On Being a Gay Guy
"'You’re like a cartoon character,' he said to me, not just once but twice. Sure makes a boy feel sexy."
July 15, 2017
Boston, Massachusetts
I was 23 years old
I’m dog sitting Cash and, fresh off my time with Kendall in New York, I was feeling sex god-ish enough to go into this weekend thinking in the back of my head, “I’m going to see Philip.” The guy who runs that menswear boutique in the South End, a very sexy 40something who I’ve run into a couple times this year. He DM’d me back in March, saying, “Your the cute dog walker on Tremont, right?” But again, seeing him this weekend, it was just some “back of head” thought. Nevertheless, it’s Saturday and I’m walking Cash up W. Newton when I look over my shoulder and lo! There he is.
We both greet each other, eventually deciding to meet on the corner. He is…beautiful. Kind of mean-faced but in an unbelievably gorgeous way. Aaron Echkartish. My height, or just a little shorter. Same size shoe, we determined that eventually. We start chatting and he’s all playful, and I am too. I poked him in the chest at one point. He leans in, noticing my grays and asks if I have any gray chest hair, to which I said, “That’s for me to know.” (I don’t have any chest hair period.)
We swap numbers, my hand visibly shaking as I take down his 617 number, agreeing that we’d see each other later. But not before he grazed his hand across my crotch as he walked away. Needless to say, I was saying “Holy shit!” the entire walk back to Cash’s place, immediately texting Shannon about everything that just happened.
Not long later, Philip sends me an unbelievably hot picture of himself in the mirror, asking what I’m “into.” I never know how to respond to that. Then he asked if I’m on PrEP. Which I should be, I guess, though I don’t know how on earth I’d bring that up with my unbelievably Russian doctor in Brighton. And I toyed with the idea of just telling him yes but, instead, opted for the truth. He responded, “I’m undetectable.” And in a testament to my unending capacity for stupidity, I respond, “Unlike my dick this afternoon!” A lapse in response from him and a Google search later, I realized what “undetectable” meant. Even with how inexperienced I am, how sad, how pathetic that I didn’t know what that meant? Eventually he does respond, telling me we can “play safe.”
A few hours later (and a few Budweisers and shots of Crown Royale later…thank you Cash’s owner), I text him at like 9:00, having not heard from him all evening. He responds, “I’m just watching TV.” At which point I basically invite myself over. He says, “Well, just keep in mind that my bedtime is 11.” Didn’t stop me! Rang his buzzer and hoofed it up six flights of stairs to his gorgeous apartment. He offered me a glass of water and I sat down with him on the couch. He was watching Good Times. He asked if I’d ever even heard of this show but, thanks to my seminal Nick at Nite days, my knowledge of 20th century sitcoms is indeed pretty broad. Everything happens for a reason. I compared myself to Natalie from Facts of Life at one point and that got a genuine, almost surprised laugh from him.
“You’re like a cartoon character,” he said to me, not just once but twice. Sure makes a boy feel sexy. I set my glass down on his table at one point and he swept in with a coaster. We’re all caricatures of ourselves.
Time was ticking and no moves had been made so I pulled the old, “Well, I’ll let you get to bed.” He said he wanted to see me in my new underwear (per his suggestion, I’d changed out of the Hanes boxer briefs I was wearing when he groped me earlier). Also telling me he wanted a back massage. We’d both realize soon enough that I don’t know how to give a back massage. Because we go over to his bed, where he lays face down and I proceed to straddle him and do that Lucy-Liu-in-Charlie’s-Angels hand chopping thing. Really, Brian. Unbelievable.
Our pants came off soon enough. I literally squealed at his naked body. SQUEALED. He laughed. A perfect V-shaped torso with just the right amount of golden chest hair. We fool around, all kinds of fool around, and, all the while, I’m waiting for him to do it but he didn’t seem interested. In hindsight, I think that was good of him. Though, in the moment, I would have let him. I finished but he couldn’t. The word “nervous” came out of his mouth but he quickly course-corrected, saying, “Not nervous, just…” and trailing off from there. It was his turn to give me a back rub. He was much better at it. Soon enough, we got on the subject of going to the gym.
“I hate to be that guy,” he says to me, “but you should really start doing some upper body work.”
I got my stuff together and he, butt naked, walked me to his door. I haven’t run into him since.
