My Block in Denver, August 2009

I awoke on Sunday morning to what was the worst hangover I’ve had in a while. I had thrown a small party the night before, a chance to show off my apartment and cooking skills, but consumed more gin than was my intention. As I stumbled through the house, the traces of the night before were all too evident: an empty glass on the nightstand, my Armani sneakers atop a pile of clothes in the living room, and my wine-soaked bamboo table runner still drying in the sink.

The one thing I didn’t see was the one thing I wanted to – The Boy I’m dating, who through our decision to see only each other had pushed me out of singledom and into some new and foreign land. He had come over the night before and met my friends, but didn’t feel well and thus took off early.

In the few weeks we’ve been seeing each other, we’ve encountered few of the stereotypical problems that can come with dating. I met his most recent ex-boyfriend, gave him a keycard to my building, and decided with him to go exclusive, all without a hitch or sign drama. But we have struggled at times with the difficulty that comes from having another person in your life, someone who thinks, communicates, and behaves differently than you do and with whom you have to learn to share your life.

All of which raised several questions, questions which I couldn’t help but ponder as I sat hungover in my empty apartment. Are we meant to coexist with another individual, to join ourselves to someone, to merge our time and assets and emotions? Or are women and men islands unto themselves who are too independently designed to be bridged together?

~~~

Earlier in the week I had an after hours-meeting with my director at work. She asked me how I was settling into my job, where my official duties had just begun. “Cautious optimism is the order of the day,” I replied. “I’m feeling good about everything, but I’m watching out for signs of trouble.”

Then she asked me how dating was going. “Still seeing multiple men?” she asked with a laugh, to which I responded that I had settled on one. “And how’s that going?”

“Same as the job,” I said – “It’s going great, which means I’m uneasy.”

Later, while we were each finishing things up on our own, I got a text from The Boy. He was saying that he wouldn’t be able to meet that evening as hoped, the result of my dinner party and his errands running too close together. While the canceled date was itself a disappointment, the true worry was how he had addressed me in the text – “buddy.”

The truth was, I didn’t know what to call him. He referred to himself as my boyfriend from time to time, but as far as I could tell, there was a step between “dating exclusively” and “in a relationship” that we had yet to take. It was a confusing spot to be in, and I wasn’t the only one there.

In fact, that more I talked to friends, the more people I found on the same boat. One woman told me that she’s been dating the same guy for a while, but never knows how to refer to him. “I just say he’s my ‘friend’,” she confided, “and it makes me feel like an idiot.” I noticed that another friend only ever said “the guy I’m seeing” and never “boyfriend,” despite the fact that they were facebook official and seemed fairly serious.

This issue of how much of our lives we wanted to share linked back to my question of independence versus coexistence. But even negotiation itself – at least for The Boy and me – seemed to be made difficult by the fact that we both thought and behaved in very different ways, ways that sometimes left us on different pages.

As I walked out of the office and passed by my director, I shared this troubling text with her. “He called you ‘buddy’?” she responded with shock. “What does that mean?!”

“Like I said before,” I replied. “Cautious optimism.”

~~~

On Thursday evening, for a reason I have now forgotten, The Boy asked me if I had ever been on a boat. “You Coloradans are hilarious,” I said as I began to crack up in laughter, pointing out that those of us from the coast have of course been on boats. And this led to a debate over home state supremacy, my heart still in the East.

It still seems surreal that I now reside in Denver, in a part of the country that was like an illusive mystery to me as a child in Connecticut. The mobility of the modern person is a phenomenon that continues to stun me even as I exemplify it myself.

I have, at times, felt isolated here. Whereas in the District I would regularly greet visitors from out of town, or by train glide through six states in as many hours, Denver feels like a tiny bubble miles from familiarity.

That feeling of isolation made it easy to be single here, for the few weeks that I was. I could walk the whole city anonymously and rarely received offers to socialize. Whereas in DC it always felt strange and unfair to not have someone after spending so much time on The Scene, here being alone seemed logical.

I escaped that feeling of isolation when I started dating The Boy, and I like this alternative much better – even if it means giving up some of my independence. I have someone who will answer if I call, who will laugh at my east coast elitism, and who will wonder in earnest if I have ever boarded a ship somewhere far from this mountainous isle.

~~~

Every change in life is monumental and yet minuscule. The smallest thing can make us feel as though the whole world has suddenly been altered, but the human form is a great survivor. It carries on much the same despite whatever life may bring us.

And so has been my experience dating. Seeing someone exclusively is perhaps no big deal, but there are times when having someone call me his own couldn’t feel more significant.

In the end, maybe this inconsistency is the greatest change that finding someone has caused. Although it seemed so disorienting, being single was binary, static and simple. I was independent, an island of a man who saw things exactly as I wanted to see them. But the world of sort-of having someone, of shared existence, is one of many shades of gray. It is this uncertainty that makes exiting the jungle of the newly out and single both terrifying and wonderful.

Steering Things in a New Direction. Colorado Mountains, July 2009.

The modern gay romance, and maybe modern romance altogether, rarely begins as do the classic tales with which we’re all familiar. There is no “once upon a time” and, in most states, happily ever afters remain illegal. And yet, when we look beyond the surface of the shallow social scene, we can sometimes find traces of real romance surviving in its evolved modern form.

This is the story of how my twenty-two years of singleness came to an end, and how my myths about dating and romance were taken down with it.

Myth #1: The Online Thing Never Works, except for finding freaks and one-night stands. Despite the fact that this was my long-standing belief, I found myself a few Sundays back searching Connexion, the West’s facebook for homosexuals. It had a tendency to show me pictures of the same men over and over again, and as I logged in that morning I saw a familiar face that I had always found attractive and alluring.

The Boy was unreasonably cute and his profile suggested that he had an intellect and intrigue to go with it. Despite the warnings that wasn’t looking for a relationship, I decided to message him anyway. It began as all messages of this nature do – with me stating that I never do this, but decided to make an exception just this once.

I was surprised when thirty-six hours later – a year in modern homosexual time – I had a message from The Boy in my inbox. It was neither snide and dismissive nor filled with cheesy pick-up lines; it was just a nice email from a nice boy. I found out that he was my age, was a student at a nearby university, and lived just a couple of blocks away.

A few emails and a few days later, we agreed to meet for a drink at a bar between our two apartments.

Myth #2: You Can’t Hook Up On a First Date, at least not if you want there to be a second date. This was something that had always given me trouble. If things were going well with a guy and I felt a real connection, I had a hard time stopping things with just a kiss at the door. In fact, I had always seemed to miss that first kiss one way or the other, with dates either ending with an awkward wave or with both of us in bed. Neither seemed to be a starting point for anything serious.

The Boy seemed even more into speed and passion than I was. While we strolled through downtown after dinner and drinks, he told me that he had once gotten arrested for joyriding in a sports car at double the speed limit – while in a 75 mile-an-hour zone. But when I told him that for me, a one-night stand was too much work and investment for too small a gain, he had seemed to agree.

Before long I had invited him up to my apartment, which led to wine and talking. He was sweet and interesting, and I felt the drinks begin to take their effect. I found myself looking into his eyes and he into mine. And suddenly he leaned over and kissed me, not stopping with a peck. In fact, moments later he had knocked over his wine, though I couldn’t have cared less.

I led him by moonlight down to the bedroom. As he took off my shirt, he whispered, “Just to be clear, this isn’t a one-night stand. Maybe a two or three… hundred.” And somehow, I believed him.

Myth #3: If He Leaves in the Middle of the Night, He’s One of Those Guys. Sometimes he really does just have a stomachache. And he texted me the next morning to tell me so.

What was surprising was that, a few days later, he called me again to make plans. In fact, from that point on, we began to see each other every night. Sometimes we would just stay in and watch a movie, and sometimes we’d go for late-night walks through our always-open neighborhood.

I began to feel as though this one wasn’t running away any time soon, but that still left me with…

Myth #4: I’ll Never Get From Just Dating to Dating. We discussed this on one of our walks, particularly my ineptitude at starting relationships. “I just don’t know how to negotiate that kind of thing,” I said. “I don’t know how to get from sleeping with someone and dating them to having an actual relationship.”

But The Boy was a proponent of clear, honest communication. He had already told me how he valued this in bed, and I had already written a column about it, though I had acted cautiously and not attributed it to him.

One night at my kitchen table he began to open up on the details of his life – about his childhood, his challenges, his goals and ideals. The more he talked, the more I found myself drawn not only to him and his intelligence and his complexity, but also to the idea of honest communication.

So the next night in bed, when he playfully took me in his arms and said, “Mine,” I decided to roll with it. “Am I yours?” I asked. And he said, “Yes.”

But I pressed on. “Speaking of that, I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m not going to see other people. You don’t have to follow suit. But we spend every night together already, and I want to keep it that way.” It was empowering to just be clear and say what I wanted, and quite a shift from my normal policy of neurotic analysis replacing actual communication.

“I already made that decision about you,” he replied, to my great relief and surpirse. “I was seeing someone else before we met, but I ended that.”

“Then we’re each other’s,” I said. And just like that, it was true.

The Biggest Myth of All: I Will Always Be Single had come crashing down for the first time in my life. According to Zack, this is proof of the power of negative thinking. After years in the closet and even more struggling to find my way in the gay dating scene, I had become trapped in the mindset that I would never find someone. Slowly it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I could probably spend a good deal of time analyzing this and writing about it and wondering what mistakes I’ve made. But I have a guy I care about, a guy who gets me, a guy who I drove with to the mountains over the weekend, a guy who brings me movies to borrow and extra laundry detergent, a guy who I can picture really being with. And that feeling of excitement and new direction has quelled the disorientation I’ve written about so fervently over the past six months and felt for much of my life before that.

Suddenly I was no longer single, and miles from my old home in a metropolis of three million people, I had finally found one man to help me see things clearly.

Denver City Blues, March 2009

Part of moving to a new city, meeting new people, and embracing life as a young professional is deciding what to say about myself to other people. And it’s not just a matter of what to say – it’s also about how much of it to say and to whom to choose to say it.

For instance, I decided not to tell my landlord or most of my new friends that I occasionally enjoy a cigarette or two, with the idea being that if people didn’t expect it of me maybe I’d soon stop doing it. I decided to be open about my work for the Obama campaign at a recent conference, despite the presence of several known Republicans, but I left out the part about being a gay, agnostic, democratic socialist.

All people choose how to “message” themselves to others, but perhaps this applies more to the gay identity than to others. Unlike most essential parts of our identity – our gender, our race, and even things like socioeconomic or educational background – we can generally choose whether to hide our sexuality from others or be very vocal and honest about it.

The more I thought about this, the more choice I saw in the way I presented myself with others in my life, be it professional or personal. I began to worry: do I give too much away in my day-to-day close encounters of the third kind? Or do I keep too much of myself private and lose out because I can’t loosen up?

To speak or not to speak. From the bedroom to the office, that seemed to be the question.

The whole notion came about last week when a close new friend told me, “Great sex is all about communication.” Chemistry, effort and talent may all be important, but the number one factor for having fun in bed is effectively stating what you want – and being listened to. Anyone worth sleeping with, he said, is going to want to hear it.

“If they don’t, they’re just selfish and mean,” he warned. Instantly, I thought he was onto something.

I tend to be a pretty quiet guy until I get to know someone, and when I’m sleeping with someone that comfort level starts over at zero. In other words, even if I hook up with a friend I’ve known for a long time, until I get to know him sexually I’m going to be fairly silent about what I want and need in bed.

There was something about vocalizing the most intimate aspects of myself that has always made me feel uneasy, and thus is something I tend to avoid until I felt really comfortable with someone. Stating too much had always been a worry. What if my sexual desires gave away too much of my personality and set me up to be manipulated or at least “figured out”? What if – at least in the eyes of the other man – I turned out to be some kind of freak or undesirable?

Of course, there were problems with keeping quiet, too. There was the immediate issue of not having a totally satisfying experience. There was the long-term issue of having to backtrack with guys with whom I was originally quiet and then wanted or expected something different. And there was the underlying issue that if I wasn’t comfortable with these guys, why was I sleeping with them to begin with?

