by Guy Branum
I retreated and sulked. Soon my friends were there, and my mood brightened. The moral of the interaction was clear, though: I should know my place. There were some people I wasn’t good enough to talk to. There would be guys at gay bars who’d dismiss me on looks alone. It wasn’t nearly being told “You’re too fat, leave,” but it was close enough for my serotonin-deprived little brain to cling to.20
Coming out as a homosexual—and not “coming out” in a telling-my-parents-and-friends “coming out of the closet” sense, but “coming out” in a debutante-ball sense—had released me into an ecosystem full of highly adapted predators and prey. They had powers, skills, weapons: adaptations to the requirements of gay. I had none, like that giant rabbit from prehistoric Minorca21 that had no predators and went extinct the moment it got ecological competition.22 Basically, I had the social skills of someone who knows a lot about extinct giant rabbits. I was powerless. I was reasonably certain I’d spend the rest of my life being battered around by emotions I’d unleashed by entering this stupid, sexy world.
As LukeMichael went back to college in Iowa, I continued to learn about being gay. I kissed a boy for the first time. I blew and got blown. I had full-on real sex with a flight attendant with a barbed-wire arm tattoo whom I knew only by his AOL instant messenger name.23 Real romance.
And then, during the holidays, LukeMichael returned to my laptop screen. He was back in town, visiting his parents again, and that sense of powerlessness and hopelessness returned. Then I remembered that I was a goddess.
If the months between LukeMichael’s minor condescending dismissal of me and his reemergence had not taught me much about the tax or family law I should have been studying, they had taught me scads about how to fraudulently acquire men’s nude photos on the Internet. I quickly summoned up one of my classic fake profiles. Long before we had such terms as “catfishing,” I had delved into the dark arts of pretending to be someone else for fun and profit. Mostly, as I said above, my profit was the naked photos of guys who didn’t think I was hot. By this point in time, I had a few personas in regular rotation. My favorite was a junior bisexual wrestler from Augsburg College whose roommate was always disturbing the privacy he needed to have sex with men while still closeted. His name was CollegeJock24. This was a time so new and simple, names as blandly sexy as CollegeJock24 were readily available. Why I didn’t use some small bit of this creative energy to capitalize on the ripe, lucrative, untapped territories of tech in 2001 is a thing for which I still have not forgiven myself.
In my time posing as men far more attractive than I was, I’d learned some confidence. CollegeJock24 was far more capable than I was of weathering a silence and demanding what he was worth. I told the story of my sexy bisexuality and my deep hope that no one would find out I was into men. With the benefit of his nipple ring and perfect abs, I sold a story of purest masculinity. LukeMichael was like wet sauerkraut in my hands. He sent me his shirtless photos and a dick pic.24 I was elated in a way that’s hard to express. I was seeing what people as fat as I was didn’t get to see. I was getting to experience what life was like for the sexy classes.
LukeMichael kept asking for my address. He really wanted to come over and mutually masturbate with the explicitly self-hating masc-musc wrestler I was purporting to be.25 A horrible, delicious thought came into my mind. I told LukeMichael that he couldn’t come to my door because if my roommate saw him, he’d suspect I was gay. I told him to come to the parking lot of the Perkins26 across the street from my apartment and to wait there.
Forty minutes later, a Range Rover pulled into the empty, snow-dusted parking lot just visible from my balcony. I looked out, delighted that I’d managed to hijack the evening of a hot guy the way his sexy magic had co-opted hours of my life. I’d felt so out of control since I’d come out of the closet, and my depressed brain had convinced me that I was taking something back.27 Eventually, about fifteen minutes later, LukeMichael pulled out and drove back to the upper-middle-class western suburb where his parents lived.
I went back online, giddy from the success of my little prank. You can imagine how surprised I was when LukeMichael showed up back online forty-five or so minutes later. He was very upset that my perfect abs and not-visible-in-the-photo face had not come out to greet his perfect abs and heavenly face while he waited in the Perkins parking lot. I did what any sensitive person would. I suggested he return to the parking lot because my fictitious roommate had finally gone to sleep.