June 30, 2023
Brooklyn, New York
I am 29 years old
“Brian…you’re scaring me…” I heard that a lot growing up. Mostly from family, honestly, but—generous in the spirit of Pride Month—I’ll resist calling them out by name. You’re welcome, Anita Bryant Burns. Because anytime my walk took on just a little too much swish, or my S’s teetered from sibilant to sssomething sssissy, or I perfectly reenacted Madonna’s handstand choreography from her Re-Invention Tour performance of “Vogue,” there it was. “Brian…you’re scaring me…” It was always half a joke, this refrain, always delivered with just enough eye-rolling irony to keep its speaker off the hook. If their words stung, let alone stuck, they had an out, conveniently reassured it was never anything more than a funny ha ha. Hilarious. Of course, it wasn’t a joke, not for any of us. What was scaring them scared me too. Because long before I manifested into reality this rendezvous with the South End shopkeeper, years before I ever had sex, or kissed a boy, or required stitches after botching a pirouette and smashing my limp wristed 13-year-old hand against a decorative martini glass in my mother’s kitchen, before I so much as knew there was a word for it—I knew I was gay. In theory.
What becomes a gay guy most? For me, the title alone accomplished plenty. I told my family I was gay at 17, but at that point I’d long been out to my friends. By freshman year, I’d not only disclosed my closeted secret to Brittany and Isa and Emily but had also checked off a whole slew of “firsts” with a hot gay senior named John. The fact it’d be years before I got around to doing any of those “firsts” for a second time–oh well. Feeling, instead, so content to toil through my young life pining for boys who were, almost by design, achingly out of reach, all the while turning down each and every boy who dared try to reach me. (There weren’t many.) I got into the habit of calling myself a “homosexual,” and not without some eye-rolling irony all my own. I should’ve known better. But that title served my purpose. By identifying with something that sounded a lot more like a diagnosis than a personhood, I spared myself the risks, the intimacy, the fear of what might happen if I sustained eye contact with that boy across the dancefloor at Machine, or if I said yes to the drunk Emmanuel girl insisting I meet her best friend Connor, or if I ever kept Grindr downloaded on my phone for any longer than a weekend. Why suck a cock when I was so busy telling anyone who’d listen to me that I was a cocksucker?
But don’t let it be forgot that for one brief shining moment—I was, in practice, gay. It’s a time I’d usually, in fact, rather forget, that summer of 2017, steeped as it was in such humiliating displays of MSNBC sincerity. But feeling so very old at 23, when “feeling old” was still more appealing than damning, I think some part of me understood that all this wouldn’t last forever. And as for whatever this might be, it was, in short, everything. Living in a crumbling Allston triple-decker, surviving off $200 a week, visiting friends who’d moved to DC or Chicago and unabashedly sleeping on their dirty couch in a living room they shared with three roommates I’d never met. Youth. But considering I was going gray before I could grow facial hair, it’s not like I ever rested any laurels on looking young, let alone young and hot. That was never my cross to bear. Rather, for this youngest sibling, he who, again, memorized the choreography of a pop star who was already 35 by the time he was born, I’d spent all my life as the consummate baby. Insisting that I loved being the “dumbest person in the room.” Almost giddy with satisfaction at all I still had to learn. But a know-nothing who can still look cute for being young, before long, starts looking more like a loser, or a freak, or, lucky me, “a cartoon character.”
Cartoonish would be the word to describe my night with Philip. I don’t blame him. My Facts of Life joke, that back massage, screaming at the sight of his naked body, it must’ve felt like the ass he was about to eat was Amelia Bedelia’s. This fumbling goof, lousy with still-recently-lost virginity, clueless of what to do but desperate for something to happen. And willing, so very willing to make himself the butt of the joke. This was, as I journaled, coming on the heels of a weekend trip to New York that had proven, let’s say, climactic. Waking up in an East Williamsburg apartment on a hot July morning and staring across the pillow at a still-sleeping face that was so beautiful I wanted to—what else—squeal. Feeling, for maybe the very first time, like I had it in me. That I could jump off the page and land squarely in flesh and blood, in three dimensions, alive. Without that, I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to climb up those six flights of stairs and knock on that shopkeeper’s door, brave enough to reach out and touch somebody. I learned so much. Thank you, Kendall. Thank you, Philip.
I have a boyfriend now, which I never thought would be in the cards for me. Really believing I’d never know a relationship, let alone for four and a half years, let alone with someone who’s never cared one way or the other what I did or didn’t experience before he came along. Thank you, Austin. The details of our pasts that we do share with each other mined, most often, from our boyhoods. So tickled, and so unsurprised, to discover we both adored Oprah, and Evita (1996), and Rizzo’s song in Grease, stockings in high heels and The Wizard of Oz, and that Ariel was our favorite princess. Not that any of this makes us unique, quite to the contrary, and thank God for it. I was all grown up by the time I learned that the songs for The Little Mermaid were written by Howard Ashman, and that Howard was gay. I already knew that Ariel was most every little gay boy’s favorite, I wasn’t that in the dark. But what I didn’t know was that the words she sang and the dreams she declared all came from the mind of a gay man. That her urgency to be a part of the world was, in fact, his own. That, to me, is magic. Like something supernatural. As if the echoes of some ancient creation myth had boomed through the television and perfectly, with no way of knowing, we understood its sound. Be amazed, but don’t be scared.