As I mentioned, I was also thinking this week about how much I should or shouldn’t say about myself at my new job. For the past two years, I have considered it part of my duty as a queer person to be as “out” as is safe and reasonable. I believe that the queer rights movement depends on more gays coming out, more heterosexual people knowing gay folks, and the “public face” of the gay community therefore broadening and not being pigeonholed into certain media-perpetuated stereotypes.

That was as a college student. As a young professional, while I made no secret of my sexuality while getting hired at the national level, coming out to the people I’d actually be working with on a day-to-day level seemed to be another story.

But earlier this week I was gently outed by a coworker who seemed to be looking out for me. I was pleased to learn that the people I’d be working with were by and large accepting and open-minded, and that I had at least a few queer allies in case I ever ran into trouble. But I still felt like my sexuality should be kept under wraps unless I had a specific reason to tell a specific person.

Really, it all related to the same questions I had been considering regarding communication and sex. Was it better to be honest with people and not worry about those who didn’t like what they heard? Or was it better to play on the safe side and allow yourself to remain a mystery until you felt comfortable opening up?

In my situation, I think that maybe I need to be a bit more communicative with the people I sleep with and a little less open with others – at least until I get a better feel for my new job. Social change and gay rights aside, there is something sensible in keeping your personal life personal, even if you happen to write a sex column.

On the other hand, if I’m going to have sex with someone, I might as well extend my oral abilities to include good communication. After all, expecting our partners to listen to our desires and hear us out hardly seems like asking too much.

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.

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.

Queer people often seem to approach gender in one of two ways: as a fight to show the world that they maintain their given gender despite being gay, or as a fight to shed the gender norms that have been placed upon them. My own journey started out in the former category – seeking to be a “man,” even if I was a gay one – to the latter category – embracing the notion of being genderqueer and no longer feeling connected to the idea of being “male.”

Just before I left the District in May, I was asked by a skeptical friend at a party what exactly made me genderqueer. I didn’t have a great answer, in part because of the amount of gin I had recently consumed, but also because for me the genderqueer concept isn’t about forging a new label. It’s about dumping a label you don’t feel applies to you, namely male or female. Instead I answered, “I don’t know, but I just am. Doesn’t that count for anything?” And he seemed satisfied with the response.

But lately I have felt myself wondering more and more about it, especially given my move to Denver. My new job has required the filling out of dozens of forms, only one of which allowed me to check off an option other than “male” or “female.” It has meant living in conference housing with three heterosexual men, a position that I haven’t found myself in for a while and which has made me altogether uncomfortable. And it has involved the search for permanent housing and therefore roommates, where again the question of gender has come into play. (For the record, I decided to live with the only person in Denver who could put up with me: myself.)

Throughout my journey westward I have questioned what it means to be genderqueer, or queer at all for that matter. Can I hold onto my independent control of labels and be what I want to be? Or is my being a “man” too manifest to not be destiny?

My Life with the Gorillas

Sub-zero air-conditioned temperatures. Beer bottles and junk food everywhere. The bouncing of basketballs in a messy living room. These are the things that come with living amongst heterosexual men.

When I moved into my assigned housing four weeks ago, a required endeavor while I undergo training for my new job, I of course knew that I would be living with men. I had to fill out dozens of forms leading up to that point in which I was asked for my gender of sex. Having little other option, I had selected “male” each time.

But while I had considered that it might be slightly uncomfortable to not fit in or to be met with some hostility based on my orientation, I had not considered how awkward I would feel simply to be considered male and put with others of my “type.”

I was given my own bedroom, as were we all, so things were not nearly as bad as they might have been. But I have been consistent in my avoidance of shared spaces or interaction with my apartmentmates. Moments in the early morning or late at night, at which I might find someone going to or from the shower, were particularly awkward for me; I couldn’t help but feel like a teenage girl who had accidentally ended up in the boy’s locker room.

Once I came home to find a group of men I didn’t know, dressed for the gym, pounding on my front door. “No one else is home,” I said with more than a little disdain before brushing past them and closing the door behind me. On one evening a group of them were blasting music in the living room, talking about “eating pussy” and making some vaguely homophobic remark. I stayed in my room and put on my headphones.

It’s not that there is anything wrong with these men, or that I am by any means a perfect person myself. It’s just that living here has been hard and isolating, not just because I’m gay but because of my gender identity as well. I have only three things in common with the people with whom I’ve been placed, and they all hang between my legs. And for that, my new employer – which prides itself on being a “great” organization for queer people – has earned a touch of my resentment.

Cheap Labels

After some thought, I concluded that the problem is largely one of labels. I can accept the fact that I have a certain sex, but do not want the label of a gender, with all of the associations that comes with it. It’s not something that I feel is part of my identity.

This doesn’t mean avoiding the fact that I was born with a degree of male privilege; this would be the equivalent of being a rich white person, calling myself “color-blind,” and complaining that supporters of affirmative action are the real racists. In order to recognize and fight sexism in our society, I can’t just pretend that gender doesn’t exist as a conception and a force. But I can choose to not identify with it myself.

However, the resentment that I’ve felt lately towards (especially heterosexual) men has also not been fair. Just as I have a right to not accept a gender label, others have a right to accept it if they choose and to live their lives in a way that works for them.

This issue plays a certain role in the realm of dating, as well. Some homosexual men who really want to emphasize their masculinity call themselves “straight-acting,” but there is nothing straight about one man having sex with another. What they really mean is that they identify strongly with the male gender, and are looking for partners who do the same – not ones who act “feminine” and thus earn the wrath of the macho gays.

And with queer women there are sometimes similar tensions between those with a more “butch” look and those sometimes deridingly called “lipstick lesbians.” I’ve seen people on both sides of the perceived fence look at the other as being illegitimate, not helpful towards the gay rights movement, or at least not worthy of association.

If our society is currently in a phase of gay liberation, I hope that the time will soon come for gender liberation, as well. One reason that the LGBT population often forgets its last letter, the trans community, is that our fight is too often one about who we sleep with and get to marry and too seldom about something deeper: our ability to identify as we choose and to strip away the old concepts of Man, Woman, and the relationship between them.

As I’ve fallen head-first into the Real World over the past several weeks, I’ve felt at times out of place, excited, nervous, optimistic, pessimistic, and just plain exhausted. But through it all I’ve felt like myself, and that’s one label – for all its faults and complexities – that I’m willing to wear.

In recent weeks, my move across the country has required a good deal of navigation through a new community, and that navigation has required gaydar. A common misconception about gaydar is that it has only two readings: gay or hetero. In fact, any frequent user of this skill knows that many people give signals somewhere in between.

There are people who are gay and don’t know it yet; people who are gay but are quiet about it; people who maybe are hetero but who get gay when they drink. As a queer person, I find myself not only taking notice of people I check off as being gay – and thus possible allies, hookups or competitors – but also those who check out as “maybes.”

On a ship, when one needs to track movement on radar, one can use a homing beacon – a tracking device placed on another vessel so as to plot out its path. It dating, is it appropriate to throw a homo beacon on the closet cases we wish to keep in sight? And if so, how do we draw the line between watching the closet, feeling around inside, and actually pushing people out?

As I wrote about two weeks ago, the group with whom I’m currently sequestered has a lot of people in relationships and few openly gay individuals. Seeing no low-hanging fruits, I realized that I may have to look towards higher branches. The more I thought about it, the more potential queer people I realized were around me.

What are the signs? For one thing, Facebook signaling. While I get frustrated at the marketing of ourselves we are forced to do through “the book” and other networking systems, one interesting phenomenon are the people who opt not to select who they are interested in – men, women, or both.

I have noticed that for many women, not putting interested in men (and rather leaving the field blank) can just be a sign that they aren’t actively looking for a relationship. In other words, creepy hetero guys who are looking at this page, you needn’t be bothered bothering with me.

But for men, not putting your interest – at least if you have all other personal information filled in – tends to be a clear sign of queerdom. For heterosexual men, projecting anything other than pure certainty in your undivided attraction towards women is the social equivalent of being sterilized. I suspect that heterosexual men on the whole have a tendency to see things more in black and white than women or homosexual men, as evidenced by the fact that so many of them are Republicans.

When I saw that a cute guy I had met wasn’t interested in anyone on his profile, my first thought was that maybe there was a chance he could be interested in me. But how to figure it out? A flirty conversation here, a smile there… Trying this has yielded nothing. And meanwhile, I have left facebook for a bit of an internet break, and no longer had that tool with which to observe and make my intentions subtly known.

Step number one was complete – homo beacon placed. He was on my radar, my gaydar, and every other kind of -dar one could think of, except for the Daughters of the American Revolution. I knew that the time had come to implement step number two: the feel-out.

The only problem was that I am incredibly bad at doing this. He already knew I was gay, which is both a plus – I know that we aren’t both playing the gaydar game – but also a minus – if I did something too flirty, he wouldn’t be able to write it off as innocent heterosexual behavior. Trying to flirt with potentially hetero men without risking a fist in one’s face is always a difficult balancing act. At the very least, playing it wrong can be humiliating.

Example: at a party on a warm afternoon, I go to make my exit and say goodbye to the gentleman in question. I think that we are doing a hand pull – fist pound combo as he holds his hand up to me. He thought we were doing a high five. I end up holding his hand for 6 seconds before realizing that I need to move on.

I’m also not good at feeling out others who know the person. With this particular gentleman I have several friends in common, but I can’t bring myself to ask the question, “Do you think he’s gay?” With that one line I would lay all of my cards on the table, and things could easily get around to him. Even if he is gay, it’s not exactly a power play to let someone hear through the grape vine that you are shyly interested and stalking him through mutual acquaintances.

It also raises the question of whether or not to take things to step number three, when the transition occurs from feeling someone out to feeling them right out of the closet. How do we inquire without instigating? Do we need to put respect for potential closet cases over our own sexual ambitions?

On the one hand, I am not overly sympathetic to closet queers who are socioeconomic conservatives and go to church every Sunday to hear a pastor preach against homosexuality, and then hop online and find other “bros” to screw on the weekends. (I’m making this comment male-centric firstly to mock the term “bro” and secondly because I don’t know that this is so widespread among women.)

On the other hand, I am sympathetic to people who are respectful of the out gay community and simply are not yet, or do not ever want to be, in that place themselves – people who are true to themselves but in a different way than I am, or who are still working through issues about their sexuality. And I wouldn’t want to feel like I was being the kind of gossipy, backstabbing, drama queen that make some people resent the gay community as a whole.

If you aren’t going to push someone out of the closets via proxies and innuendo, you have to do it the direct way. You can try to massage your way in, to get the person drunk enough to show her or his true colors, or find an excuse to be alone and start losing your clothes. But none of these are for me. I’m not nearly bold enough to pull it off, and if I got caught trying and hadn’t indeed found a homo- or bisexual, I think that I would sooner die than show my face in public again.

So here is what I am left with. On Saturday night, I see the guy in a busy courtyard. I am smoking and reading poetry – Ferlinghetti, I think – by the light of the moon. We talk for a few minutes, but I run out of things to say. He goes one way and I go the other, with trails of Marlboro vapors fading behind us into the night. He’s on my radar screen, but he may be just a blip.

A few weeks ago, a new friend of mine in Denver came into my hotel room unannounced, climbed up into my bed, and started flipping through my copy of Men’s Fitness. It seemed obvious that he was just looking at the pictures of the buff, shirtless men and not reading the articles about protein bars and sit-ups.

“You won’t find any material in there for your ‘private time’,” I warned him. “The guys aren’t that hot. I only get that magazine because Radar got canceled and I had to pick either this or Star.”

Soon, realizing that I was right, he put the magazine away and transitioned to GQ. We went on to talk about a lot of things that afternoon – sex, threesomes, the perils of oral sex – nothing too unusual. So when I heard from a mutual friend about a scandalous conversation topic we had discussed, I thought she meant lockjaw. “No,” she said, “I didn’t hear that one.”

So what was so outrageous? My comment about using (or not using) the pics in that magazine to lend oneself a hand.

