Band uniforms, you see, were numbered according to size. Unisex, they got both taller and wider as the numbers went up. There were 115 uniforms owned by the band. I was number 107. This fact was gloriously listed for all to see on the large assignment sheets in the uniform room. And yes, most of the defensive linemen from our football team filled in 108–113, joining band being an easier way to complete the school’s music requirement than music-theory or-history classes. The pants on 107 were so long on me that they were hemmed to my knees, but the jacket at least fit over my ass.
“You’re built like a woman,” Mikey would rail. “Women are supposed to have curves. You’re not supposed to be some stick. You aren’t Edie Sedgwick, for Christ’s sake.”
“I know that, and you know that,” I replied. “But these idiot boys don’t know that. And frankly I need to get laid.”
“Can I get an amen to that!” Jody threw his hands in the air like he was receiving the Holy Ghost.
Anyone who thinks the boys’ locker room is the center of the lewd and crude universe has never spent time with a sexually active girl and her favorite gays. At seventeen, I was a teenage girl who had given up the goods, and now I had the good fortune to be dishing with my gay boyfriends. The three of us would turn instantly from mooning, cooing romantics into lust-driven psychotics, with language that would make sailors blush. We bandied about words like girth, engaged in the age-old debate about spitting versus swallowing, and had competitions to see how many different positions we could name in one minute.
“He doesn’t exactly fill out his track pants in a meaningful way,” Mikey might say in reference to a new student teacher in gym.
“One never knows for sure,” Jody would pipe in. “Bobby was the same way. Looked like a total absence of junk unless we were fooling around, and then when it came down to business, it was like he was smuggling three pounds of grapes in his briefs.”
Mikey was the one who first suggested that I look outside of school for someone a little more mature. We both had agreed that someone older wouldn’t expect a girl to be the size of a French fry, and I embraced that ideal with all the fervor of a Grail-tormented knight of yore.
Ah, the older men of my youth.
Some of these guys had graduated when I was a freshman and were now in college, but still showed up at the parties when they were in town. There was a particularly handsome twenty-something waiter at an ice cream parlor where our crew hung out. I dragged my friends there twice a week for four months so that I could flirt with this devastatingly cute guy. (This did wonders for the size of my ass.) I finally got up the nerve to leave him my number on the table one night. But he never called. I assumed he must be gay, and I worried that I’d never find a straight guy.
Mikey consoled me by telling me that the eighties were a tough time for gaydar, what with all the androgyny in fashion. “It’s Robert Smith’s fault, princess, all these boys in eyeliner—anyone would be confused.”
Despite our best intentions and well-laid plans, when prom time came, it was Jody who escorted me, dapper in a tuxedo with a cream silk scarf jaunty around his neck. He and Mikey took turns dancing with me all night and telling me how beautiful I was. And while I would have loved to spend the night after prom in a hotel room in the arms of a lover, I consoled myself with the knowledge that at least my escort genuinely loved me, and I wouldn’t have to worry about prom-night date rape.
I emigrated East for college, and set about immediately to fill the void in my life formerly occupied by Jody and Mikey. Jody decided to travel for a time instead of going to college, and Mikey headed to California. In a time before cell phones and e-mail, and with our new adventures taking precedence, we fell out of touch the way high school friends often do. But when one door closes, another opens: Eli lived exactly one floor below me in my freshman dorm, and we sniffed each other out within thirty-six hours of our arrival. He had been wandering on the girls’ floor and stopped in my open doorway to make a window treatment recommendation.
“You might want to extend that left side a bit beyond the actual window,” he purred in a slight Southern drawl from the doorway.
“Really? Over the wall? Why?” I asked.
“Your window isn’t centered on that wall. It is over to the right six inches or so. If you add six inches to the curtain on the opposite side you’ll give the illusion of the window being centered, that’s all.”
