TNG reader Joshua Adamson submitted this post.

“What kind of gay are you?” asked the young and confessed freshly-out boy. The pointed question was the result of me telling him just prior, “Congratulations on finally coming out! Now you get to decide whatever kind of gay you want to be.”

The question, directed at me, took me off guard. I admitted to myself I had never really thought about it in those terms. What kind of gay am I?

First of all, I’m apparently the kind of gay who meets men on Grindr, a gay social networking iPhone App. This is how the newbie and I met, and we eventually exchanged phone numbers (because texting is much easier than chatting using the crash-laden App. Who calls people anymore?).

“Ha! Good question,” I responded, dodging a little bit. “Well, I think we’re always constantly figuring that out.” Figuring it out as I type, in fact. “I’m a gay who lives for balance. Balance between work and play, sex and love, health and liquor”—punctuated with a winking emoticon.

Ok, that was a true statement. It was the best I could come up with on the spot, anyway. But the question has stuck with me in the weeks since it was raised. Just what kind of gay am I? Maybe the better question is, what kind of gay do I want to be? But it leads to another question: What categories of gay are there to choose from?

This is my inaugural post for The New Gay. I happened upon the blog at random and was intrigued initially by the blog’s title itself. This blog seems to offer up at least somewhat of an answer to the categories-of-gay question. If there is a “new” way to be gay, then there is, in turn, an “old” way. The beauty of this blog, from what I can tell, is that it allows the blog writers and readers to discover and determine whatever the “new way” is suppose to be, for each queer individual. The old way, as TNG’s editors, writers, and readers seem to purport, isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just that we share a desire to move away from some of the overarching themes of the LGBT lifestyle—nightly techno-club hopping, self-segregation from the larger community, etc.

But can I say that I fit into the new gay lifestyle? I still club hop, though I’m more prone to hang out at a chill beer bar with friends than grind it raw with strange men in a warehouse dance club. I do listen to electronic music—but then again, I rock MGMT, The Bravery, and Alphabeat more than Lady Gaga, Rihanna, or Sophie Ellis Baxter.

I live in Salt Lake City, Utah. I find it to be a microcosm of the larger liberal-meets-conservative American story. You can find every type of queer, vegan, straight-edge, commie, hipster, and neo-hippie rubbing shoulders with all kinds of homophobic, Mormon, gun-toting, conservative-libertarian, and Log Cabin Republican—all in a city of 180,000.

The great thing about being gay in Salt Lake City is that, despite outsider stereotypical views of my hometown, it’s really goddamned easy to be gay here. And I’m finding that it’s pretty easy to be any kind of gay your queer heart desires—new, old, and otherwise. I may not have figured out exactly what homosexual path I’m destined to travel in the end, but at least I have the opportunity to discover it.

So, I’m the type of gay who meets guys on my iPhone—guys who happen to be my coworker, as was revealed a few text messages into the conversation with Newbie Boy. (Awkward? Tune in later to find out!) I’m the kind who enjoys an occasional one-night stand, never to speak to the hottie again, and I’m one who would be perfectly happy to meet a cute guy to watch a local band play at SLC’s Urban Lounge, wax poetic about the state of social media, and call it a night. Balance in all things, I suppose.