As someone who talks about sex a lot, I probably cross people’s boundaries for acceptable conversation topics regularly. But I find that most of my friends enjoy it more than they’re offended or put off – unless the subject begins with an “M” and ends with an “asturbation.” In light of this revelation, I wondered: is masturbation the last taboo? And if so, when it comes to this “touchy” subject, why I am so comfortable being the master debater?

It began back in high school when, inspired by an old episode of Seinfeld, a friend and I decided to have a contest as to who could go the longest without jerking off. We each lasted close to two weeks, but walking into school on a Tuesday morning we both wore the look of defeat.

“When did you cave?” I asked him.

“Around eleven last night,” he replied.

I smiled as soon as I heard it. “I beat you by seven hours,” I said. “I held out until this morning.”

He went on to lament that it was disgusting to jerk off in the morning before school, to which I replied that it was about as gross as doing it any other time of day. (For the record, I never received the dinner we had wagered.)

In high school, I also began to ask female friends about their habits, if and when I felt like I could get away with it. I was intrigued by questionable statistics that less than half of women report masturbating, considering that I estimated the percentage of male participants to be around 130%. Most of the women I talked to were understandably coy about the subject, but hinted at the information I wanted. (As with any taboo, letting go a little can be a fun experience, even for the proper folk at my Connecticut high school.)

The verdict from the ladies I chatted with was that there was, indeed, mixed participation, with most citing far less frequency then most men with whom I’ve compared figures. My talks with female friends tended to yield results like “once in a while,” whereas with men it was always a certain number of times per week or, in some cases, per day. I have wondered if some women do it just as often but feel silenced or shamed by our society’s sexist hypocrisy; it would hardly surprise me.

I had thought that the queer community would be more open to discuss this subject, as we tend to be (by necessity, if nothing else) more cognizant of our sexuality. But this has proven not to be the case. One friend who I regularly talk to about sex tends to balk at any conversation involving masturbation. He somehow managed to skirt the issue even when he paid me $60 in cash to order him porn, a necessary step as his parents pay his credit card bills.

“If I’m not going to talk to you about this, who will I talk to?” I had asked.

“No one!” he answered. “You don’t talk about that!” His argument, in addition to it being vulgar, was that masturbation was just too private to discuss. It is the only place where we can play out our deepest fantasies without the judgment or condemnation of others, he said – a sexual sanctuary whose walls should never be, well, penetrated.

In my two whole years as a fully-out homosexual, I have found only one person who can always match my interest in and willingness to talk about the sexual oddity that is masturbation: TNG’s own Zack. Whenever I have something to say on the subject, I will open up a new email to Z and begin with something like, “I feel like you would appreciate this.”

As I said above, I find it curious that the rest of the gay community isn’t so willing to engage. Masturbation, if we take the term broadly, is often an integral part of (at least the male) gay sexual experience. As things do not line up biologically quite as they do in heterosexual intercourse, the responsibility for getting off is often handed off to oneself. In addition, anyone who has checked out the craigslist ads knows that there is quite a market for quasi-gay men to sit around and jerk off together.

Maybe we have to venture into psychology to find the answer. Queer people, often forced to spend years repressing their true sexuality, may have felt that their hours spent masturbating were the only time when they could feel their true desires come to fruition, the only safe space in a cold, judgmental society. And perhaps the fact that gay sex sometimes requires one to finish oneself off only rehashes difficult feelings of sex as a detached, lonely act.

Then again, maybe some people just find it weird to talk about. For those who don’t, I’m always here to chat – unless you catch me with my hands full.

Denver Over Traffic, March 2009. Photo by Corey.

When meeting new people, there are things one loves to hear. “I have a car…” “I used to work for the Obama campaign, too…” “I think our organization needs better LGBT recruitment…”

And then there are the things that you don’t want to hear. “I need to find a church here…” “My political views may surprise you…” “I’m married.”

While setting off on a new adventure in a new city, I have been surprised at how many of my new counterparts – mostly around 22 years old – are either married, engaged, or pretty close to it. Maybe it’s because my alma mater has a shockingly limited dating scene, and my gay friends often aren’t even allowed to get married.

Nevertheless, as I stepped out into the real world last week, it felt more like stepping onto the arc. My single peers around me have felt the same way, and together we wondered: what the fuck?

Chapter One: First Comes Love…

Before graduating from Georgetown a few weeks ago, I was perfectly used to never seeing couples in my day-to-day life. Very few people dated there, and those who did showed little affection in public. I once had a gender and theology professor say how stunned she was at the lack of visible sexuality on our campus.

I could never figure out the reason why our school was not one of couples, dating, or even much sex (at least not that was being discussed.) Was it the catholic background? The fact that rich, socially-conservative prepsters dominated much of the scene?

I did have a few friends at Georgetown who were “seeing” someone, but it was always an arrangement somewhat shy of suggesting a “couple.” I doubt that many of them lasted past graduation day.

Across town – on the scene, in my gay community, in the land of TNG and Dupont and U Street – things were somewhat different. I had several friends who were in relationships, but it didn’t make me feel like this, like I was the only single person in a room of pairs.

Was it because they were gay? Did the fact that they didn’t fit the relationship paradigm our society has set make it seem less valid or real in my mind? Am I really bothered at present by the visible presence of heterosexuality and not couples?

Or maybe it was because my gay couples in DC were young, fun, and made my life – including my sex life – more interesting and not less.

Chapter Two: Then Comes Marriage…

“I’ve set a goal,” I announced on my way to happy hour on Friday night. “I will get laid by next Sunday.” I was only half-kidding.

My newfound friends and I had been talking about the fact that there weren’t a ton of single people in our large group of incoming hires, currently trapped together in an intensive training program. Many were in serious relationships and I had been surprised at several points to be introduced to 22-year-old spouses.

So finding flings for any of us seemed a long way’s off. And this was despite the fact that we had heard from our predecessors that our month of training would be one of shots, suspended judgement, and hookups.

“I just don’t get it,” a friend said over drinks, puzzled by the fact that even many of our single-at-first-sight peers had long distance beaus. “I moved here to meet new people. Why would you want to be in a relationship with your phone? I barely have time to talk to my roommate!”

While I took comfort in not being alone in my despair, I also began to feel that if the problem wasn’t just in my head I would need to take action to get action.

Chapter Three: From the Cradle to the Grave

“We’re so…”

“Boring.” I finished M’s sentence to propose what our group had become. “We get up at five, we eat dinner at six in the evening, we’re in bed by eleven. This is my grandma’s schedule.”

M, a hetero woman who gets my sense of humor, suggested that I ask my grandma what she does to get laid. I didn’t take her advice.

Instead I wondered about the ambivalence of my feelings towards couplehood. On the one hand, I wanted to avoid the path of my parents – married at 20, living in the same house their whole adult lives… I knew that wasn’t for me. And now I found myself appalled to be surrounded by couples, some with rings on their fingers.

But wasn’t that what I wanted? Didn’t I want a relationship – albeit one that didn’t hold me back or let me grow complacent, grow boring or grow old?

Am I just jealous? That doesn’t seem right. I had never felt jealous of my coupled friends – homo or hetero – in the past.

Maybe the problem is that by being feeling so fenced in by couples, I am always reminded of my own singleness. And I am reminded that prospects of finding someone may be more difficult than I had imagined.

“I’m open to dating. I just feel like I haven’t met the right person yet,” my friend said.

“Me neither.” I took another swig of my Coors Light and looked around the bar. I wondered where he was.

To read the first part of this story, click here.

The first few months of being out and dating are like the first run through an all-you-can-eat buffet: you try a little of everything, figure out what you like, and go back for more. I’d learned that sex with random people didn’t do it for me, but I also didn’t think that I needed for it to be attached to a relationship for it to be enjoyable.

A “spring fling” is thus something I thought I could pull off, and when a great guy came along who seemed to want more than being friends, I took the opportunity. But after we slept together, we were simply no where – no fling, no friendship, nothing. We went from talking everyday and confiding in each other to dropping all but the most basic communication.

For me it raised some questions. Is there room in the gay world for dating? Is there room for flings that last more than forty-five minutes? Or are my options limited to friends, fucks and boyfriends?

The Incident went down on a Saturday night in Georgetown. After drinking and socializing most of the evening, we were finally alone and on the couch. I inched closer to him; he inched closer to me. I put my head on his shoulder and my arm across his chest; he leaned his head on mine and took my hand. And soon, we were kissing.

I was suddenly very confused. I had wanted this to happen for a few weeks, while we ran about town on what were basically dates while he maintained that he just wanted to be friends. The fact was, I really liked this guy but I was moving soon and so was he. Having had a rocky few months, I knew that he didn’t need any more heartbreak. I didn’t want to ruin our friendship for a one-night stand, but I thought that a little fling – a few weeks of dating and intimacy with an amicable departure – might be good for us both.

I pulled away from his lips and asked him to wait. Gathering my thoughts, I asked, “Are you sure this is what you want? I know you’re not into hookups.” “I know,” he said.” “So this isn’t a hookup?” He shook his head no, and that was good enough for me.

Between the wine and my desire to advance things with him, I took this as a sign that he must want something similar to me. I thought that we were headed for something between a relationship – which I would have wanted but which wasn’t possible – and no-strings-attached sex – which was a little too short-term for either of us.

We slept with each other and I was on cloud nine. Something about this felt different than the sex I had had in the past. It’s not that I didn’t care about some of the men who came before (no pun intended), but it wasn’t the same kind of caring. The next day, after he had left, I wondered if I was falling for him.

The funny thing about flings and dating is that they are supposed to be casual due to their lack of clear boundaries or commitments, but in reality this often makes things more complicated and stressful. As it turns out, getting laid without structure isn’t so laid back. Some people – myself included – take comfort in the clear definitions of friendships, people we’re just having sex with, and people we’re in a relationship with. When you start mixing with those categories, you can often end up with a mess.

My boy and I went from being close friends who talked everyday about things important to us to hardly talking at all. We had all sorts of things planned for the weeks ahead, from which he dropped out of one by one, leaving me with jazz tickets and train tickets and too much free time. I know that he wasn’t trying to hurt me. But in the sobering light of day, he may have realized that he couldn’t be friends with me without us wanting to sleep together, and that we couldn’t sleep together without us both wanting something more than that.

Regardless of his intentions, I was left pretty upset. Not only had I lost my chance at a few week fling with a great guy, but I had also lost a good friend. I also worried that I had somehow hurt him – that maybe I should have just kept my distance so as to avoid all of this from happening. He was younger, still in his late teens, and perhaps I was the one who was supposed to be responsible and stop us both.

Anything that is more than just sex but less than a relationship seems to run in contradiction to every kind of paradigm presented to a young queer person in our society. There is the old notion that sleeping around is as much a part of gay identity and community as is superior taste in clothing. On the other hand, there is the new guard – those in very public relationships, those adopting kids, those fighting for marriage rights because they actually want to use those rights.

Truth be told, it can be hard for queer people to go on dates and feel comfortable and safe. It can be hard to define something that is more meaningful to us than a one-night stand but that doesn’t fit into the heteronormative structure of a “relationship.”

And many of us may feel rejected also by our queer peers. I have friends who sleep around, friends who are in relationships, and friends who are in relationships and sleep around, but I don’t have any who date or have short-term affairs. We don’t need the approval of others and we don’t need to live in a way that mimics our friends, but standing on one’s own with no example to live by is easier said than done.

(Of course, there’s the distinct possibility that it has less to do with being gay and more to do with being me. But that’s a more depressing line of questioning for another time.)

In the weeks following The Fall of the Fling, I found myself disinterested in sex. I had the opportunity once or twice, and normally I might have gone for it. But after sleeping with a guy that I really liked, sleeping with someone for whom I didn’t have feelings seemed to lack much appeal. And now, even if I do find someone who fits that bill, I’m not sure I’m willing to risk falling too hard too fast once again.

Knowing me, it won’t be long until I’m mixed up in something once again despite these reservations. But I will be a lot more careful before pursuing a fling. Maybe some people can have more than sex and less than a significant other, but I’m complicated enough as it is without adding all that.

And to my long lost boy, if you should be reading this, from the European city you flew off to without warning: I’m sorry that we messed up our friendship, our fling, or whatever it was we wanted. I hope you weren’t hurt like I was. And I hope that if we’re ever living in the same zip code at the same time, you’ll look me upl.