We looked each other up and down. His khakis were pressed, his loafers battered artfully, the blue oxford well-worn and fraying delicately at the sleeves and collar, with a wide brown belt worn a little low on slim hips. He took in my full size-18 amplitude, the baggy black pants, the freshly minted Brandeis sweatshirt, the wrestling shoes.
“Are you a budding interior designer?” I asked coyly.
“Maybe.” He grinned. “Or I could be a florist.”
“Or a caterer,” I offered.
“Hair stylist is always an option,” he laughed.
“Don’t sell yourself short, you could be a lawyer.” I paused for dramatic effect. “I hear Lambda always needs good people.”
This cracked us up, and within two hours he had completely rearranged my furniture, referred to three other guys from our dorm as “she,” “Nancy,” or “Miss Thang,” taken a scissors to my sweatshirt, and given me a thorough tutorial on the art of the blow job.
“Don’t give up the goods too quick, honey. These college boys will move on to the next girl in a heartbeat unless you give them a reason to come back. And getting them off without getting them naked is a guaran-damn-tee of a follow-up phone call. Now, you wanna start by firmly shaking hands with the monster…”
Eli assured me that by parceling out my gifts, I could be reasonably sure of three to four dates, by which time, “They’ll have fallen in love with you despite themselves!”
Eli wasn’t wrong, and with his guidance I managed to spend the better part of my freshman and sophomore years having intense mini-relationships of anywhere from one to four months.
A few choice tips from Eli worked wonders. It wasn’t all about sex, either. Eli helped bring out my inner seductress, even when I wasn’t in the bedroom, and I quickly gained new confidence.
I learned new social skills. “You’re a natural flirt, kiddo, but you lack mystery. Get ’em hooked with the humor, the light stuff. But when it comes to real information, be cagey. Watch me, a little I-know-a-secret kind of smile, no teeth, a lowering and slow raise of the eyes, and a shrug. Then some innocuous comment like, ‘You know how it is,’ or ‘Let’s speak of more pleasant things,’ and he’ll be chomping at the bit to really know you.”
I appreciated it even when the truths Eli told me were hard to hear.
“Dollface, I adore you. And I think you are the most beautiful, sexy, spectacular broad on this whole campus. But as much as you want boys to love you for who you are and ignore that you color outside the lines of conventionally accepted physical beauty, you yourself are a total looks queen. All these boys you moon over are handsome and fit and shiny like a damned Calvin Klein ad. When have you ever gotten a crush on some little schlubby guy with sloped shoulders and a weak chin, hmm? Your ideal of attractiveness is just as fucked up as theirs, and if you don’t open your horizons a bit, you are going to miss out on some men who are just as extraordinary as you, and just as alternatively beautiful.”
Eli spent his junior year abroad in Israel, and then transferred out of Brandeis to pursue a career as a rabbi. I missed his warm wit and caustic observations on life. His time in the Holy Land had reinforced his personal commitment to Judaism, which was wonderful for him, but put something of a barrier between us, as I am not religious. And it is difficult to talk about sex with an about-to-be rabbi. But his sage advice to me about my tastes in men broadened my criteria. I threw myself headlong into a relationship with my future ex-husband and lost my drive to pursue a constant companion of the homo variety.
However, once a hag, always a hag: After returning t
o Chicago and enduring graduate school, a wedding, and teaching high school English, I found myself working for a professional theater company, running their education programs. In one fell swoop, my social arena broadened to include more gay boyfriends than even I could juggle. My circle of gays even had subsets:
There were my shopping gays, who introduced me to the thrift stores where shabby was indeed chic: “It’s got great lines, kiddo, just strip that yellow paint off it. Cross my heart.”
My bitchy gays, who would sit for hours in my living room drinking wine and dishing the dirt on everyone: “I’m serious, he actually showed up to rehearsal high as a kite, and fell asleep during table work!”
My dancing gays, who kept me out far too late, and took me back to Berlin for the first time since Jody and I had last gotten our groove on, the summer after graduation: “Baby, it’s already two in the morning, you might as well keep dancing!”
