effort to get to know the guy better, and potentially missing out on someone wonderful.

Armed with these arguments, I decided to try out the three-date rule.

I went on three dates with a guy, and by the end of the third date, I realized I wasn’t interested in pursuing a relationship with him. And I think he gave up on me anyway, since I hadn’t put out after three dates. We didn’t go out again. (I ran into him several months later at the Duplex and sat on his lap while he fondled my genitals, but that’s another story.)

Sometimes I’ve tried the one-date rule. This means I go out with a guy, have sex, and never see him again.

Other times I’ve tried the two-date rule. This means I go out with a guy once, go out with him again, have sex, and never see him again.

And then there’s the no-date rule, or the Internet hookup, which doesn’t even involve going out; I have sex and never see him again.

Is three dates some magic threshhold? If you have sex after three dates, can you not not see the guy again? If you have sex after three or more dates, are you married or something?

I think that after three dates, you have to worry about ruining the friendship.

Maybe guys just need to be clear about what they want from the get-go. But that’s not easy. Suppose you ask a guy, “Okay, you’ve just invited me back to your place, but I want to know, if we have sex, are you still interested in getting to know me?” If he says yes, it might be a false yes. He might not even be consciously lying. He might think he wants to get to know you better while really he’s just under the thrall of his libido. Our libidos will lie, cheat or even steal to get what they want, without even letting us, their rightful owners, know about it.

I know couples who have had sex on the first date and wound up together. I know couples who have waited and wound up together, too. And I know couples who have waited and not wound up together. It could be that there’s no correlation. It could be that if someone is the right person, he’s the right person, and you’ll wind up together whether or not you wait. And if he’s the wrong person, no amount of waiting can change that.

Ugh. Dating is messy. Let’s just go shopping.

Be my fake boyfriend for Passover.

That and more at the Best of Craigslist, which I can’t believe I didn’t know of until now.

It has been brought to my attention that I must point out the following:

The guy in the first and second photos is Hal Sparks, who plays Michael on “Queer as Folk.”

The guy in the third photo is me.

Therefore, the guy in the third photo is NOT Hal Sparks.

I just needed to make that clear.

Thank you.

I finally took a step toward moving yesterday. I looked at apartments in Manhattan. I did it to see what types of places are in my price range — and also for the experience.

I saw five studios, all no-fee rentals, all between $1100 and $1300.

The first was in Chelsea, on 24th Street, just west of 9th Ave. It was quite small, but cute, with windows facing the back (no street noise), a nice floor, and a fireplace. This was my favorite. $1100.

The second was in the East Village, on 3rd Street between Avenues A and B. It was also quite small, and also newly renovated (but therefore a bit sterile). It overlooked a little courtyard, where there were lots of kids playing. No thanks. Plus, I’m not really an East Village kinda guy. $1150.

The third was also in the East Village, on 19th between 1st and 2nd. This one was $1300, and much bigger. Also newly renovated, and also a bit sterile, and also in the East Village, but… hmm.

The fourth was in the Village itself, on 10th Street just off 6th Ave. It was $1200, with a separate kitchen area that made the place bigger. The clothes closet was in the kitchen and had no door, so my clothes would probably wind up smelling like food. But it was in a great neighborhood, and one block away from the PATH, which I’d take to work. It was also on the same block as my therapist’s office, which would be… strange. Still, this place was my second favorite.

The fifth place was on First Avenue, between 13th and 14th. It was small and dim with crappy carpeting and faced 1st Avenue. No thanks. $1100.

So, what did I learn?

- Manhattan apartments are small. I already knew that, but… damn. For $1100 you basically get a dorm room with your own bathroom and miniscule kitchen. For $1100 right now, I have an entire floor of a brownstone, with a bedroom bigger than most of these studios, a kitchen with its own window that overlooks a yard, a living room, a separate little study, lots of closet space, and my own washer and dryer in my apartment. To move, I’d have to sell lots of my stuff — which actually wouldn’t be so bad. And I’d probably start to feel cooped up in most of these places, but I guess everyone deals with that. Unfortunately, if there’s noise, you can’t escape it by going into a separate room. And yet: location, location, location.

- If I look at enough places, I can probably find something that I can afford and live with — and live in.

- Manhattan apartments are small.

- I’ve begun to overcome my fear of the whole Manhattan apartment-hunting process. Overcoming fear is a good thing.

- Manhattan apartments: small.

Yesterday I went to see a gastroenterologist, because I’ve had a sensitive stomach my whole life and I decided it was finally time to do something about it.

The doctor says I probably just have an irritable bowel (doesn’t that sound delightful?), but he wants to rule out such unlikely possibilities as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

In order to rule these out, he wants to do a colonoscopy. Also a biopsy of my small intestine and, um, rectum.

I’ve actually had a colonoscopy before, and it wasn’t so bad, given that I was sedated.

This all cries out for so many jokes that I’m not even going to say anything else.

Buffy 7.19: Empty Places.