Drinks on the Terrace, Spring '09

From spring flings to summer lovin, it seems that there is only one thing on many people’s minds as the temperature rises. Many people try to pull off that illusive feat: the short term affair that is more than a one-night stand but less than a long-term relationship.

But as we hit the dog days and the summer nights, and things heat up outside, can we keep them from heating up too much with our beaus? Can we balance temperature with temperance? Or will our flings just get flung?

Chapter One: A Model Flingizen

Late last summer, after returning back to the District from a summer on the West Coast, I caught up with an old friend with whom I had studied in Turkey. She was one of the many great people I had met during college – strong and sensible, beautiful and brilliant – a true catch. Whilst abroad, we had spent a good deal of time discussing men and relationships, and more specifically our hesitancy to get involved with either.

Each of us had very limited experience in this department. We had both been overworked and overly shy in high school; in college, I had only recently come out, and she (a hetero woman) went to a women’s college in New England, which is a less than ideal place to meet men. While abroad we took comfort in having met someone else who was unwilling to rush into a relationship.

I was therefore surprised to hear at the end of the summer that – even though she was about to move and knew it wouldn’t be serious – she had pursued a short-term pseudo relationship. We had both been holding out for someone who could be the one, but somewhere along the line my friend decided that a little fling might be just the thing.

“You know,” she said, “sometimes you can learn a lot from a man, even if it’s just for a short time.” This was her first real thing, and clearly she thought it had helped her relationship potential to mature.

What’s more was that I sensed a sub-text here. She was hinting to me that despite my reservations, a brief beau might help me to work through some of the issues that relationships offer without the pressure of thinking it was till death do us part. In running, no one starts out with tackling a marathon; you begin small and you work your way up. Maybe the same was true in dating.

I asked her if she was said to say goodbye to him as she moved away. She seemed a little disappointed, but was hardly heartbroken. They agreed to stay in touch, though when I mentioned it a few months later the fling seemed already largely forgotten.

Chapter Two: The World’s Worst Flinger

Some people just aren’t built for flings. One such person was my friend, gay confidant, and self-styled socialite of Georgetown. Until our recent graduation, he was not only the king of the preppy party scene, he was also a queen who could hardly go two dates without thinking marriage.

I think that sometime in April it hit him: he was never going to find his future husband in his last few weeks at Georgetown. He was too proper to simply pursue hookups, so why not try a spring fling? After all, a cute guy would make the perfect warm weather accessory, whether or not he was only a rental.

And so he set out looking, and his first stop, oddly enough, was me. I have yet to achieve friendship with a man without hooking up with him, wanting to hook up with him, or having him think that I want to hook up with him, so this shouldn’t have come as a shock. We had known each other for a long time and talked every single day. Who was to say that it couldn’t work?

But as we discussed the possibilities we had, he detested my pragmatic attitude. Fling or not, he needed me to at least speak the language of romance – not come right out and say, we both know that this is just a short-term thing.

And when, after enough wine was consumed, we hooked up anyway, he couldn’t go through with things. “We want completely different things,” he said to me on rainy night in a muddy field. “You don’t care about money! And you have an eyebrow ring!”

I tried to tell him that none of that mattered – that if this was just a fling, who cared that we didn’t share the same life goals or social status? But even if it was just for a few weeks, this boy couldn’t go bourgeois.

After me there was Jon, who my friend said “might be the perfect fling.” But Jon got scared off by things moving too fast and the decidedly un-flingy talk of the future. And my friend decided that if he and Jon couldn’t at least have a pretend future, he’d just as soon put Jon in his past.

And then there was Alex, a fixture on the gay scene who was rumored to be better endowed than the Harvard Business School. This time it was Alex who moved too fast – or at least too far – and wanted to take a little more than my friend was prepared to offer, at least to a man who wasn’t on the husband track.

In the end, he may not have had an affair to remember, but he got a lesson he wouldn’t forget. Like all good accessories, the spring fling simply doesn’t fit some styles.

Chapter Three: From Just Friends to Just Flings

I met him online and within days agreed – with a great deal of hesitancy – to meet in person. One never knows what to expect with these things.

But V was everything I hoped he’d be and more. Smart, funny, and sweet, not to mention very cute, we instantly had a connection. There was only one problem. While I could hardly keep my hands off him, he just wanted to be friends.

Our first non-date began meeting up in Dupont Circle at 1am on a Saturday. From there we went to Georgetown and stayed up talking until 6am. He spent the night at my place, as he lived far from me, and while he slept in my tiny bed I curled up on my yoga mat on the floor. In the morning, I let him sleep in while I rose early to work. I made us brunch and we proceeded to spend another five hours in Dupont and Adams Morgan before he went home.

Our second non-date had even more undercover romance. A bottle of wine chez moi before dinner at a French bistro, a movie down the street, and a walk along Washington Harbor. Another night platonically spent at my place. Another brunch and another departure.

When we made plans to meet up again, I knew two things. One, my time to turn this into a hot affair was running out, and staying just friends was difficult with someone that I liked so much. And two, even if I was able to start things up with him, keeping it at fling level would be hard.

Truth be told, this wasn’t someone I wanted to fling with, it was someone I wanted to date and maybe be in a real relationship with. But with both of us facing potential moves, that wasn’t an option.

Thinking about my two friends – one of whom succeeded with the fling and one of whom failed – I thought that if I guarded my feelings carefully enough, I could pull it off. I wasn’t so obsessed with the future that I couldn’t enjoy the moment, and who better than this great guy with whom to try things out?

The next time he returned there were candles on the patio and three bottles of wine in the pantry. I managed to pull off the seduction, and though I could hardly believe it, I found myself in his arms before the cabernet was kaput.

But what remained to be seen was whether we could keep things hot without letting them boil over – whether we could not get too attached or get each other hurt – whether we could stay on the same page and enjoy a little fling, or suddenly face a boatload of drama.

Tune in next week when we get some answers.

A shot of summer, this morning in South Carolina

With summer approaching and a beach holiday on my horizon, I set about Georgetown to buy all the essentials: a purple swimsuit from Benetton, a pair of grey sandals from J Crew, and – just for good measure – a box of condoms. Truth be told, although I had gone through plenty of swimwear and flip flops in my twenty-two-year-old life, this was my first time ringing up rubbers.

While studying at Georgetown, I had hardly ever seen a pack of condoms for sale, for as a “Catholic” institution the sale of contraception had long been banned. I had realized that in the post-grad real world condoms would be for sale everywhere, but it was a strange thing to get used to after having lived in their absence for so long.

Until a few weeks ago, I had been operating on the principles that whoever I was hooking up with would likely have condoms himself, and that the things I typically did with men (especially the ones that happened unexpectedly) didn’t require a condom to be safe. But maybe I had been unwise to live without condoms for so long. Maybe the university’s ban had caused me to ignore a vital part of having a healthy sex life.

To put it in terms of the Catholic tradition, I wondered: till condom comes, can it be on earth as it is in heaven?

Two weeks ago I was at a lovely dinner party at Cafe Bonaparte with my old study abroad friends. Somehow, over cocktails and crepes, the subject of safe sex came up. It was then that I chose to share some startling news that I had recently learned myself. “Ya know,” I started, “oral sex isn’t as safe as everyone thinks it is.” Everyone at the table turned towards me – giving head might not be proper dinner table discussion, but it’s also not a topic anyone’s likely to ignore.

“I had read before that the chances of getting HIV from giving head were like one in several thousand,” I continued, “or even more than that – that there were only a few documented cases in history of it happening. But I did some more research last week, and read somewhere that those statistics are only true if you don’t swallow and you use a condom. Otherwise the chances are less than other forms of sex, but not by all that much.”

The faces around the table said it all, with the hetero boys looking more uncomfortable with the topic than with the news, the hetero girls looking slightly concerned, and my fellow homosexual men looking absolutely fucked – and not in the good way. And why shouldn’t they? Our very concept of oral sex had just been turned, well, on its head.

I am someone with limited sexual experience, having only entered the dating market around August. If we’re talking brackets – 1 to 4, 5 to 15, 15 to 30 – the count of my technical sexual partners fell into the middle group, and closer to the low end at that. But with all of these men I had engaged in oral sex, and the way I had done so, I had just learned, was considerably more risky than I had initially believed.

It was hard to wrap my head around the idea of wrapping up for head. With anal sex, the idea of wearing a condom seemed appealing even aside from the obvious STD prevention angle. If there’s any part of the body I’d like to explore with a bit of separation, the ass is it.

But regarding oral sex, I had always applied the mantra that if you’re going to do something, do it right. This had certainly always meant without a condom, as I honestly didn’t see much point in doing it any other way. It would seem to take away all of the thrill and beauty on the giving end, and presumably a lot of the sensation on the receiving. As someone who was always more of a giver than a receiver, I couldn’t help but think that this would make totally boring one of my favorite activities.

Then again, maybe it was my time at a Catholic school that led me to blow this out of proportion and fail my oral exam. Maybe there was nothing terribly unreasonable about using a condom for oral sex, and that – as with all forms of sexual relations – it could be a bit inconvenient but was better than getting HIV or any other type of sexually-sent sickness. It was possible that living in a rubberless realm for four years had warped my views on condoms and led me to make unsafe decisions.

In any event, despite having had oral sex a few times since my dinner party announcement, my box of condoms remains unused. I have, however, decided to ease up in engaging in this activity, one that in the past hadn’t been a daily routine but that wasn’t exactly being held for marriage, either.

If giving head gives me a headache, then there is about as much a point to it as just giving in and using the condom. All this added to my growing sense that hooking up wasn’t my style, as it was too much trouble and didn’t allow for the fullest enjoyment of the sex I seek. Learning the truth sucked, but didn’t seem unreasonable to get to know a man a bit better before deciding to go down.

It’s May in the District of Columbia. The tourists and the heat have arrived. The cherry blossoms have come and gone, and the memories of a harsh winter have faded. At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a new president is at work, with inaugural celebrations and a hard-fought election in the past. Before that crisp fall was a hot summer, and there you have it – a year.

I have seen four of these years come and go since moving to Washington, and this week I graduate from Georgetown. I had long been debating what to do afterward – to go through with a job in Denver or risk everything to stay put in DC. It was a question complicated by the community I’ve found here, the people I’ve met, and at times men with whom I could imagine a future.

In the end, I decided that it was time for me to leave the District. I had an opportunity in Colorado to do some good for the world and gain valuable experience, and had overcome many of my prior reservations.

On paper there was nothing standing in the way between my past in DC and future out West, but my heart still ached. As I began to pack, I started thinking about the things we take with us no matter what changes in life and the things we choose to throw away. How can we have the foresight to pick out what’s important and let go of what we don’t need? With so many possibilities, are paths “right” or “wrong,” or simply different?

In short: would I look back someday and see DC or someone I had met here as “the one that got away”?

I began to worry that by reveling in my disorientation, and wasting so much time experiencing and writing about the singles scene, I had missed a chance at finding something real. One big fuck-up in particular had me thinking that my prospects with dating were hopeless. And since I had run out of time to stay in DC and figure it out, maybe the next best thing was to cut off my old life, avoid regret and move on.

I met my editors on Wednesday to talk about my impending move. As the thunder roared outside and I sat with my arms folded, they remarked that it felt like a break-up conversation.

By Thursday, I told them my decision: not only would I give up my managing editor position, but I would stop writing Sexual Disorientation and take an indefinite leave from dating itself. With some time to reflect on what I wanted, maybe I would figure things out and stop making mistakes. Maybe I would grow up.

By Friday morning, I was back in my therapist’s office for our penultimate session. He seemed concerned with my decision to quit both TNG and dating. As Georgetown’s twenty-something LGBTQ specialist, he had heard me talk a lot about relationships and sex, and suggested my new plan was just a way to avoid feeling rejected or regretful.

“It seems like you’re throwing away what you’ve been looking for,” he said. “Why does it have to be everything or nothing? What would it be like to keep an open mind about the future?” But that has never been my forte. Whenever I’ve made changes in life, I’ve burned every bridge and severed the past. It seemed only natural to do it again now.

