Sexual Disorientation: Sexual Disorientation: All That Glitters Isn’t Gay
Delve into the jungle of the newly out and single. Sexual Disorientation dishes on dating and sex – or lack thereof – every Wednesday morning.
Boston, New Year’s Eve, 2006
It was the gayest of times, it was the straightest of times.
By senior year of high school, my best friend and I – both closeted homos in small-town Connecticut – had grown sick of the suburbs. But we were licensed to drive, gas was cheap, and we had friends in the nearest big city, Boston. It became our second home.
Last week I returned for the first time since coming out. My perspective of my times in Boston today (as an openly gay, well-traveled 22-year-old) is a lot different than it was then (as a closeted, conservative teenager). As the memories of our misadventures flashed through my mind, I came to a not-so-surprising conclusion: we had been idiots. Here are my best Boston blunders.
1. Beantown as Queentown
For me, a good Christian Republican, nothing could have been gayer than the Boston area. Cambridge seemed to take the cake. It was a venerable haven of hipster clothing stores, costume shops, vegan cafes, drag queens, and liberal academia, not to mention the legendary folk venue, Club Passim. We spent a lot of time wandering this neighborhood.
I somehow came to equate all of this with Boston being a really “gay” place. It was actually a popular view among homophobes in my area – it was a city, it was liberal, and they had civil unions there. It had to epitomize homosexuality. On the one hand, I took some comfort in this; if I ended up being gay, I thought, at least I’d be in good company.
On the other hand, it also had a negative effect. I threw so much of the city into my melting pot of what being gay must mean that in the end “gay” couldn’t possibly have been something relatable.
This weekend I realized that Boston isn’t very gay at all. It’s not even that liberal, at least not compared to Portland or Paris or other cities I’ve been since. There is the progressive-but-elitist wing of the city, the Harvard-goers and the Kennedy types; there’s the blue-collar Catholic crowd who vote for Democrats but who are social conservatives; and there are a lot of quiet bigots, too. Several southerner, black coworkers of mine have said that Boston is the most racist city they’ve ever been to.
I have also since realized that even if an area does have a lot of gay people, they are still usually the minority; and even if queer culture is dominant, it still leaves a lot of gays feeling just as excluded. No city could have been an effective paradigm for what being gay would mean to me.
2. Wicked Dumb Hook-Ups
Being in Boston allowed us to feel sexually liberated enough to pursue hook-ups in a way that we didn’t back home. The problem was, we were both attracted to men but kept hooking up with women.
Matt did not need to go all the way to Boston – on my 18th birthday party, drunk in my hotel room – to decide he was in love with our mutual female friend who had bought the beer. If he wanted to pursue a relationship out of heteronormative guilt, he could have done it under the watchful eye of his overprotective parents. But he did.
And I did not need to wait for Boston to share my first kiss with a woman. I had been in two relationships beforehand, including one that lasted seven freakin months, and had somehow escaped ever locking lips. Yet somehow, in Boston the stars aligned. On New Year’s Eve 2006, in an apartment literally full of coke-snorting gays, it was a woman who chose to come after me and who I ended up kissing.
It was almost as though being presented with the opportunity to mess around with guys made us so afraid that we went running to the nearest woman. I apologize to the hetero female population of Boston; we were probably awful.
3. What’s a Little Lie Between Friends?
When Matt moved to Boston after high school, a majority of his male friends were gay. That party at his friend’s house was the biggest gay shit show I have ever seen – in addition to the coke fiends, there was a gay love pentagon developing and homos drinking champaign around every corner. Gays, gays everywhere, and not a drop to drink.
I wondered for a while why my friend hadn’t come out sooner. Unlike me, he didn’t have family concerns, and he had always been politically and religiously liberal.
I now think having all those gay friends was the biggest factor keeping him in the closet. When he came out to me, he said that he worried they would find him to be a hypocrite – that lying to them and pretending to be hetero for all those years would leave him in an awkward social position. I’m not sure how his friends reacted in the end, but I know that having so many homo companions in Boston made his two years as The Hetero Guy seem like an insurmountable lie.
4. He’s Just Not That Into You
I came out to him via AIM junior year of college. He came out to me 15 minutes later. From there it was trouble.
I made the mistake of admitting that I used to have a crush on him; he was the first guy I was attracted to, way back in the 5th grade. He made the mistake of telling me rather undiplomatically that he was unquestionably disinterested.
It hurt. I guess on some level I thought that if we both were somehow gay, and somehow found a way to come out, that we might be together. It wasn’t like I had spent my life waiting for him, or even felt certain that we’d be a good match. I guess I just thought that if we were both gay, and we had been such close friends, there might be a chance.
He apparently didn’t share my sentiment. I began to realize that throughout our friendship, it was always me making the emotional investments, making concessions to keep things working, making sure our friendship made it once he moved to Boston for college and I came to the District.
So when he blew me off just before an October visit to Massachusetts, I decided that was it. I had to stop seeing him and thinking that maybe something would happen. Like Boston, our relationship may have involved a few homos, but that didn’t mean it was gay, or definitive of our queer experience. It may have been my first exposure to queerdom, but that didn’t mean it was anything special.