Improbably, another forty-five minutes later, that Range Rover was sitting in the dark parking lot again, acquiring a light dusting of snow. Again, I peered with glee. Again, he waited about ten minutes, then left.
What a ridiculous scam I’d run, what a rambunctious swindle, what a . . . wait, what? He was online again? Deeply frustrated that my hot pretend self had not yet drained his body of its erotic juices, he again questioned my commitment. I had to. I told him he could return. This time he insisted I give him my specific address and apartment number. I assented.
What a strange three quarters of an hour ensued. I was thrilled and terrified. My swindle had swindled above its weight class. I had co-opted a hot guy’s evening and made him suffer the way hot guys’ indifference had made me suffer, and what the fuck was I going to do when he actually showed up?
Soon enough, there was a knock at the door. I steeled myself and opened it. All six feet eight inches of LukeMichael’s frame were situated very deliberately, leaning on the doorframe. When he saw me, he was obviously shocked. I said, “You can leave now.” He did.
This isn’t a noble story. I don’t think what I did was right. I was a scared, confused, depressed man firing a shot across the bow of the forces he thought were oppressing him. Lashing out is rarely a good choice, but when you’re feeling powerless, you just hunger to feel like there’s anything you can control.
This story did a terrible job of making the point I wanted to make, which is essentially that clubs can be very nice. They’re full of fun, optimistic people who want to have a good time, and you can make really great friends there. But this story isn’t about clubs at all. It’s just about me harassing a guy who was once vaguely indifferent to me at a club one time. Okay, that’s the part that makes it about clubs. I guess my story is mostly just an exploration of the idea that you can’t be at home somewhere you fear, and my magnificent trolling of LukeMichael was a resolution to stop being afraid. It would be more atmospheric if it all happened in a gay bar, and we will definitely take that note into account before we adapt this chapter into a screenplay that will go unproduced.
So, I made friends, I started going out five nights a week, and I stopped being a responsible law student in every way. I went from having an abject fear of gay clubs to being a person who was oddly soothed by the smell of stale beer and too much cologne. I stopped being scared of the people at the club—because I was now one of the people at the club.
* * *
1. They can almost never be effectively evoked on episodic television. Clubs require too many extras and too much thumping music. A rare exception was the third episode of The Mindy Project, “In The Club,” which wasn’t the most realistic representation of a nightclub, but at least felt sexy and fun. It’s when I fell in love with Mindy, a show for which I eventually wrote.
2. The second, which I did not get to in this book, was during the delicious period when I was on Chelsea Lately for the first time. Suffice it to say that being on a dumb, silly pop culture show that is primarily watched by gay porn stars in their twenties is a very nice life.
3. Until I was the age of twenty-three, my mother purchased every piece of clothing I wore. That’s the kind of shit you let happen when your desires are walled off from the rest of your brain. My mother was deeply proud of her capacity to acquire clothing at below its original retail cost, and if you’d seen me in any of those outfits, I can trust you would have thought “I hope no one paid anything close to the original retail cost for that outfit.”
4. I’ve previously referenced going into gay chatrooms on AOL. You might wonder why this didn’t satisfy the need to meet gays in Minneapolis. The answer is that AOL chatrooms at the time were not regionally specific. It’s hard to find anonymous tail when everyone you’re chatting with is on another continent. Figuring out how the Internet could properly facilitate gay male anon sex was a process of trial and error. The course of true love never did run smooth.
5. In 2018, we call that a Molly from Insecure.
6. And, occasionally, ass-to-mouth.
7. I understand that the ramp-up of this paragraph would be better if I left all the sexy club-related stuff to Matt, but Steve’s capacity to go from Miranda to sex felon in under two drinks was truly dazzling.
8. No one knows his character’s name. It’s been lost to history.
9. By which I mean straight actors playing gay characters.
10. Aptly, the song is called “Dildo.”
11. To this day, I consider treatment of Pride and Halloween as the gay High Holidays to be central to rectitudinous homosexual observance. This is but a small example of the way a tiny dose of gay behavioral modeling is invaluable to budding homosexuals. (I do not say “young” because I think I was older than that clerk was.) But suffice to say that when I saw that guy taking off for Pride, I thought, “His eyebrows are so well manicured, he must know what he’s doing!” And both of us were right.