My dinner-party gays, who took my natural love of cooking and entertaining and sent me into the stratosphere: “I found the best place for wild mushrooms ever, come get me and we’ll practice risotto tonight!”
My hang-at-the-bar gays: “Well, we could either go sing show tunes at Sidetrack or shoot pool at the Four Moon. Your choice.”
My sub-for-the-couchbound-husband gays: “Of course I want to go to the opera tomorrow!”
And of course, there were my sex-coach gays. The latter attempted to assist me in rekindling, albeit unsuccessfully, the spark in my marital boudoir: “Have you tried the spanky spanky? He’s a corporate guy, they always like the submissive role.” The failure therein was not their fault but my own. (Do not ever marry someone to whom you are only peripherally attracted and who is boring in bed. It won’t get better with time. No matter how many wise homosexuals offer guidance.)
After my divorce in 2001, my gay boyfriends became more essential to me than ever before:
“You are taking out a personal ad. I’ll help you. And I promise not to laugh if you meet a couple of losers.”
“I’m coming over. No one should watch a Thirtysomething marathon alone.”
“Get off the couch and come meet me. This place is crawling with straight boys and martinis.”
“It isn’t your job to make someone happy if they aren’t making you happy. Of course you’re not a failure!”
“I’m sure it was just the beer, sweetie, of course he’s attracted to you.”
“I think we need new shoes.”
They pushed me with firm directive back into the dating world and schooled me on how things had changed since I was last single.
“It’s all about the online research. Google him, baby, Google him!”
They talked me through how to get over my first-time-naked-with a-new-boy anxiety: “Wine, not liquor, two glasses, not four, and candle-light, not electric.”
And how to delicately handle a limp lover who has been overserved: “Take his face in your hands, kiss him gently on the lips, and tell him that you’ll blow him for the same number of minutes he goes down on you.”
They built up my self-confidence and my lingerie collection: “Of course you can wear a garter belt! On those luscious, creamy thighs?”
They encouraged me to discard all the devices from my nightstand that had gotten me through the last years of my marriage, and helped me acquire a totally new set of toys that were not only functional, but yes, pretty, too: “Oooh, look at this one, it’s lavender!”
They helped me buy a new bed, introduced me to six-hundred-thread-count sheets, and then showed me how to find and attend to the male G-spot: “Okay, first, shower him—you know how lackluster straight-boy hygiene can be. Then use some lube and your middle finger…about two and a half inches in, make a motion like you’re beckoning him…and for heaven’s sake, don’t make that face when you do it!”
For all the wonderful support of family and colleagues and friends, it was my gays who really got me through the dark days and back out into the spotlight, both in and out of the bedroom. A pink spotlight, no less.
So when a recent new lover gasped to me, “I think I lost consciousness for a second there—that may be the best sex I have ever had,” I just snuggled up to him and said, “Yeah, I know. Thank God for gay men.”
Judith Krantz would be proud.
LOVE IN OTHER LIFETIMES
Anna David
“He’s gay, you know,” Bonnie said.
We were sitting on stools at a then trendy, now long-gone bar on Melrose, surrounded by Amstel Light bottles and cigarette smoke, and I’d just confessed that the guy she’d introduced me to a few moments earlier had made me feel like I’d been struck by the love-at-?rst-sight lightning bolt.
Of course, I’d felt such bolts before. I was twenty-?ve years old at the time and I couldn’t fathom relationships built on trust and mutual compromise; I saw only fables or romantic comedies, Cinderella’s prince or the lead actor rushing toward his one true love at the ninety-minute mark. I had no interest in what would happen post-happily-ever-after: Love, I was convinced, happened in a lust-?lled instant, and there was no mistaking it for anything else.
“Really?” I gasped.
“Really. And not just gay—very gay.”
While I nodded at Bonnie, Brian and I caught eyes again and gazed at each other the way only two people who are dying to tear each other’s clothes off can. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Bonnie, making my way across the room to Brian’s side.