When people ask me about him, I just say we’ve lost touch.
5. One last thing…
I used to make fun of that Boston accent. Having traveled a bit more, I now realize that I have a mild case myself. I believe that’s called karma.
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off topic, and maybe i’m confusing you with someone else, but isn’t this like, the third post in which you’ve decided you had to “stop seeing” someone because they don’t meet your emotional demands? that was you with the campaign fag-hag right? and the straight guy? that’s a pretty striking pattern corey. just sayin’.
Oh the damage a young gay man can inflict on a hetero girl. How many girls did I kiss wishing I was kissing a boy?
lol, adam is reading corey like a book.
Yeah, kissing a girl isn’t the same as hooking up.
funny story. at my high school, hooking up meant having sex. it took me 6 months of college to realize (a) to most people hooking up is just kissing+, and (b) my new college friends were getting laid a lot less than i initially believed.
Hooking up is not just kissing. It is never just kissing. “We made out” or “We hooked up.”
All my straight friends in college insisted that “hooking up” only meant kissing; all my gay friends and I had a different definition. Like commenter “Um…”, I call bullshit. It’s either “‘We made out’ or ‘We hooked up.’” — I agree. So maybe it is a gay culture/straight culture thing?
I guess I objected because someone who is gay could use “hooking up” that way to cover for the fact that he is not that comfortable with being gay. As in “I’m not gay, gay. See I hook up with girls.” I don’t think that is Corey’s intent here, but I see it happen all the time. There is nothing inherently heterosexual with just making out with a girl. Again, it doesn’t appear to be Corey’s intention though.
Dude, you should really take Matt’s name out of this. It’s really messed up that you could so openly talk about him being gay when as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he’s straight. The least you could do is change it to a fake name. Not that anyone from our town isn’t going to know who you’re talking about anyways… Have some decency, he may not be your friend anymore, but he was in the past. You’re just coming off as a total jerk.
And for small-town Connecticut… we have a REALLY open minded, liberal town. Just thought I’d throw that out there.
awesome! small town politics rears its ugly head. did we just witness matt being outed to hmmm? sensational stuff!
haha, it’s kind of the farthest thing from small town politics… it’s just a matter of human decency. The small-townness of the whole affair is when somebody you used to have an incredible amount of respect for pithily goes around blogging gossip.
Another thing… you’re painting a really inaccurate portrait of our town… It’s a tourist trap that people are raving as becoming the next P-Town. Have you been to the borough lately? We have a lot of diversity around here.
It may be “sensational” but you’re also witnessing what was a really tight bond go down in flames over childish backstabbing. This isn’t the Real World or a reality show on Bravo, it deals with real people.
welcome to the world of blogging. and the real housewives are real people. it says so right in the title.
It’s simply a trifle disconcerting when someone with such high literary promise resorts to muck-raking the dregs of the darker times in his past, utilizing a public forum for his own personal catharsis, with utter disregard to the feelings (and identities) of those involved.
Does any of this help alleviate the author’s “frustrat[ions] with the current status of queer culture in [his] town”? (TNG’s stated criteria for its writers).
Or does is simply salt old wounds in hopes of having something to say?
You can rely on journalistic integrity for positive social change, or pent gossip against the ones who knew you way back when.
If it’s the latter, one would hope it would be in hopes of achieving something pretty damn good.
When I read this column every week, I feel Corey is trying to explain his experience with being gay and being in the closet. I do not think he gossiped about his friend, but explained the similarities and differences in their in-the-closet experiences in Boston. I feel the posts relating to this particular column shows Corey’s perspective on dating and being newly out, which includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. We all have been burned before and those experiences along with the good ones make us who we are. This column is showing Corey’s journey.
If you think this column is a gossip column, then do not read it.
I completely comiserate with your views of Boston’s gay “scene” … The city is not nearly as liberal as it may seem, and there is a substantial blue collar red sox loving socially conservative element. I’ve winessed more than a few instances of harassment during my 3+ years of school here.
You mentioned Portland in your rant. I currently live in Portland for the 2 years and i can tell you I never seen so many screwed up, emotionally damage gay men in my life. Portland seems to be the gathering place of all the misfits that can’t seem to make it anywhere else. I’m constantly running into guys who moved away and came back after a miserable defeat somewhere else. And being from LA Oregon/Portland is the furtherest thing from being liberal. There are so many closeted-bi sexual guys here it is ridiculous. Plus ann abundant of guys who got married, popped out a few kids then came out of the closet. Oregon is not as liberal as everyone might think. It is very conservative here. If you don’t believe me re-watch “Milk” with Sean Penn. During the 70′s when proposition 6 was trying to be voted on. Six major cities were very against the equal right amendment. One of them, was Eugene Oregon…very backwards. Very short cited, very emotionally messed up. So if you’re damaged goods feel free to move here. You’ll fit in fine.
I am always skeptical of reviews written by people who are illiterate. Sorry, Tom, I’ll judge Portland for myself.
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