Party of One

by Dave Holmes

  Gay at the Cross

  Please know that I am now, having typed that out in 2016, in a full-body cringe. But in 1991, I read it proudly, as though some smarter person had written it. I went over it again and again. I had done it. I was ready to see how the rest of the world would respond.

  People responded in one of two ways:

  1. They read it and paid attention to how closely and eagerly I listened when I asked their feelings about it. Immediately, they put two and two together like the international bright young things they were, said they were proud of whoever wrote it, and then had the grace to act surprised when I told them it was me. Or:

  2. They read it, and assumed it had been written in jest. There were more than a few of these, and it stopped me dead every time. I had prepared myself for every possible outcome except this one. There were people in 1991, in a school of 2600 people, who could not believe there would be one homosexual among them. It knocked me off my feet, like Charlie Brown getting flattened on the pitcher’s mound in a Peanuts cartoon.

  But category two was a fraction of the size of category one, and I began to tell a few friends, and then they told a few friends, because that’s the way a small college works, and then suddenly I was out. People knew. It was a thing. Someone would come up to me in a bar and say: “Dave, I think my little brother is gay; what should I do to make him feel comfortable enough to tell me?” And I would answer: “What is your name?”

  Being out ended up being a nonissue. We were learning to be good little Catholics at Holy Cross, acknowledging but never really talking about the hard stuff.

  The letter got the Chaplain’s Office talking. Holy Cross is run by the Jesuits, a progressive order of priests (as orders of priests go), and it turned out they were waiting for someone to bring the issue to their doorstep. What they decided to do was issue a poll, through students’ PO boxes, about sexual issues. Are you sexually active? Do you use contraception? How would you describe your sexuality: homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual? The poll was a little intrusive and clumsy, but what are you going to do with celibates? I filled mine out, folded it up, sent it back through the mail, and began actively counting the minutes until the results would be published.

  I went to a meeting of the Campus Activities Board, and someone pulled that poll out from their backpack, and my friend Ana took a close look at it, and said, “Oh, no.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I made a mistake on this,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “See here where it says, ‘How would you describe your sexuality?’ ‘Homosexual’ is listed first, and I checked that one off. I didn’t even read it. I just went for what was first.”

  I thought it was funny, until the results were published in The Crusader a couple of weeks later. Of the respondents, two said they were homosexual. One of them was me, and one of them was Ana, who wasn’t.

  The Chaplain’s Office, working off faulty intelligence, decided to put a support group together for the two students who were struggling with their sexual identities. I saw the ad right there in The Crusader a week later. That it was a support group, and not an activity group or a social group—that we were already being treated like we had a condition—didn’t even faze me. What did was the possibility that there could be, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, more than one of us. Someone who had been too afraid to fill that questionnaire out. Someone who might sit with me on a couch and understand what I was talking about when I talk about this stuff. And then we’d make out.

  It was too exciting to consider, and it was all I could consider.

  I visited the Chaplain’s Office and signed up for the first of what would be two separate interviews that I would have to go through to become a founding member of this group. They needed to talk to us all to make sure we weren’t pranking them, or joining the group just to cause physical violence to gays and lesbians. It was sweet. I convinced them that I was serious—that I was so gay I didn’t know what to do with myself—and was granted permission to attend the first meeting.

  I was psyched.

  On the day of the first meeting, I Sea Breezed my face, changed clothes seven times before settling on a simple Gap sweater and jeans—one doesn’t want to appear overeager—and went. I took a deep breath, I opened the door, and inside the room sat one facilitator from the Chaplain’s Office and three serious-looking starters from the Holy Cross women’s field hockey team. I felt like someone who had won the wrong showcase in The Price Is Right’s Showcase Showdown. Like, I came here from Iowa, and now I have a Jet Ski.

  The meeting was an even more somber affair than what you might expect from a roomful of skittish gay people and a Catholic priest. We were given copies of Brian McNaught’s On Being Gay and urged to talk about our feelings. My feelings, quite frankly, were that I was tired of being scared. I wanted to be out. I wanted to be a beacon to other kids on campus, who I believed existed, who were searching for the same things. I wanted people to see that I was out and social and accepted and happy and that they could be, too. I wanted them to find the inspiration to be brave and to live life as their truest self. Also, I wanted to have sex with dudes.

  The women were warier, which in retrospect I understand. They were from tight, talky little New England, where if they were to come out publicly, their conservative families and friends from home might hear about it. They wanted to stay right where they were for the time being. Quickly, they proposed a policy: No talking to one another outside of the meeting. The women could talk to one another; they already knew one another and wouldn’t need to invent a cover story. As for me, I was not to address any of them while we were outside the meeting place. It was too dangerous. I didn’t like it, but I agreed.

  After a couple months, facilitator Mary Pat called me in for a meeting. “We have a job for you,” she told me. “There’s a sophomore named Jeff who wants to join the group, but he’s nervous about it.” I perked all the way up. “We’ve met with him a few times, and I think he just needs to talk to someone who’s been through it. Would you mind having coffee with him?” My heart pounded at the prospect of helping someone who was going through what I was still absolutely going through, and doubly so at her use of a male pronoun. I said that I would not mind having coffee with him. She said, “Great,” and I said, “Terrific,” and as I was about to leave, she said, “You should know this going in: Jeff is very, very handsome.” Of course he is, I thought. I was already picturing him. Jeff had me long before hello.