By Friday night, I had deactivated my Facebook account and written off old friends. By Saturday, my apartment was half-packed. And by Sunday, I was on the phone to wish my mom a happy Mother’s Day.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one packing up. She had been filing old things and found a letter I wrote to Santa saying I was too old for him. “Dear Santa,” she read to me, “Knowing that this is the last thing I’ll ever write to you, I feel sad. But I am happy for everything you gave me over the years.” Then she read my sister’s: “Dear Santa, I don’t know what you’ll get me now that Grandma gave me a lava lamp. But I’m sure it will be good.”

Had my opinion of change been so apocalyptic that I even had to cut off Santa Claus? My sister’s take-things-as-they-come attitude had allowed her to keep enjoying gifts, and later in life maintain a long distance relationship and eventually move in with her Ivy League boyfriend. At 20 years old, she was closer to marriage than I had come to a second date, and here I was ready to cut-and-run again.

I’ve had some setbacks since coming to DC in 2005, but also many accomplishments. I’m graduating, I landed a job, and I came out to myself and the world. I haven’t always found what I’ve sought, but I’ve had some laughs along the way. I’ve met people I still have feelings for, and opened doors I’m not ready to shut.

And as I write this now, at 3am on the day I had planned to say goodbye, I’ve decided to keep an open mind. I won’t throw away all I’ve found while I continue looking for love, and I’ll keep writing about my experiences until I do. It might not always be the smartest, funniest or most enlightening thing you’ll read, and maybe our futures don’t share a path.

But what else can I do but keep unpacking the past and hope that maybe – just maybe – there’s room for more disorientation in my future.

Part One: The Realization

A few weeks ago on a Thursday night, I found myself poring over one of my guiltiest pleasures: the Craigslist Missed Connections. Apparently either people weren’t feeling connections that week, or they had finally learned to be direct with each other, because there weren’t a lot of could-have-beens for me to read. Bored and curious, I navigated over to a different part of the site: the regular men-seeking-men ads, where the pretext of prior chemistry is aborted and people’s desires and fantasies are put on the table.

I had long been thinking about the relationship between new age communication and the tendency of people to market themselves. On Facebook and Twitter, blogs and away messages – everywhere we go, we are forced to be public relations executives, getting our image and message just right. If you don’t believe me, check out the Facebook Grader, which uses a formula to judge the publicity power of your profile. Or think about the time and energy many put into selecting profile pictures and detagging less-than-flattering photos.

But I realized that nothing compares to the raw salespersonship that is employed on Craigslist, where you classify what you’re looking for and then make a classified out of yourself. I had been living under the impression that all of the self-promoting associated with modern life is unhealthy, tiring, and at times even maddening. But could the direct approach work? Could the right salespitch lead to the quick and profitable exchange of goods? Or would it only yield false advertising?

Part Two: The Experiment

Knowing that I may soon be leaving the District of Columbia, and having had little luck going out, I decided to do something out of character for the sake of this column: I would put up an ad on Craigslist and see what happens.

My first rule for advertising myself was to keep it simple. I was frequently turned off by ads that listed ten thousand confusing, contradictory, or repetitive statistics. If the descriptor “GL” (meaning good looking) was useless, than “VGL” – very good looking – was beyond excessive. There was no need to say “HWP,” meaning height-weight proportionate, and then spell out all of your measurements anyway. Don’t say race doesn’t matter and then state your preferred races. Don’t even bother listing cock size, because even the Pope would lie about that.

My second rule for advertising was to keep it open-minded. For the sake of the experiment, I thought that it would be best to have only basic requirements listed for my suitor, and to therefore generate more responses. So I said only that I was looking for a college student who was in pretty good shape and who lived in Northwest.

Within minutes I had received a half-dozen emails, but not one of them matched my requirements. Most of the guys’ ages put them clearly outside the college bracket; if a man is 24 to 30 and still an undergraduate, I probably would have no interest hooking up with him, anyway. The only collegiate respondent did not meet even a very loose standard for being “in pretty good shape,” so that didn’t work, either.

Discouraged but not defeated, I thought that I would try responding to a few ads that others had posted. A few got back to me and would exchange a few messages before they stopped replying. Interestingly, this never happened after I sent face pictures – they were all still interested upon seeing me, which gave my low self confidence at least a bit of a boost. One stopped after I stated, in all honesty, that I had no “body shots” of myself naked. My advertising mission aside, that was something I was not willing to release to an anonymous person through conspicuous channels.

But the others stopped communicating when they learned that I was gay. One might assume that these men were, too, but many identified as bi, or as “straight but having problems with my girlfriend,” or as “totally in the closet and looking for other closeted bros.” Apparently, there are many ways for men-seeking-men to market themselves. “Gay” is not a particularly successful one.

However, eventually I had a lead. Like me, he was a Georgetown student, and something about the warm weather and the approach of finals had encouraged him to look online. We chatted a bit on AIM before agreeing to meet up.

I met him in front of his building. He was cuter than his picture indicated. He led me upstairs and made small-talk along the way. Soon we were in his room, our lips locked and our bodies moving towards the bed. But just after his head hit the pillow, things started to go south – and I don’t mean below the waistline.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “I feel like you’re holding back. Are you into this?” I answered that I was, and that this just wasn’t something I did often (or ever).

I realized that the problem was he hadn’t wanted to make a specific plan when we chatted online, even though most Craigslisters do just that. However, having come together, he was unable to take charge as he had suggested, and I felt uncomfortable leading things myself.

We kept kissing for a few more minutes, but it was clearly not working. I couldn’t help but wonder why, if he wasn’t able to take charge, he would have led me to his room without direction. And if he wasn’t into what I was offering, why had he accepted to begin with?

Our hook-up having failed, I left alone. I decided that while some “advertising” may be necessary in this day and age, it’s hard to directly market ourselves when our sexual desires are so complicated and ambivalent. Some people don’t know what they want, and don’t realize it until they’re in bed with another person. Some people seek out encounters with members of the own sex, but can’t come to label themselves as gay. Some people will lie to your face, and some will lie to themselves.

The most important rule of marketing is to know the product you’re selling. A lot of us searching for someone don’t seem to know ourselves. So while sex may sell, it’s not easy to sell sex.

Part Three: The Final Find

There is a place I call the Facebook for gay men. DList is the Vogue to Craiglist’s Us Weekly: glossier, sexier, and with a lot more ad space. It was on DList where I met my “first time,” and after having been off for months, I decided to make my return.

One April night a boy messaged me and we got to talking. Before long we met up, and I was relieved to find that he was exactly who he said he was – no lies, no hidden motives, no false representation. The more time we spent with each other, the more I realized that we had in common, and the more of myself I saw in him.

We were “just friends,” a label I didn’t mind in my post-Craigslist existence. I realized through that experience that sex wasn’t all that important to me. It means very little without a connection, without emotion, without chemistry. I would take a friendship with a smart, interesting man over a cold hook-up with a stranger.

But as our story continued, I realized that this could be a true rarity in the world of marketing: something even better than advertised.

On Friday evening, the unthinkable happened, something I hadn’t encountered in four years at Georgetown. And yet there it was in black and white: my email inbox was empty. No starred messages to return, no requests for which I needed reminding, no notes left unopened – nothing.

I was set to graduate in just three weeks with my future still very much up in the air. But though I felt more than ever that I needed guidance, I found myself staring for the first time at a totally empty slate.

Things were supposed to have already been settled, since back in the fall when I was accepted into a service organization and told I’d be placed in Denver. But earlier this month they revealed that some of us would be sent elsewhere in the state of Colorado – into the suburbs or to other cities, like Colorado Springs. After pondering this for a few weeks, I emailed them on Friday to present an ultimatum: either I needed a guarantee for Denver itself, or else I would have to leave my position.

As I sat around Friday night feeling restless, I started to think about what was important to me. I had a situation in Colorado that would pay me fairly, give me something valuable to put on my resume, be a great adventure, and allow me to do something decent for the world. So what was the problem? What was I really after? And could I complete the puzzle before the clock ran out?

To put it in context, I had decided on Denver way back in October. At that point, I was just starting to work for TNG and had yet to meet the staff. To be honest, I was feeling bored with DC and alone in my Georgetown apartment. I had very few gay friends, and most of them had very different social lives from what I wanted.

But as I left Georgetown and broadened my horizons, I found a community that I could actually connect with. I found places to hang out and be myself without feeling uncomfortable, unsafe, or insecure.

Since I knew I’d be moving soon and my time in DC was term-limited, every social interaction was one with an expiration date and my dating potential was somewhat limited. But under these circumstances, I learned to appreciate the moments as they came rather than trying to fit everything into my life plan. For someone who normally looks at all roads as leading to Relationship, this meant stepping out of my comfort zone and exploring different possibilities.

The problem is that having come to the moment where I was asked to pack my bags, I wasn’t ready to give up DC easily. As a single and out gay man, having found a community where I feel connected and safe was no small thing. I was willing to take the risk of Denver, where TNG has just launched a satellite group and where the per capita gay population is tenth among U.S. cities. But looking at my new placement options across the state produced a much grimer picture – one of the evangelical capital of the world, long commutes, small towns, and isolation. It might be a fine option for some people, but I simply wasn’t one of them.

What I did want was a balance of community and chaos. Community means having queer people with whom I can relate and socialize freely. Chaos means having excitement, drama, a plurality of possibilities, and – well – some disorientation in life.

It’s this same chaos that often complicates my ability to make decisions; I have a tendency to hide behind complexities and avoid taking charge of my life. But now, when circumstances out of my control forced me into a state of uncertainty, I found myself perfectly capable of handling it. In fact, after four years of all nighters, game time decisions, and constant over-analysis, it’s hard to imagine my collegiate career ending any other way.

And that also makes me prepared for challenging roads ahead. Should I turn Colorado down and stay in DC, it will mean having to struggle to find work, a place to live, and direction for my life. But I know I can make my way through that kind of mess.

What I can’t do is have my future decided for me, against my will and against what I was promised. I can’t live alone in a quiet town or in a city known as the “Evangelical Vatican.” I won’t be forced back into the closet, and I won’t spend my nights at home watching TV and wondering what might have been.

After sending that email on Friday, and suddenly feeling a great wave of silence and unease, I realized that my letter to Denver wasn’t the true ultimatum in this game. It was only the penultimate ultimatum. Yes, I had laid my cards on the table and waited with bated breath for response. But the ultimate decision was still firmly in my hands if I had the will to take it. I didn’t get to choose to be gay, but I do get to chose what kind of community I place myself in, and how to protect my right to be who I am.

While I may not know where I’m going next month, I know where I’m not going. And for now, I can wait.

Late Night Blur, Turkish Riviera, 2008

A few months ago, I found myself wandering back and forth from my house to the bus stop for about an hour. My feet started getting tired and I was running out of family members to call up as a means of killing time. Still, I couldn’t find an answer to the biggest question of my week: should I bother going out?

As children, where our realm of control stopped at our front door, we had no power over the subject of leaving our homes. Sometimes we would beg our parents to take us here or there, or let us go meet a friend; sometimes we would kick and scream as they dragged us somewhere we had no interest in going. But as adults we have no curfews, no locked doors, and no oversight. The saying “the world is your oyster” fails to note that some of us lose our taste for seafood.

As I’ve mentioned before, there’s often a lot built into the words we use, and the phrase “going out” is no exception. For the single among us, it often brings up questions like: Will I meet someone tonight? Do I want to meet someone tonight? If I don’t meet someone tonight, is it worth going out at all? And most importantly, what do I really want and how far out on a limb will I climb to get it?

My bus stop back-and-forth that evening led me to choose to go out rather than sit at home, and so I traveled across town to Solly’s for a TNG mixer. I had a good time, but didn’t exactly do a lot of mixing; mostly I stood around and talked to people who I already knew, or stood there and didn’t talk at all. One friend, Kareem, asked me towards the end of the night, “Do you ever meet people at these things?” I thought about it for a moment before answering, “Well, I met you at one of these things.” But that didn’t exactly count because (a) we were introduced by mutual friends and (b) we became each other’s designated sounding board for complaining about not meeting others. Not exactly a shining example of optimal mixer action.