That said, no one should need to take off Monday for hangover recovery. The glory of getting day-drunk for a Pride parade is that you should fall asleep by nine p.m. and wake up fresh and new for work the next day. Also, on the gay High Holidays you don’t blow a ram’s horn, you blow a man’s horn.
12. Were we ever that young?
13. If you are jarred by this honest admission that looking down on someone else made me feel better, go fuck yourself. We are not always generous; we are not always our best selves; and your pretense to perfection is emotional dishonesty of the highest order. Why did you buy this book? And could you buy another copy for a friend, as penance?
14. Criminal laws punishing sodomy were declared unconstitutional by the 2003 Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas. Minnesota’s sodomy law was declared unconstitutional in 2001 from a State Supreme Court ruling on several merged cases, Doe et al. v. Ventura. I co-wrote the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union’s initial motion to dismiss in the Doe case, about a dude who got blown by a lady in a bar after hours. (The security cameras were on.)
15. It was fucking great.
16. I mean, it might have actually been the first time. I think Pride was the first time, but you know how in Midnight’s Children Saleem insists that, in his memory, Gandhi died on a different day from what the history books say? Well, under similar rules, I’m just going to say these were both my first time at the Saloon. I was new, just know that. I was new.
17. I’d go on to declare at least forty people to be The Most Beautiful Boy in Minneapolis before I left. I don’t think I’ve declared that many in Los Angeles, and I’ve lived here seven times as long as I was gay in Minnesota. Everyone knows that gay guys in L.A. are way, way hotter than anywhere else on the planet. Maybe not an actual runway in Paris or Milan, but comparing cities to cities, Los Angeles is doing aiight. Now I am jaded to such attractions, but in Minneapolis, fresh from the closet, I was very new to the game, and every attraction seemed cataclysmic.
18. I have learned in the intervening years that the problem-free life of beautiful dancers in the early 2000s smelled mostly like Abercrombie & Fitch’s Fierce.
19. I’m sure many of you think interrupting a stranger’s conversation is an act of transgression nearly on par with touching a stranger’s butt. I would write another screed informing you of the conservatism and limitations of this opinion, but I run the risk of this chapter simply turning into a diatribe on my part about the dangers of heterosexual dating mores being applied to gays. Thus, I will be brief:
1. You show up to gay bars to talk to people you don’t know. If you just wanted to talk to your friends, you’d meet up at home or a place with mozzarella sticks.
2. The precept that initiating conversation with strangers who might not be interested is wrong is looksist. My primary appeals are not visual. If I play my entire game waiting for someone to look at me and be enchanted by that alone, I will probably wait a long time. If I give myself a chance to be delightful, charming, and smart, things go a lot better.
20. Once, during that Chelsea Lately fame–fueled second period of club frequenting around 2010, a door guy did tell me I was too fat to come in. He let my friend in, but not me. My friend, who was actually a photographer upon whom I had a soul-rending crush, asked, “Why did I get in and not him?” The bouncer said, “Because you’re cute and he’s fat.” Exactly, precisely the thing I most feared happening happened. And then like three minutes later the club promoter told him to let me in. And ten minutes after that I had a vodka soda, and twenty minutes after that I was making out with a boy who is hotter than any person currently living in Minneapolis. I kept waiting for myself to cry, but I was too busy making out with that boy. Sometimes the thing you fear most in the world isn’t that bad.
21. It’s called Nuralagus. It was a giant rabbit that lived on the island of Minorca and didn’t evolve any natural defenses because it was isolated from competitors or predators. Basically, me in 1999.
22. From the weird Majorcan mouse-goat Myotragus. It’s a tiny goat with eyes in the front of its head so it can see eagles that might try to kill it. Its evolutionary advantages made it way better at eating bark and shrubs than Nuralagus, so when the Myotragus made its way to Minorca, Nuralagus went extinct. So, in this metaphor, every other gay guy in Minneapolis. Seriously, you guys need to spend more time researching island-isolated species.
