by Dave Holmes
As for Janeane, she had her lips done and got herself a Bravo scripted series. As ever, she is one step ahead of us all.
Teen Shows That Were Earnest
Those Salinger kids in Party of Five dealt with some real drama—dead parents, alcoholism, dating a guy who ends up being kind of racist—and they faced it head-on and wet-eyed. Saved by the Bell may have been watched ironically, but they made that shit with a straight face. I don’t even have the emotional fortitude to address Blossom and her very special episodes. For a moment there, we seemed to believe that television was a way to change hearts and minds, and that the best way to do it was to be emotionally direct and kind of embarrassing. Nowadays, the 90210 kids would have to murder one another graphically every week and all talk like the same twenty-three-year-old gay guy who’s trying too hard.
The Feeling That Anything Could Happen, Radio-Wise
Nirvana blew everything wide open in the early ’90s, and radio jumped on the “alternative” bandwagon, looking for the next big thing. They didn’t find it, but we got a few years of truly excellent one-hit wonders: New Radicals, Primitive Radio Gods, The Toadies; even the Butthole Surfers and the Meat Puppets had hits. You turned on commercial radio not knowing what you were going to hear next. Now you hear all of these songs on Jack FM in between Mariah Carey and Meat Loaf.
Black Guys in Pastels
Say what you will about their overreliance on vocal runs, but Boyz II Men could rock a mauve.
Unreachability
If you wanted to e-mail someone, you went home, turned on your computer and modem, fired up Prodigy, waited a half-hour for it to load, and then said something that was worthy of your effort. The rest of the time, you existed in the actual world. You looked where you were going. You were alone sometimes. And you didn’t think you’d ever be nostalgic for it.
An Internal Life
The other day, I had a thought about something, and as is now my reflex, I reached for my phone to tweet it. And I don’t know what stopped me—maybe I was heading down into a subway station or something—but for some reason, I stopped. I thought: this thought will have to stay inside my head, unexpressed. A feeling of calm washed over me. It was the first time I’d done that since late 2006.
One Sunday night when I was eleven, I flipped through the channels for something to watch, and I rested on PBS, because there were robots on it. And thus began my brief but intense love affair with Doctor Who. The show hit all my buttons: it was sci-fi, it was British, and I was the only one I knew who had heard of it. Plus, it was all so charmingly low-budget. It felt like it needed me, and I needed to be needed. I became a fan right away.
After I’d been watching for a few months, the station ran a promo for a “Doctor Who and Star Trek Convention” down at the St. Louis Art Museum. What. I begged my parents to drive me down there and drop me off for the day. I was sure it would be packed with people my age, people who wandered their schools feeling like half a circle. People who were waiting for me the way I’d been waiting for them.
My parents relented, and we drove the half-hour downtown. I got there right as the doors opened at 10 a.m., and told my folks: “Pick me up at five.” I went inside and, well, it was full of what I now recognize as the kinds of grown-ups who would willingly have gone to Doctor Who and Star Trek conventions in 1982: adults with long Tom Baker scarves and Captain Kirk costumes, or pointed ears, or I GROK SPOCK T-shirts. Or all of it.
I remember saying to myself, “Oh, hell no.”
The attendees weren’t particularly kind to me, for what it’s worth. I was the youngest person there by a decade or more, and people gave me looks. Like: We have come to dress like space lords and talk to each other in Klingon; what on Earth is a child doing here?
I made the best of it for as long as I could, sat through a screening of The Trouble with Tribbles that the entire audience recited line for line, and then gave up and called home, begging my parents to pick me up.
Twelve years later, this would basically be the story of my first few gay bar experiences in New York.
In 1994, the biggest of the big gay bars in New York City was a place called Splash on Nineteenth Street in the eastern reaches of Chelsea. I had learned this from the Village Voice, which in my last few weeks of college I studied more closely than any textbook. The clubs—Limelight, the Roxy, the Tunnel—were out of the question, as a $20 cover charge was not in my budget, so I wrote down the address for Splash and made a plan to hit it on my first Friday.
The countdown to the end of that first Friday was endless; I watched the clock at Saatchi & Saatchi like Britney would, years later, at the beginning of the “Baby One More Time” video. At 5:00 p.m. on the dot, I ran out the door. I didn’t even go home to have a spritz of Drakkar Noir and put on a casual button-down; there was just no time. My people were waiting. I threw open the doors, and, as was required by local ordinance at the time, Robin S’s “Show Me Love” was playing. The place was jam-packed. Go-go boys in speedos taking showers in glass cases. Videos of gay pride parades of old playing on the video monitors. And as I ordered a beer and scanned the crowd, I began to notice something. The boys were…oddly similar. Short hair, lots of product, styled forward. Tank tops, tight. Jeans, tight. They even had the same shoulders. I had never seen such uniformity, and I had spent six years at a boys’ school with a dress code.
Once I had downed the two beers necessary for striking up a conversation with a stranger, I picked a handsome guy who was standing alone at the other end of the room. My attempts to make eye contact were not working out, so I walked over and extended my hand. “Hi! I’m Dave.” He scanned me from head to toe.