But his question made me realize that when we “go out” as single homos in the big city, we’re looking to do more than meet up with friends; we’re looking to meet people who could be more than that. And it’s an odd mating ritual, indeed. We get dressed up in bright colors, and some among us even paint their faces; we travel out to a designated, dark location in the middle of the night; we consume poisonous elixirs until our vision is blurred and our judgment impaired; and, through the pulsating sound of drums and sirens, we set out on our search for sex.

And for some of us, we search for something else as well. I find that I am never truly satisfied with an evening out – I am always left wanting more. The whole idea of going out and looking for a relationship is maddening to those of us for whom, as Carrie Fisher wrote, “instant gratification doesn’t come fast enough.” A phone number leaves us lacking a date, a date lacking a boy or girlfriend, a significant other lacking any kind of security that it will last… and by the time it’s through, perhaps nothing completes an evening out other than a marriage proposal and impromptu wedding.

Still, as my therapist has urged me to practice mindfulness, and to enjoy experiences rather than worry constantly about the future, I have forced myself to go out with increased frequency as of late. At this point a lot is blurring together – quite a feat considering I never really got drunk – but here is my past week, as I recall it:

•  Wednesday I went to an improv club.  I spent most of the time before the show talking about sex; most of the time during the show wincing at race and gay jokes; and most of the time afterward thinking that I would never, ever meet someone at an improv club.
• Thursday I went to our mixer at Solly’s.  I talked to a bunch of people and caught up with friends.  I left alone, missed my bus, and at 1:30 in the morning jogged the few miles home in skinny jeans.
• Friday I went to see Menopause the Musical at the Bethesda Theatre, which was terrific, but not the ideal place to pick up a man.  Afterward I met up with a friend in Dupont and we talked until the wee hours of the morning about troubles with relationships.
• Saturday I went to our event in the park and talked about couples with height discrepencies.  Then I went out, already exhausted, to DC9 where I drank and smoked and again lamented with friends on being boyfriendless and restless.

One of those nights resulted in a hookup, and I had a lot of fun along the way. However, thinking about it now, I can’t help but be embarrassed at how much men dominate my mind as I head out into the city each evening. Granted, in order to write this column every week, I go out of my way to talk about dating and to hear people’s stories, but that seems like too convenient an excuse. And to say that it’s spring fever or general longing for sex ignores the fact that sex is relatively unimportant to me.

In fact, if what we’re looking for is a relationship, are the nights out simply a distraction? Do we fool around just to fool ourselves? And do we go out to find that special someone, or are we just going out of our way to avoid putting ourselves out there?

Maybe I’m on the wrong track. Maybe it’s all an odds game, a matter of meeting enough people until you find one who works, and so hitting the scene is a productive way of getting this done. Or maybe, for some of us at least, going out is just a way to make excuses – to tell ourselves that we can’t find anyone when the real problem is we’re not ready or willing to open ourselves up. Maybe, in the dim lights of the bars and clubs, we are hiding from the frightening prospect that there are choices to make and people we could be with and the possibility – even in the mythical land of couplehood – that we may still not feel happy or complete.

Yesterday, appropriately for a Sunday, I rested. I did my laundry and cooked hummus. I finally found some decent shorts at H+M. I spent three hours working out in a daze. I wondered if I was ready to be with someone.

Missing Connections, DCA, 2006

Saturday Afternoon:

I pulled up into the parking lot of an abandoned Linens N Things and parked my old pickup in the rain. I took out my laptop and began to write this column. I was going to go to a cafe but it was overcrowded with out-of-school kids escaping the inclimate weather. I didn’t want to go home as my family had planned their day without me.

A fog had set over Connecticut early this morning, and it made me feel very alone.

Friday Afternoon:

I got the call around noon. There was a new member of my family – Madison Claire – the daughter of my eldest paternal cousin. I’m not sure what that makes her to me, or vice-versa.

I told my grandmother that I would drive with her to the hospital. It was the first time I had been there without feeling that morbid sense of death. In fact, the mood today was quite the opposite. In my cousin’s hospital room, the small, pink child was flanked by generation upon generation of couples, all trying their best to show her love. She seemed mostly to want to sleep.

In the car on the way home, my grandma told me that she and my grandpa would be going to the casino for the evening. “We fight the whole way there,” she told me, “and we fight the whole way back. We have so much fun.” And she meant it. Their arguing, I had realized long ago, was like an elderly version of love-making. It had all the elements of passion and fire, of power and control; it was an act of agression brought about by love, and by chemistry.

Chemistry, as I define it, is that vibrant, volitile force between two people that is necessary for any long-term romantic potential. I have felt such chemistry with only two people since coming out, and neither were very interested in me. Two people out of all the men that I had met and been involved with. And for both, that chemistry wasn’t enough. They needed something more, something me and that spark couldn’t give them. Those odds didn’t make the future look too promising.

Later, my sister came home, and lamented – eyes fixed upon me – that she will never get to be an aunt.

Thursday Morning:

As part of my job training for next year, I was supposed to observe a special education classroom for one hour. I ended up spending five, and it was worth it. The kids were so full of life, color and love. Most were only at a first-grade level of reading and math, despite being in high school. I wondered if we could retain that kind of wide-eyed appreciation for simple things, and for other people, after our minds progressed. What do we lose when we become weary of the world, I wondered? Are we all so caught up in complexities that we miss the basics?

I followed the students to their basic chemistry class. The material was far too difficult to them, but the state has mandated that they be there regardless, if only to interact with “typical” students.

Afterwards, outside, I stood silently with a child who rarely spoke. “Are you like me?” he asked, out of the blue. I paused for a moment before answering, “Yes.”

Wednesday Evening:

My parents kept offering to take me out for a drink or to one of the casinos. The two biggest in the country, run by Native American tribes, are located near our small, New England town. “I feel bad that you come home and we just hang around the house,” my mother told me.

But I kept turning them down. None of the things that happen when I go out in the District can happen when I go out here. I cannot get drunk, search for someone to connect with, and pretend for a while that it might be for real. In the city I can search for chemistry, which doesn’t have the superficial, admittedly foolish feeling of a crush, nor does it require time to develop and mature, as does falling in love with someone. Therefore, searching for it on any given night has just enough chance for success that I can force myself out the door and have reason to stay optimistic.

But in Connecticut, the most I can hope for is a G+T and some hetero men at the slots flirting with cocktail waitresses.

Tuesday Night:

8:35. BWI to Providence. Southwest Flight # 1162.

I have the aisle seat. A middle-aged woman in a pantsuit has the window. She is already asleep.

A guy in a blue hoodie comes and asks if he can get by me. I pull in my legs. I don’t really catch his face, but he is the only person besides myself I’ve seen with real headphones. They are enormous and klunky, the exact opposite of the earphones that have taken over in this age of the-smaller-the-better.

He smells amazing. His leg touches mine.

Something funny happens and we laugh together. We both keep our headphones off for a long time, but neither of us speaks.

Maybe it’s because I know that I will not be getting any action for a week. Maybe it’s because from the Mile High Club to Craiglist drama on planes, romance in the sky has always appealed to me. Whatever the reason, I really want to kiss this guy.

The plane lands and we depart. Minutes later, across the baggage claim, our eyes meet. I look for something there.

Chemistry.

Words are powerful. We hear thousands of them everyday and process them automatically, but the attachments we attribute greatly affect the way we understand our experience. As feminist theologian Mary Daly wrote, “If God is male, then male is God.”

I had been wondering recently how homos define the word “virginity” when the typical meaning doesn’t make much sense. If the LGBT community has traditionally been excluded from formulating discourse, how do we find a definition for a word like virginity that is actually relevant to our dealings in the world? Do we have to reconsider what we mean by some of the most basic words in our vocabulary?

To put it bluntly: what the fuck is sex?

I was at the theatre last week telling a friend about this column. At first he was adamant that for gay men, sex had to involve anal intercourse, a definition that I think many gay men share without having put much thought into it. But what about those who just aren’t into it? Or who practice it sometimes but don’t usually get off that way? “Fine,” he conceded, “I guess oral could count as sex, too. But that’s it – I refuse to consider a handjob sex.” He said that there had to be fluid and moisture involved on both ends, and that I could quote him on that.

“In other words, we need some membrane action?” After making this suggestion, I realized what a horrible conversation this was to have at the theatre.

The trouble with having a more open mind as to what constitutes sex is that it deprives us of having non-sex erotic experiences. The “anything but” trend in heterosexual culture – whereby hetero kids promise to stay virgins with the caveat that touching, oral and anal don’t count – might just be a laughable example of conservative hypocrisy. On the other hand, at least this concept presents the opportunity for messing around without giving everything up, and for there being more of a nuance to sexual experience.

LB, a TNG assistant editor, made this point while explaining her changing definition of sex. “Once upon a time, back when I was straight, I only counted vaginal sex,” she told me. Now she considers the intent to produce an orgasm her working definition for lesbian sex, but pointed out that that leaves a lot less gray area for stuff to happen without counting it as sex. By her definition, even an over-the-clothes orgasm could count as sex, a concerning thought to us both.

I was especially concerned when I realized that if clothes-on orgasms counted as sex, I lost my virginity to a girl in high school while in a car full of unknowing friends. I won’t be detailing that story, but let’s just say that my definition of sex instantly adopted a “clothes off” exclusive policy.

My investigative plot thickened with a story from another TNG editor, Gem, who works at a gay ladies’ bar in the city. Last week, she recounted, a few older women were inquiring about her sex life. One asked her if she was a virgin, to which she answered no. “Her response to this was then, ‘Oh god! What is the world coming to?!’” Gem said, and the reason was obvious. “When she asked if I was a ‘virgin,’ what she intended by this question was, ‘Have you ever had sex with a man?’”

Needless to say, she was more than a little annoyed. For Gem, “when genitalia has touched some other body part in an effort to orgasm,” sex has been had – with or without a man. (She also has a clothing-off clause, leading me to wonder if a lot of lesbians are getting action without stripping down.) Why should queer sexual experience be limited to the heteronormative standard? Doing so discounts the sexuality of those gold-star gays who have avoided encounters with the opposite sex, and also tramples on the sexuality of the gay community in general.

Having listened to my friends, though, I was still no closer to coming up with a definition of sex or of virginity for myself. I felt like the same word could have different meanings in different contexts. For example, I could understand two men in a relationship sticking to oral some nights and considering it sex. In contrast, two guys who had never hooked up before would likely not count the giving of a blowjob in a parking garage as sex. After all, they would lack sexual precedence with each other and would probably think of that blow job as more of a warm-up act to the real deal.

Mutuality doesn’t seem to be the dividing line either as it’s pragmatically arbitrary in a world in which some people prefer to give and some to receive.

And even the clothing and touching rules don’t work for everyone. As I have written about before, after an afternoon of phone action this summer I was shocked to be asked, “How did you enjoy our first time?” by the dude on the other end. For some people, evidently, sex can happen from three thousand miles away, no physical contact needed.

My conclusion is that sex, the lack thereof, and virginity are all what we want them to be. Maybe this is too convenient an analysis, but why make expressing our experience difficult? I personally like to be able to do different things with people and decide for myself whether I consider it sex or just a workout with a payoff.

Perhaps my hesitancy to throw the word “sex” around shows that even though its meaning is complicated and ambiguous, it’s still very powerful. I think that’s all the more reason for us to take control of it and not let someone else’s standards rule. To borrow sentiment from Daly, if screwing is heterocentric, then homos are screwed.

And as to my notions of virginity and the status of my V-Card – well, as Webster would surely agree, there are some definitions we just don’t need to print.

Mindful of the Moment - Paris, April 2008

On Friday my therapist recommended I look into the concept of mindfulness, which he explained as the art of being mindful of one’s present experience.

“Do you know the expression of washing the dishes for the sake of washing the dishes?” he asked me. “It’s about concentrating on the feeling of the soap and water running over your hands, instead of just looking at it as a task that had to be completed.” I told him that I washed the dishes so that if I should take a nice boy to my house, I wouldn’t look like a slob, and would seem more like marriage material. He got a good laugh out of that.