  Through Mary Pat, we arranged it. We chose a place off campus so as not to arouse suspicion, and a time when most of the student body was in class so as not to bump into anyone: Friday at 2:00. I buzzed with excitement and nerves and rage that I could not bend time to my will.

  Friday at 2:00 finally came. I decided to be fashionably late, which is to say that I arrived at 2:01. Jeff was at a table, reading a book.

  Jeff was beautiful.

  Dark, wavy hair, the kind eyes and dimpled chin of a young Campbell Scott. He was perfect.

  “Jeff?” I asked.

  “Yeah, hi.” He said. Nervous. Like me.

  “I’m Dave.” We shook hands. I felt it in the pit of my stomach. I felt a handshake in the pit of my stomach. “What are you reading?”

  He held up the book and looked at the cover, and then at me. “I have no idea.” And we laughed.

  We talked about the school, and where he was from, and where I was from, and how weird it was that we were doing what we were doing. He mentioned how nervous he still was—he held up his hand about five minutes in and it was still shaking—and I tried to make him relax, to make it look like it was a real hoot to be a half-closeted gay guy at The College of the Holy Cross. I told him that of course he should totally come to the support group meeting, and also, funny enough, that I was having a party that very night and he should come to that, too. He said he would, and we said goodbye, and then I sprinted home to tell all of my friends and my roomm
ate that we were having a party that night.

  I’m going to play it cool, I told myself. I’m not going to tell anyone what the deal is or how we met—I have to protect Jeff’s anonymity, after all—I’m just going to take the opportunity to get to know him a little better. He showed up a little later than everyone else—because I had told everyone else to show up an hour earlier than I told him to show up—and he was just as breathtaking as before, in a plaid, oversized Abercrombie & Fitch flannel. I greeted him with a red Solo tumbler and offered him “house cup” privileges, which allowed him to sail through the scrum around the keg, and we sat on the back of my couch, looking over the crowd and getting to know each other.

  I told him I was in love with him roughly four minutes into this conversation.

  I believe in love at first sight. I also believe that if you make someone repress their desire for love and companionship and sex for years and years during the time they need it the most, their hearts are like single cans of beer bouncing around the trunk of a car, and when someone comes along and fishes that can out and opens it, it makes a great big mess. Your first plausible shot at love feels a lot like your only plausible shot at love, and the longer you wait to have that first shot, the harder it is to tell them apart. Jeff and I were too young and inexperienced to know the difference. We thought we were in love and we kissed everywhere we were alone. Our rooms, elevators, stairways. Jeff came out to his roommate and a handful of friends. We were learning how to do this. Together.

  We spent more or less every night in my bed, just holding each other. Nothing more. We were both afraid to go any further. Or I was, and he didn’t want to. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. We were in a bubble, just me and Jeff, and everything was perfect. It felt like being out of control, and I loved it.

  Here’s how in love I felt: Michael Bolton’s “Said I Loved You…But I Lied” was a hot one on the radio at the time, and I bought the cassette single. (The lie he teases in the title is that when he said he loved you, what he was actually feeling was more than love. Super-love. Extra-love. Bolton has been in the love bubble. Bolton gets it.)

  The thing about bubbles is that they pop. After around three weeks, Jeff pulled his head out and realized that when two guys—especially when one of them is the one gay person on campus—are suddenly inseparable, people talk. There were suddenly two out gay people on campus, and without deciding to be one of them, Jeff had become one of them. The thing that had made him too nervous to attend a double-secret support group meeting only three weeks before was suddenly something everyone might actually know. Also his boyfriend was a needy person who called fifty times a day and waited for him outside of class. Jeff did the only sensible thing and broke up with me.

  He called me up and asked if I wanted to take a walk around campus, which is something we had done at his suggestion the day before, and I said sure, because all I wanted to do was spend time with him. And up on the landing of the administration building that overlooks the campus, he stopped and said: “Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t. Do you understand that?” I said that I understood that, which I didn’t, and that I, too, had been thinking we should cool it a little bit, which I hadn’t. I said, “I know things are hard now, being here in this place, but I think we’re good. You and I are good together. Maybe later? Maybe when we both graduate and we’re out of here?” He was telling me it was over, and I was telling him I could accept that, as long as we could keep going. He said maybe, and we both knew he didn’t mean it. I hugged him goodbye and I hopped in my car to go back to my apartment, and on the drive back, it hit me that he had called and asked to go for a walk around campus yesterday because he had wanted to break up with me yesterday, but he’d lost his nerve. That’s the part that made me have to pull my car over and catch my breath.

  At the next double-secret gay support group meeting, which I could not attend, because I could not face Jeff, two of the field hockey women revealed that I had broken our agreement and spoken to them outside of the meeting room, and that this had made them feel unsafe. Mary Pat called me and said I was not allowed to come back to the meetings, but that I could talk to her in private sessions if I wanted, and that since all of my transgressions had taken place in bars or at house parties at which I’d been drinking, I should seek alcohol counseling.

