This post was submitted by corey

Start your week with sex… or lack thereof. Delve into the jungle of the newly out and single every Monday morning in Sexual Disorientation.

Coors Field on July 12th

The creation story of the Urban Single begins something like this:

On the first day, God created the downtown loft apartment.

On the second day, She created the first date.

That is how my first week of actually living in Denver began. Having completed job training that required me to travel to Atlanta and relive the thrills of dorm life, I finally made it back to the Mile High City, the place that I would now call home. I found myself with an empty apartment waiting to be filled with mattresses and espresso machines, decor and dinnerware, and tables and chairs. It was also waiting to be filled with new memories as I embarked on new adventures.

And with my bags hardly unpacked, I was all ready for my first date in my new city. It had been a boring summer thus far; in fact, since I had seen spring flings fail and fail again, I had basically decided to hold off on The Pursuit until I was a bit more settled. Thus, I was quite happy to spend my second day in Denver out and about with a local.

The boy, who we’ll call Babe Ruth, got us tickets to a baseball game and cold beers to boot. While I’m not much of a sports person, I firmly believe that there are few better ways to socialize and enjoy the summer than sitting around drinking in a baseball stadium. Unlike a movie – too little face time – or dinner for two – sometimes too much face time – a baseball game offers the perfect amount of social distraction and opportunity to chat.

Truth be told, Babe and I already knew plenty about each other. We had bonded over everything from music to pet peeves to literature while chatting via text and email for a few weeks prior to the date. In fact, as I told him at a bar after the game, I felt as if we had already known each other for a while. “Is that weird?” I asked him. “No,” he answered, expressing similar sentiments himself.

Maybe what was truly odd was that I thought of it as a first date at all, not only because we had already spent so much time getting to know one another but also because I tended not to apply the label of “first date” to any outing. When we label something as “first,” it’s certainly implied that there will be a second – and that is where my superstition kicks in and I remind myself not to count my chickens before they return my phone calls.

Another round of drinks in, we got to talking about the fact that we had met online and the social implications that entailed. “Honestly,” I told him, “if I were a heterosexual I would not use the internet for anything close to dating. But I feel like as a gay person it’s a lot more legitimate.”

My point, I went on to explain, was that in a heteronormative society where everyone is presumed heterosexual, to go online in search of romance is to turn from a culture in which opportunities are obvious and try to narrow your search in a more reclusive setting. As a gay person, going online to look for love means trying to do the opposite – to find a bigger community and open up more possibilities. Many of these are simply not easy to find in a heteronormative world or a “gay scene” focused solely around clubs and a handful of gay bookstores. There is no gay grocery store, gay restaurant, or gay office for us to meet people we know could be available to us; going online is a logical step.

Babe Ruth listened politely to my long explanation. He had a much more nuanced opinion to things than I did, in which on some level maybe homos and heteros were all looking for the same things for similar reasons. I would try to explain it here, but I think I would mess it up.

Later I invited him up to my apartment, where we drank espresso and continued our conversation. I told him that I had lugged the espresso machine from Target – along with $450 worth of apartment findings – until some random man saw me struggling to carry a dozen bags along a highway, gave me a ride to the light rail station, and offered to sell me drugs. After coffee, Babe and I set tentative plans for our next outing and soon he was off.

Alone in my apartment I couldn’t help but feel a little lonely. Compared to my cramped DC studio, which I shared with a roommate in a house of six, my relatively big loft in the middle of Denver felt like a silent white-washed abyss. I walked down to the ground floor, stepped out onto the busy pedestrian street, and began a quest for a bathroom rug and a standing lamp.

Babe Ruth sent a text. I texted back. Through the downtown crowd of unfamiliar faces, I waded in to my new surroundings, awaiting the next move.

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