But his point was well taken. I do, in fact, obsess about the deeper meaning of every tiny experience. My mind is never in the present – it’s connecting what’s going on to something from my past or to a future possibility. Lately, though, it’s been giving me trouble, especially as it’s applied to dating and relationships.

I’ve known since November that I’ll be leaving the District in May and moving two thousand miles west. Even for a pseudo-romantic like me, I’ve known that any interaction with men has been unlikely to turn into something long-term or serious. I’ve therefore been faced with a difficult question: do I hold off on dating until it can actually fit into my long-term wants and goals, until the men I involve myself with could be “the real deal”? Or do I just appreciate the moment and see where things go?

For the most part, to my own surprise, I’ve been leaning towards the latter option. I’ve given myself somewhat of a free pass over the past few months to explore the dating scene and try to figure out what I’d want in a relationship once I’m in a position to really pursue one. I’ve entered into some somewhat complicated situations that normally I may have avoided but that – under the circumstances – I figured I might as well just experience.

Despite the wonderful stereotypes that queerfolk are inherently promiscuous, I’ve sensed some push-back from potentially interested men when they learn I’m not going to be around much longer. I went on a quasi-date with a great guy with whom I really enjoyed spending time, but I got the impression that he didn’t want to get too involved with someone who was already one foot out the door. If we look at relationships as investments of our time, energy, and maybe even love, it makes sense that we might not want to put much into something that we knew wouldn’t last.

Things came to a head this weekend when I found myself with a guy I’ve known for a while but always just as friends. I was abroad, and then he was seeing someone, and when we were both finally available at the same time and place, I was counting down the days to my departure. After midnight in the rain, we kissed in the middle of an empty field for a few intense minutes. Before I knew it, though, he pulled away from me and stood up. “You’re leaving,” he said, “and we want very different things in life.” He said that since we had no chance for a future together, even if I was going to stick around, he couldn’t bring himself to stay with me that night.

I realized then that something doesn’t have to be for eternity or be totally goal-oriented to have any value. Something can be momentary without just being an excuse to hook up without strings attached. If we spend our whole lives worrying about whether people have the right ambitions, interests, jobs or goals, we may well wake up old and alone, with no future to look forward to and no present to enjoy – just a past of missed opportunities.

Nevertheless, my argument lost out, and I got left there in the rain, my clothing soaked and my head still buzzing from booze and disappointment.

I had told my therapist that the only place this mindfulness idea of his worked was in my shower. Only there did I tend to forget about my problems and agenda and just enjoy the feeling of warmth and cleansing, a few minutes of peace at the start of each day.

But the day after my aborted connection, even my shower was invaded by thoughts about the past and the future. Washing the store-brand shampoo out of my messy hair, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was slowly heading towards finding someone special, or if I was just absentmindedly watching each moment pass me by.

I found myself in the car last week with a few friends from Wellesley College, a women’s school outside Boston where I planned on spending the night with them. I was DJing from behind the wheel (Le Tigre, Metric, Ting Tings – the usual stuff) when our conversation turned to sexuality at Wellesley.

“Have you heard of LUGs?” my friend asked me suddenly. “Or BUGs? You know – Lesbian or Bisexual Until Graduation.”

Having never gone to a men’s or women’s school, I had heard about theoretically heterosexual people getting experimental when faced with such conditions. But these almost exclusively involved women, and I kind of took it as a continuation of the annoying stereotype that “slutty” women sometimes act bisexual. I did not know it was actually a widespread idea among progressive young women, and a label that someone might attribute to themselves or to a friend.

I couldn’t help but be a bit, well, bugged. If people can sexually shape-shift as convenience mandates, is there really such a thing as sexual orientation? If our sexual identities are all somewhat fluid, is there such a thing as gay?

A lot of people say they believe sexuality is a spectrum, not just gay on one side and hetero on the other, with bi somewhere around 50% in between. If this is true, many people could have the capacity to sometimes move away from what is normally their orientation. And yet we seem to have few cases of people for whom this is the case. Actress Cynthia Nixon had been in heterosexual relationships all of her life until 2004, when she fell in love with another woman. She says that she doesn’t view it as a change in sexual orientation, per se – she just happened to fall in love with a woman this time around.

But is this a common occurrence? And do any of them involve men briefly going gay? It’s not too unfamiliar to see two “heterosexual” women temporarily abandon their label in one way or another, but this is almost unheard of with men. Is it that women as a whole are more sexually liberated, or that men tend to restrict themselves more sexually? Is it just that many men feel more threatened by doing something typically homosexual?

Again, I have been tempted to believe that the whole idea of “girl-on-girl action” is just a media obsession, part of the sexual objectification of women that still plagues our society. But that doesn’t explain young women at a place like Wellesley who consider themselves to be hetero but are willing to loosen that standard until their time in college is over.

The plot thickened later when, around eleven at night, we decided to go down to a pub on campus and hang out. It was Saturday night and the place was pretty well packed – almost all, of course, women. “There usually aren’t that many men who come here,” my friend explained to me, “and the motives of those who do are suspect.” Most of the dozen men I saw looked single and hetero.

As we hung out, drank a bit, and danced, I found myself repeatedly forgetting that I was in a room full of mostly hetero women. I am often in crowds of gay women at queer events or certain concerts – my introduction to the queer music scene was a series of Melissa Ferrick concerts, where I was frequently the only person in the room into dudes – but I’m not accustomed to being in a room of all women in which most of them are hetero.

Sitting there drinking my beer, the whole BUG and LUG thing sort of clicked. In such a situation I could see why women who wanted to have sexual experiences but didn’t see many men might decide to give things a try, even if it didn’t represent some kind of life change. From what I understand, the same thing happens in the military with men from time to time, and certainly in prisons. These guys aren’t likely to all be “closet cases” of homos who have been waiting for their chance to get some gay action. More likely is that they need something and they take what they can get.

There is also something to be said for sexual curiosity. There is a gorgeous “hetero” boy who I catch looking at me quite regularly in a theology class. While I’d love for him to be gay, and to ask me the fuck out, he’s probably just a little bit curious, or maybe falls around 90/10 on a hetero/homo spectrum. Perhaps, in a more liberated society, people in that position would be more likely to pursue the occasional queer relationship, much like our pioneer LUGs and BUGs already do.

Of course, our not-so-liberated society is its own catalyst for people thinking outside of the box on their sexual pursuits – just in an opposite direction. There are tons of closeted men and women in hetero relationships who, by most ways we might define it, are homosexual or pretty damn close. Personally, if circumstances had prohibited me from being with a man, I probably could be with a woman. Honestly, I’ve always preferred women over men regarding everything but sexual relationships, anyway. If I had no other option, I would at least try to go for it and hope for the best.

For now I have concluded two things. First, while the spectrum idea of sexuality makes some sense, I think that many of us get close enough to one side that it’s reasonable to approximate a label, as long as that’s how we want to identify ourselves. This issue is avoided anyway if we use terms like “queer,” which I like in that it gives my identity more room and accounts for my genderqueer tendencies as well.

And finally, while I believe that people have sexual orientations, I also believe that sometimes they can become disoriented. Maybe it’s a compelling circumstance, maybe it’s curiosity, maybe it’s just happening to find the perfect person in an unexpected form. But sometimes, the compass that orients us to a particular place on the spectrum leads us a bit astray, and maybe this is something we should just embrace.

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.

In a posh San Francisco hotel room two blocks from Union Square, I had just done something over the phone that Alexander Graham Bell couldn’t possibly have had in mind. It happened with a fellow Georgetown student with whom I had started getting flirtatious by phone and chat while living on the other side of the country. We still had weeks before we’d see each other in person, so while I normally wouldn’t have done it, I thought phone sex might be okay in this situation.

“So,” I heard from the other side of phoneline, “how did you enjoy our first time?”

With that one sentence, I suddenly felt very strange about what we had done. Phone sex is not sex, and the implication that the two were the same – and we had just experienced our “first time” – freaked me out. What I didn’t realize yet was that this was but one symptom of a problem that this guy and many others share in the so-called Digital Age.

Technology allows us to communicate in a depersonalized way. But what happens when we become more comfortable with even romantic relations through the medium of a computer or phone? What happens when we make intimacy unintimate?

It wasn’t just this incident that made me wonder. We hooked up once when I moved back to the District, and although we both enjoyed it, I didn’t think it was a good match and wanted to cut things off. He, on the other hand, wanted to give it another go.

But whenever he asked me to fool around again (or, for that matter, have a conversation), he wanted to do it via phone or webcam. At this point we were living ten minutes away by foot in Georgetown. “Wouldn’t you rather come over in person?” I asked. It seemed utterly bizarre that someone would want to mess around using Skype when I could be there in ten minutes, especially since we had done so before and there were no complaints. Needless to say, I took that as a sign that I should abandon any notion of reviving this affair.

We’ve all heard warnings about the dangers of these kinds of communications. But in this case there was no risk that my “teenage college student” was really an old man living in backwoods Virginia in a house full of human hair. He was who he said he was, he just preferred to partake in even his most intimate encounters from a distance.

And while that’s an extreme example, I think it’s part of an all-too-common trend. How many folks seem to have nothing to say in person but will talk up a storm through chats and texts? Or will flirt and send all kinds of signals from the safety of their PDAs but hardly show any PDA when encountered in person?

Sometimes these electronically-only men have led to boring dates where they haven’t had anything to say. Having determined that our chemistry wasn’t real, we’ve parted ways and that’s been that. More puzzling are the men who will go on one of these horrible dates, return to their laptops and phones, and request that we go out once again. They don’t seem put off by the fact that we have no chemistry in person because the chemistry when we communicate electronically still seems to work.

Truth be told, the “information age” has brought out the worst dating qualities in more than just these dependent users. It’s bad over-analyzers like me, too.

If you have a conversation with someone face-to-face, you have it and it’s over. You retain certain memories – images and words and emotions – but you usually can’t go back, retrace every word and ask all of your friends about it. I find that when I try to report back on a conversation to another friend, I realize in telling the story that most of the little details I’ve fussed over aren’t very important.

On the other hand, when you can return to everything that was said it’s easy to become obsessive. I know I’m not the only guilty one because I’m constantly asked by friends to interpret what someone meant between the lines, whether someone is interested in them, etc.

And on top of that, breakups in the land of emails, texts and IMs present the perfect opportunity to relive the past again and again. I’ve tried to wipe my Gmail account of long-lost men, but they still creep up when I search for something obscure or look back into the annals of emails past. Thanks to the good folks at Google, our flirtations and relationships can never really be erased – they just get archived.

All of this leads me to my conclusion: technological communication doesn’t really make the dating thing any easier. It leaves a digital version of a paper trail, it allows people to escape finding real chemistry, and for some people it can even come to replace intimacy altogether.

Flirting and fooling around through an electronic medium may take away some of the pressure and awkwardness, but that’s part of meeting people and dating. I love reading through the missed connections on Craigslist as much as the next girl, but if finding a partner was as easy as finding a used sofa, relationships wouldn’t even be worth pursuing. I’m want a relationship so that I can turn the computer off and spend my time with another human being. It doesn’t seem logical that I’ll find that with someone who needs to have a keyboard between us.

So I’m going to try my best to pursue relationships the good old-fashioned way – in real life, or IRL for you instant messagers out there. My phone bill is high enough as it is, and I’d rather spend the evening watching old episodes of “Friends” than some guy stripping on a webcam.

Standing there with a guy at the end of the night, I know that it’s the moment of truth – either I will pull off getting that first kiss or I won’t. And thus far I just can’t seem to manage it.

I have come to realize that the situation is usually complicated by queer identity and the perception of gays in American society. How do you handle PDA, public displays of affection, in a largely homophobic world? How do you manage chemistry expectations that are often intertwined with notions of gender roles and sexual compatibility? And as same-sex couples don’t fit the dating norms, if two men or two women go out and part ways with a wave and a smile, were they even on a date at all?

After months of dealing with these issues I came no closer to finding a solution, but I did begin to think that they may mean the difference between the “good night kiss” and “good night and no luck.”