  Jeff handled being out on campus like a champ. He ended up being kind of an inspiration to other kids who were going through the same thing. The support group grew and grew, and soon there was the stirring of a strong, vibrant community that I wasn’t allowed to talk to.

  And I became aware that I had fallen in love with a projection. When I tried to think about things I could say to Jeff to make it better, I couldn’t think of any, and I couldn’t think of any because I didn’t know him. He was the first beautiful boy—one of my people, one of the people I was trying to be—who could conceivably love me back in the same way, and I’d decided to endow him with every trait I was looking for in a boyfriend, whether he had them or not. Whether he wanted them or not.

  In retrospect, it’s kind of like when you’re auditioning for something and the casting person is behind schedule. You end up sitting in the waiting room for much longer than you expected to. And because there’s nothing else to do—there’s a Coke machine and an old USA Today and the cell reception is shitty and there’s no Wi-Fi—you start to get in your head. You get nervous about this thing that you usually do with ease. You read over your lines too many times. You think about what you’re going to do with your hands. You think about what a gig like this one could do for you, what you’d do with the money. And when they finally call your name, you go in and just eat it. You talk too quickly, you talk too loudly, you oversell the joke in the script. You show the worst version of yourself. You want to run out of the place and never stop running. You’ve ruined it because you waited too long and you wanted it too much.

  This was that kind of deal.

  I threw all my love at a guy I barely knew, and it injured him. I wagged my tail so hard I knocked everything off the coffee table. The lucky thing was that this was happening right as Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories released their debut single “Stay (I Missed You),” which, by being plaintive and just vague enough, echoed my personal experience. I only heard what I wanted to, and I only wanted to hear that song, all day, every day.

  Jeff and I never spoke again before I graduated, but I did make sure to ask all of his friends about him every time I saw them. One never knows when one is behaving like a creep; probably even that astronaut lady who drove for two days to beat up her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend didn’t think twice when she bought those adult diapers. It just felt right. Morrissey released the single “The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get” at just this moment—which I think you will agree is a very Morrissey thing to do—and it would have to join Suzanne Vega in the “listen later” pile.

  That was a heavy couple of chapters. Thanks for sticking with me. As a reward, here is a photograph of a young Grant Show.

  I spent my whole college career, and then most of the rest of my twenties, loving guys who were either constitutionally incapable of loving me back or wise enough to keep their distance. It was a dumb, exquisitely painful, self-destructive pattern that I seemed to enjoy. If it never led to any romantic or sexual satisfaction for me, if I lived my life in a perpetual state of frustration and heartache, at least it was predictable. I was a lot of fun to be around in the ’90s.

  Here are a few of the songs that got me through it.

  “Weak”—SWV

  This one gets the early crush period down kind of perfectly; it’s a physical trauma, an affliction, and one you don’t want to shake off. You see a confident yet bookish senior pull out his word processor from across the library, you watch as he furrows his brow and taps away, and this song cues up in your soul. It’s glorious. It makes you want to sing, even if you are in a quiet area. You can imagine yourself joining in this one, a capella, with Coko
and the gals. You in a mock turtleneck and Cross Colours pants, them in doorknocker earrings and flannels casually tied about the waist, on a stoop in a rapidly gentrifying urban area. Afterwards you’ll go for fudge!

  “Where Does My Heart Beat Now”—Céline Dion

  A hot bowl of cheese meant to be sung with a tear-choked voice and a freshly shattered heart. This one is so potent, so dramatic, they couldn’t even find a good enough American singer to get it across. So they went up to Canada, taught Céline the lyrics phonetically, styled her like Elayne Boosler, and we were off to the races. For extra comfort, watch the video on YouTube and count all the times where she gesticulates on the wrong words.

  “I’d Die Without You”—PM Dawn

  PM Dawn gets lumped in with Digable Planets and Arrested Development and all those other early-’90s groups that pushed hip-hop into a gentler direction and then immediately fizzled out, but we forget that they wrote some fairly epic pop songs, and did it in caftans. Like all of their songs, this one is awash in hippie nonsense, but once you get to the chorus, you can sing along, and snap, and smoke, and cry. And repeat.

  “Star Me Kitten”—R.E.M.

  You will inevitably become confused and frustrated by the fact that your boy does not, maybe even cannot, love you back, and you will turn again to music. Yes, of course there is “Everybody Hurts,” but anybody can be heartbroken to that one. You’re special. Skip a few ahead on Automatic for the People until you get to this one, which is every bit as hangdog sad but, with its climactic “fuck me kitten,” gives us a rare peek at Michael Stipe’s horny side. At the height of my addiction to this song, I used to think about Todd, a viciously sexy and not particularly nice hockey player I hung out with for a while. I think he went on to be in the Army Special Forces. Todd was committed to hotness. (Incidentally, according to whatever magazines I was reading, Michael Stipe was hanging out with Stephen Dorff a lot in the mid-’90s, so he knows about intense crushes on sexy idiots.)