“Oh, my God, Bonnie just told me,” I blurted, knowing I didn’t need to finish the sentence. I felt absolutely confident that the lightning bolt hadn’t only hit me—from the moment Bonnie had introduced us, Brian and I hadn’t taken our eyes off each other. The news about his sexual orientation felt worse than disappointing; it actually seemed intrusive, like it was infringing on the course nature wanted us to take. “Is it true?”
Brian nodded but continued to look at me in a way that I can only describe as deeply heterosexual. “It is—I mean, I always have been. But maybe—I don’t know…”
That opening, combined with the sight of his sparkling hazel eyes and perfect cheekbones, was enough for me. “I’m buying us shots,” I announced, fully confident that my bar order was the only thing we needed to get us to the next step and erase any notions he’d had before this point about his sexuality.
I know all about falling for gay guys. Since college, it had been my way of swooning over unavailable people without having to get involved with married men, and it’s safe to say that in the ensuing five years, I’d been attracted to more than my fair share of guys who preferred guys. My previous biggest crush in this arena had been on Martin, a tall, spectacular British boy I met during my junior year in Cambridge, when we were in a play together. Everyone in the play—the entire cast of straight women and gay men—was in love with Martin. Not only was he charming, hilarious, and beautiful, he also didn’t seem distinctly oriented one way or the other. Finally, at the cast party, I’d had enough of unrequited love so I confessed my feelings to him. And then Martin—charming, hilarious, beautiful, and, as it turned out, gay—told me that I had actually helped him to come to terms with his sexual orientation because, subtle though I’d thought my crush had been, Martin had been well aware of it, and when he compared the attraction he felt for me with his attraction to a short Asian guy whom he didn’t think was as attractive as me, I lost. (Whether or not this was true, it was a brilliant rejection on Martin’s part, as I walked away with my ego more than intact.)
But this was different. With Martin, there had been signs. He had loved Bananarama. (I’d justified that as a British thing.) He wore pink. (It looked good on him, I told myself.) He was in a musical with only straight women and gay men. (You can’t label someone just because of his circumstances, I’d thought.) Though Brian was, in fact, out, he also happened to be sartorially straight, dressed in a button-down shirt and gray slacks, basic black, nondesigner shoes, and no product in his hair. Plus, there was the matter of the ey
e contact we kept having—not to mention that he seemed far more interested in cornering me for one-on-one conversations than the gay men I’d met before, who would start off talking to me alone but then trot me over to their friends like I was something they’d found outside and wanted to display in show-and-tell, usually urging me to be “fierce” and funny.
At the end of the night, I had all the confirmation I needed. “I can’t believe it, but Brian is into you, too,” Bonnie said, shaking her head. “This is just too bizarre.”
With that, I went up to Brian to say good-bye and he asked if we could go on a date the next night. I nodded, giddy, and we kissed good night—on the lips, in the bar, with seemingly no worries over who might see. What kind of a gay guy does that?
I figured the conversion process was more than halfway through.
When I was getting ready for Brian to pick me up the next night, I found myself more excited than I’d ever been for a date before. Perhaps it was my desire for thrilling, dramatic, romantic-comedy love, but there was something fabulously intense about an attraction so deep that it penetrated the standard definitions of sexual orientation. The notion of a date with a regular old straight guy, who wouldn’t have to sacrifice or defy anything to go out with me, seemed downright dull in comparison.
At dinner, Brian and I wasted no time in psychoanalyzing his past. Over steak and red wine, Brian told me all about how his older brother had stolen his teenage girlfriend away from him. Brian had been devastated and had found himself obsessing over thoughts of his brother and the girl together, and especially the thoughts of the two of them in bed. And then—this part’s a little vague, as I think we were well into our second bottle—he started obsessing over his brother sexually. He knew it was incestuous and wrong and horrible, but it felt better than obsessing over wanting to kill his brother for stealing the girl away from him. Soon after, he hooked up with his first guy.
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