The first part of my problem, regarding PDA, is complicated by the fact that I live in Georgetown. In TV and film – which is where most of us first learn the norms of dating – people are always getting walked back to their apartments after that perfect date, where they ease into the kiss. Alas, none of them lived in the transportation black hole that is my little neighborhood. I’m always miles out of the way from whomever I’m going out with, and thus am never leaving men at my doorstep; I’m leaving them at a bus stop, the metro station, at a bar, in front of a restaurant, or on the street corner like a prostitute or t-shirt vendor.

The worst place I ever parted ways with a first date was on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street, after a great show and a nice dinner. A tip to readers: if you’re ever on a date and you DON’T want any privacy, this is the best location in the District to bring your unspecial someone. It’s hard enough to just stand at this intersection without getting plowed down by tourists and the Late Night Shots crowd, much less trying to manage any delicate physical contact.

And it was there on that corner that I realized gays were, in general, at a major disadvantage in sealing the deal for the first time. There have been several anti-gay hate crimes in Georgetown over the past few years, and they always occur – like most crimes – when people are by themselves. It seems to me the stupidest thing in the world to make a big gay scene on the street and then walk off, by yourself, into the dark. Of course it’s a double-standard. Hetero couples can do a lot more than a quick kiss before anyone bothers to take notice. But for a gay couple, especially one about to end the night walking off in separate directions, letting others see your lips meet is a somewhat dangerous proposal.

The next facet of my first kiss dilemma has to do with the lack of strict roles each person in a gay relationship is meant to play. In a hetero relationship, the traditional expectation is that the man leads and the woman either consents or suggests she must be going. While it’s a horrible, sexist idea of how the end of the night should be managed, there are days when I wish a similar structure existed for gay relationships.

That good night kiss moment is often the first one we have with a potential boyfriend or girlfriend in which the sexual chemistry is tested. Though I believe that the power of roles is limited, and that specific situations mean more, it is true that a certain kind of match is needed to make that first kiss line up. Two shy people might miss an opportunity, two aggressive people might struggle over power, and two indifferent people may break my first rule of dating and try to make something happen just for the hell of it, with no real interest or investment.

Over dinner at Ben’s Chili Bowl last week, Zack suggested that I might need to ratchet up my ability to incite some action on dates given that I tended to be attracted to chill, shy guys. That’s when I realized my primary role problem in these scenarios: I was good at turning up the heat and escalating romantic situations. I was not good at starting them. I always did fine once I was in the door, but getting there was challenging.

And this brings me to my last concern. In a heteronormative world in which gays aren’t always comfortable kissing in public and in which the typical roles for dating don’t apply, if the evening doesn’t end with some kind of a romantic gesture who’s to say it’s a date at all? If a single man and woman going to dinner and a movie on a Saturday night, it’s a date. But the same-sex couple is platonic until proven otherwise. As far as social norms are concerned, two women at dinner are only having a “girls’ night out” until they start going at it, and two men at the movies only a bromance make. So although the challenges for gays getting to that first kiss are great, there is also a higher perceived need for it to happen.

Here’s another tip, though: don’t get swallowed up in the heteronormativity of the dating paradigm. This can go both ways. Sometimes we might feel pressured not to kiss in public to avoid scrutiny; we may feel pressured to keep our relationships totally closeted, and just cruise Craigslist for sex rather than face homophobic social rejection. On the other hand, we might also feel pressured to lock lips with someone just to prove to the world – and maybe ourselves – that what we went on was a date, even though it was outside of the social norm. And it can be tempting to long for the type of predetermined roles that characterize traditional hetero dating culture so that there would be less guesswork and room for error.

But we need to find our own ways forward. For me, it may mean being more creative about where I chose to say goodnight to my dates. It may also require either choosing more outgoing guys or – because the shy ones are just so cute – learning to be a little more forthcoming myself. Not that the bro hug, awkward handshake, or lonely wave goodbye don’t have their place; but when the sparks are otherwise flying, I could stand to get a few more first kisses, and hopefully a few more second dates as a result.

We start out as kids learning the ever-popular bases, which beyond first being kissing and a home run being, well, a home run, get kind of confusing. (In fact, either this Urban Dictionary entry is out of hand or I don’t know nearly enough slang to be writing a dating column.) But we soon learn that there are also different “leagues” involved in courtship, with the Majors reserved for people who really know how to score. And at least if you’re a gay man, you’ll also become familiar with baseball positions – the catchers and pitchers deal which some people have taken beyond a top-and-bottom metaphor to a total descriptor of people’s roles in a romantic pursuit.

But how much do leagues and positions, which are essentially just ways of grouping the dating pool, really matter? The more I talk about it, the more I feel that it’s an illusion – at least to an extent.

I began to raise all these questions over the weekend after I was blatantly checked out by a random guy in the lounge outside my office. He was tall, dark, and handsome, totally cute, and way out of my league. Don’t be cocky, I thought to myself; there’s no way this guy could be checking you out. I looked away for a second but couldn’t resist turning back. He was still looking in my direction, smiling ever-so-slightly. I started blushing and averted my eyes, leaving him to walk into the coffee shop and leaving myself confused.

Back in my office, I changed my gmail status – the bat signal of the 21st century young professional – to a detailed description of what had happened and the question of why someone who couldn’t have been into me would have given me “the look.” Within no time, five friends had responded to my message. The first few were from hetero ladies telling me that no one was out of my league. I appreciated their kindness, but really, I thought, they couldn’t be serious.

I’m not what I would consider a shallow person, but I’ve always thought it a universal understanding that some people are objectively better looking than others; it has been a fact of life, like the sky being blue or Starbucks being overpriced. I have always believed that the personal chemistry I feel with a person, what we have in common, and what I can admire about them mean a lot more to me than how they look, but that has never stopped me from wondering if I’ve been attractive enough to earn someone else’s attention. In fact, thinking about it I realized that I only employed leagues to place myself below people I found to be too good to want me, not to veto someone from earning my consideration.

The plot thickened when a gay friend suggested that anyone could be in whatever league they wanted if they were willing to play hard enough. If you can be the aggressor, and can pursue with confidence, you can get what guys you want. It may not exactly follow the “what position do you play,” top-bottom idea that I’ve never gone along with, but it did have to do with roles. If I could lose my shyness and indecision and just go for it, could I change from being a gazelle to a cheetah and no longer have to worry about what guys are “in my league”?

I remain unconvinced. Yeah, my self-esteem isn’t as high as it might be, and being a little less timid couldn’t hurt my chances on the singles market. But part of that is who I am. I’m awkward, earnest, complicated, sometimes a little too naive and sometimes a little too skeptical, I always over-think things, and I can never accept the obvious answer. (Hence writing a column about this incident instead of just saying, he checked me out and therefore probably thought I was cute.)

And I think it’s about more than just being the pursuer or the pursued, the one at bat or the one simply hoping to catch what comes near. Like it or not, people look different, present themselves differently, take care of themselves to different degrees… At the end of the day, no two people are quite alike, and we cannot be attracted to everyone.

But I think that what Ben told me makes sense, which is that “there are many, many teams in your league. So it is for most people.” If I’m understanding him correctly, this means that we all seem attractive to different people. No matter how much I might change myself or how confident I might become, there are some guys who still wouldn’t give me a second glance. But some people may not want me to change at all. Short, awkward guys with messy, self-cut hair and eyebrow rings might be exactly their type.

So maybe the labels we affix to others and ourselves don’t matter nearly as much as the people playing the game. I’ve tried to keep this in mind this week while interacting with cute guys, even if my gut has told me that they’re out of my grasp. Life is too short to always worry about what other people might be thinking based on our own conceptions of ourselves. I always thought it was presumptuous to assume that guys looking my way were checking me out, but maybe it’s more presumptuous to believe that I know better than them what kind of guys they should be looking at. There is no rational system behind attraction, and as William James said in A Pluralistic Universe, “the only thing that ever drives human beings insane is logic”.”

The new system is going well. And while I haven’t hit it out of the park yet, at least I’m not sitting on the bench.

Sex.

Of course, it would take longer for some of us than others for the concept of sex to materialize. For gays, and especially “gold-star gays” – those who never had sex with a hetero partner before coming out – it may well have been a long wait from those days on the playground to finally making something happen. How many queer people have found themselves at twenty, or thirty, or dare-I-go-higher, without having really entered the world of sex and dating as a result of orientation complications?

Maybe a better question is, what happens when you do finally come out, often with mountains of baggage and sky-high expectations?

I was talking with a conservative gay friend last week who said it was excusable for queer people to be somewhat promiscuous when they first come out, given that they have so much experience to catch up on. Instead of beginning sexual exploration at the age of twelve or fourteen, they have to wait (in some cases anyway) several more years, with curiosities and desires all building up inside.

I likened the concept to dog years. Each year for a human is said to be experienced like seven years for dogs. I’ve also been informed that a dog experiences as much in its first year as humans do in their first twenty, a fact which only made the dog years concept more interesting to me. The way we saw it, the twenty-or-so guys my friend had hooked up with in two years was a lot in terms of heterosexual time, but wasn’t so much in “gay years” – a measurement that took into consideration the fast pace of the gay dating scene and the fact that, having been closeted for two decades, he had a lot of catching up to do.

For me the concept was compounded by the big gap between coming out and beginning to date – two events which I always imagined would occur at pretty much the same time. In my imagination I would come out, learn the ropes, and have a life partner within a week and a half. While not everyone is the “marrying type” like I am, I suspect that many closeted gays imagine that coming out will at least coincide with sexual success, whatever that might be for them; if not a steady relationship, they will envision immediately having lots of sex, or lots of hot dates, or something of the sort.

But in my case, having any kind of a romantic life took awhile (or at least felt like it from where I was standing). I came out in August 2007, on the eve of my junior year at Georgetown. It took me a few months just to get used to the fact that I was gay and to begin to feel comfortable in my own skin. Then in December I went abroad for five months, spending most of my time in the Middle East – not the ideal place to explore homosexuality. From there, I spent two months working non-stop for the Obama campaign on the other side of the country.

And thus, it had been a full year of being openly gay and without so much as a hug from another man. Instead of living in this “dog years” concept of having ten times the number of experiences as a mortal heterosexual, I had been living in “dog days” – a hot, sultry period of being stuck in the mud, waiting and wondering.

It was only a year, but it felt so much longer to this heartsick young homo. I didn’t phsyically stay in any one place long enough to develop a “gay community” or to find “gay spots” around town to hang out in; I didn’t have many gay friends, and soon stopped worrying about finding guys I might possibly date. In a world that so often portrays the young gay man as cliquey, promiscuous, and living in a bubble, I couldn’t help but feel that I had missed the proverbial boat.

It turns out that I did have one stereotypical gay feature, and that was the instinct to be melodramatic – for at the age of 21 I had decided that I would probably die alone and sexless sixty years later, my body given to science as the last virgin on earth, my money donated to charity. Lo and behold, it didn’t work out that way – I just needed to be patient.

In August 2008 things started happening. They began slowly but soon started snowballing. As the expression goes, when it rains, it pours. In fact, not too long ago I found myself so wet that I decided maybe I needed to slow down and get an umbrella – some kind of shield, an intermediary between the possibility of a romantic connection and choosing to pursue, allow, or imagine one. It wasn’t that I was hooking up with lots of people or falling in love with every other pretty face, but I did start to feel like a kid in a candy store – a little confused, a little overwhelmed, and suddenly needing to figure out what it was I really wanted.

It would seem that I had grown so used to not having a sexual existence, from 20 years spent in the closet and a year out and alone, that I had a hard time adjusting to a world in which there were real possibilities. Not only were there possibilities, but there were many possibilities – sometimes more than one at a time. I couldn’t let something happen just because I had nothing better to do, and I had no reason to pretend I was interested in men when it clearly wasn’t clicking. There were plenty of fish in the sea, and while I may not have been the most experienced fisherman, I wasn’t without the ability to reel one or two in. But if I wanted to make something work, I would have to start participating in my least-favorite activity on earth – choosing.

I had learned my first rule of sex and dating: There is no room for indecision. Forget the dog years theory, forget those dog days spent in heat; entering the dating scene and just grabbing whatever fruit falls from the tree will only waste more of your time.

That being said, the choices aren’t always easy. But those are stories for another day.

Be sure to check back next Wednesday morning for the latest “Sexual Disorientation.” Meanwhile, you can read through my related posts from the past.