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

Library at Georgetown, Fall 2005

Chapter One: To Kill a Perfectly Good Evening

When I was invited to attend the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and write it up for this site, I jumped at the opportunity. The first show I was given tickets to was To Kill A Mockingbird, which – while curiously not Shakespeare – is one of my favorite stories.

The show was fantastic, the outdoor location beautiful, and overall it was a terrific Colorado night. However, I found myself wondering where I would draw the connection to our readers. For that matter, where was the connection to me? It’s not that there wasn’t any to be made. Mockingbird is essentially a story about acceptance and redemption, a message to which many queer people can relate. And yet the classics of American literature, the works of William Shakespeare, and all but a handful of quality narratives exclude gays in any meaningful way.

As is so often true, my over-analyzing turned a lovely evening of theatre into a spiral of self-doubt. I found myself wondering if there are any stories to guide a disoriented young homo, or if I’ll have to learn to write my own?

Chapter Two: The Ten Plagues

On Tuesday night, I invited Babe Ruth – a man with whom I had gone out with last week – over to my apartment. It ended up being an invitation to sit around and drink Coors Light and red wine, as my DVD player refused to cooperate with a movie night.

It wasn’t long before all of that drinking led to a mutual need to use the restroom, but there was a big problem standing in our way: I had managed to flood the bathroom after inviting Babe over, and he had arrived before I had managed to fix whatever was wrong.

Instead of allowing him to enter the once delightfully decorated powder room that had fallen into this tragic state, I suggested that we search my new building for a public restroom. But neither in the fitness center nor in the laundry room, neither by the mail nor conference room nor stairs – nowhere in this historic building was there access to any bathroom but my own.

“We could go down the street and find somewhere,” I suggested. My street had more bars and restaurants open at that hour than any other in the Rockies. But for Babe Ruth, there was something about that scenario that was less than appealing on a second date.

“I think I’m just gonna head home,” he said instead, warning me before he left: “You’re going to be writing about this in your column.”

At the time, I had thought that I would die a thousand deaths before writing of a flooding bathroom in my column. My weekly adventures are hardly glamorous, but this seemed a step too far. What kind of coming of age story talked of post-beer bathroom searches? What kind of romance ever told tale of troubled toilets?

But when it came time to put pen to paper, I realized that this was just more proof that real stories never turn out the way we expect them to. This is true for anyone, homo or hetero.

And meanwhile, I had bigger problems on my plate. The kitchen had suddenly flooded, too. I was reminded of the one source of literature that did speak of such things – the Bible – and I couldn’t help but wonder if I had gnats and locusts or rainbows and redemption coming ahead.

Chapter Three: The Complete Works of Lost Love (Abridged)

I’m hopefully making my way back to Boulder next weekend to see the premier of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). I’m curious to see how the play takes chunks of tragedy and somehow forges comedy, as well as how it condenses so many stories into such a short block.

I find that in shaping my own gay narrative, I find pacing to be a frequent problem. The typical hetero love story has a clear beginning, middle, and end. The couple meets; they begin to date; and after a bit of drama they end up together, until death or sequels do them part. But the gay story, which so often begins unofficially, on the DL, or with a one night stand, does not so easily fit into the timelines we’ve been given to etch out our lives.

Sometimes my problem is wanting to move faster than the great love stories allow. In the classics, people would often wait years or until marriage before sleeping with each other. For me, marriage is not even legal. Even on television, the number of dates, weeks, or months one needs to wait before having sex seems like an unrealistic fable when juxtaposed with the real, contemporary gay life. If my beloved sitcom stars worried that one will never find love putting out before the fourth date, how was I to find anything if my dates consisted of flooded bathrooms and I tended to look for hookups first and hope to forge relationships later?

But I have just as many issues watching things move too slow, holding onto the past, and continuing to wonder about long lost man for many years after we’ve parted ways.

The problem is simple: I hope for every story to have a happy ending. It’s why I expect everything great to come on a first date – if I know things will end great, why not get there sooner than later – and why I can’t let the past go – because maybe things will turn around someday and that person will be back.

This idea really came to fruition this weekend when an old friend started calling and texting, wondering if we had been wrong to leave things as just friends. We were now separated by thousands of miles plus the things that had always kept us apart.

But something was different now, and I wondered if we didn’t have it in our power to write our own path forward. I wondered if our story was already dead and buried – if we were just two confused people holding onto a fantasy – or if maybe someday down the road our stories would become one once again.

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