23. Flyboy69.
24. Still got ’em!
25. He said he wasn’t interested in anything more sexually invasive because he was a “safe boi.” This was an era when “boi” was a deeply meaningful and useful term.
26. If you don’t know what a Perkins is, it’s a Denny’s that was properly loved by its mother.
27. I also went through a real shoplifting phase then. I only now realized these two horrid behaviors might have similar psychological antecedents.
BABETTE CAN COOK
I DO NOT KNOW when I first asked my mother to teach me to cook, but I know what she said when I did: “Sit there.” She pointed to the bar overlooking our stove. She cooked. I watched. She talked, she joked, she riffed, she entertained for her audience of one. Periodically, I would push: “Can I help?” “Watch,” she’d reply.
There are many ways you can lead life as a working-class family in a farm town in a part of America that no one knows exists. My mother was firmly committed to making one that was as wonderful as it could be. She sincerely believed that wit, ingenuity, and a positive outlook could get the most out of the life you could afford. Nowhere was this truer than in her kitchen. She toyed with pomelos and bulgogi marinades while the moms down the road cranked out another Hamburger Helper. She knew we deserved better, and maybe she herself deserved better, too. If she was going to mix ground beef with sauce and noodles, she would decide what they were, not some anthropomorphic oven mitt. Sitting, watching my mom create, were some of the most magical times of my life.
The worst years of my life were my time in law school in Minnesota. This has already been established in this book, but a very real and concrete issue is what one is supposed to do when the worst time in one’s life is over. My answer was to pack my bags and return to the last place I could remember being happy: Berkeley, California.
Building your life up from smoking ruins is terrifying and great. Like, you could do anything! Am I still a lawyer? Maybe not, maybe I’m professionally spelunking now, and everything I once loved will be forgotten, and I’ll spend the rest of my life hunting through caves. I’ll spend most of my t
ime in Chile, I’ll speak heavily accented Spanish, I’ll develop hypersensitivity to daylight and become primarily nocturnal. I’ll be known as “El Gordo De Las Cuevas” and all my friends will be bats. Maybe that? Which makes you understand the terrifying part: losing the groundwork you’ve done in your life up until that point and knowing you might be making another terrible choice.
I didn’t completely start anew. Like I said, I moved back to my college town and pretended that August 1998 to May 2001 had not happened. I also figured I’d eventually put that law degree to work, but since I hadn’t participated in the highly ritualized system of finding first jobs for lawyers, I’d have to figure that out later. In the meantime, I had to survive. That terrified me deeply. Even though I’d worked construction for my dad, delivered pizzas, worked at a movie theater, and held various other jobs during law school, I knew I could not survive. My parents had made this very clear to me during most of my childhood. I was disorganized, lazy, and liked nice things. I couldn’t possibly just find a job and survive, I needed my parents, but since my coming out, they had made clear that their willingness to help me financially or emotionally was mostly gone.
I moved into a dilapidated house on the Oakland-Berkeley border, a transitional territory where Berkeley grads getting ready for their first kids were gentrifying out older black families. The house was one of the few remaining holdouts of six to ten recent college grads sharing a home the landlords were unwilling to develop into something they could make more money from. We were surrounded by twenty-eight-year-old professional couples with craftsman bungalows and three-year-olds, and working-class older black couples who spent a lot of time working on cars. There were lots of cats named after jazz legends in our neighborhood. That’s what you need to know.
My viability was a continuing question. I’d survived Minnesota, I hadn’t killed myself, but could I survive surviving? Were my smarts and skills as useless as I’d been told? I hunted as aggressively as I could for a job, knowing full well that few persons were as unemployable as a J.D. without a bar membership. Any job I’d want would require me to be a real lawyer; any job I could get would know I’d quit as soon as I passed. I remember praying, begging the universe to give me a chance to make an income so I could have a life of my own.