“No, thanks.”
I have a theory. I think everybody needs to join a club at some point in his or her life. People have a natural hunger to be on the inside, and the later they satisfy that hunger, the more of a nightmare person they turn into. Take fraternities and sororities: a person who has fit in somewhere before having joined a fraternity tends to put the experience in its proper place, while a person for whom it’s their first club tends to take it way too seriously. Similarly, if a person gets through college without ever having been on the inside, and then moves to a big city and is immediately accepted into the gay community, he has a tendency to be the worst. He learns the rules and the lingo and the dress code, and he is fucking vicious to the people who don’t know them. He has been denied membership in a club until very late in life, and someone is going to pay.
In the gay male community of New York City in 1994, the fat guy was the someone who paid. It was not yet cool to be a hefty, scruffy gay dude the way it is now. Gay men have always been a little more body-conscious than the rest of the population; guys are visual and sexual and disgusting and hot, after all. But in the years after the initial AIDS crisis, as its death toll kept hitting new peaks, the focus on the physical became manic. A community whose most public faces had been sick and dying for more than a decade seemed bent on projecting health. Fitness. Power.
Or maybe broad shoulders and abs are the mutually agreed-upon hottest things, the way blond hair and big tits are the all-access pass to the straight male world, and having them is the surest way to get yourself laid. A little of both, probably.
The rest of the Chelsea bars followed the same template as Splash. Same guys. Same rules. Same Robin S. But I was an eager young man fresh out of Catholic school, so I kept searching. In any major city, there are gay bar magazines, tour books to the scene to tell you where to go and which nights to go there. There were two in New York at the time: Homo Xtra and Next. I grabbed them both from Splash, took them home and went at them with the Hi-Liters I’d stolen from work. My home on the Upper East Side, the place where all postcollegiate prepsters settle when they move to New York, boasted affordable rents and numerous draft beer specials, but almost no gay bars. The magazines listed one ritzy piano bar in the east Sixties for guys in their seventies, another place near Bloomingdale’s exclusively for Asian t
winks and Asian twink enthusiasts. And then one place called The Regent, which was summarized thusly: “A young entrepreneurial crowd mixes with an appreciative older audience.” Young? I am that! Entrepreneurial? I am in the world of business, sort of! Older people? I have been taught to respect my elders, plus think of the stories they could tell! Sold. I dressed in my finest polo shirt and khakis and hopped on the southbound 6 train, toward my destiny.
The Regent was down by the tram to Roosevelt Island, a hidden little place without so much as a sign—just a red light over the door. The appreciative older audience likes to relive the bad old days, I figured. I swung open the door and entered just as “Show Me Love” by Robin S. made its crescendo. The lights were dim. The crowd was segregated: young’uns along the wall, older guys—and we are talking older guys—along the bar. Three empty, silent feet in between. The two groups surveyed one another. It was like a junior high mixer. I struck up a conversation with a good-looking younger guy in a very tight tank top and a goatee. “You new?” he asked, looking over my shoulder at the older gentlemen. “I am!” I said. “Well, you know. Good luck.” Talking did not seem to be on anyone’s agenda at this place. A guy at the bar signaled him over and he went. They spoke for a quick moment, the older guy settled his tab, and they left. I stood alone, with my back against the wall, nursing a Bud Light bottle. A cold room. It’ll warm up, I figured.
After twenty minutes or so, the drunkest of the older guys at the bar waved me over. I stepped to him.
“Hi! I’m Dave.”
“You’re new.”
“I am!”
He looked me up and down and then up again and then down again. “How much?”
Have you ever had the experience of being in your kitchen and you see an ant, and you think How strange, an ant, and then your scope of vision immediately widens out, and suddenly you see a vast network of ants who have just been there—making orderly lines, serving their queen, eating your food since God knows when—and until this moment you were utterly, blissfully blind to what was right in front of you? This was that kind of deal. Immediately I realized what any halfway-savvy fifth-grader with decent reading comprehension skills would have picked up on immediately: “young entrepreneurial types and an appreciative older audience” meant “prostitutes and johns.” This was a hustler bar. I shook the hand of my appreciative older audience, finished my beer in one large gulp, and excused myself.
I had a hard time finding my place in New York’s gay scene, and while today I recognize the problem as internalized homophobia and a lamentable eagerness to find fulfillment in a bar, at the time I blamed CeCe Peniston. Where now I recognize that the mid-’90s were a golden age of gay-bar music—a perfect, shining moment in time that has earned its place alongside the Motown era and the classic rock of the ’70s—at the time it worked my nerves. But that shit holds up; go into the most basic gay bar in your area—the one that smells like an old fog machine and is called Rumors or Illusions or The Malebox or whatever—and see how long it takes for you to hear “Finally.” If you have not heard it in thirty minutes or less, drinks are on me. (Limit 1, well and draft only.) In the ’90s, disco was becoming less of a dirty word and the gay community was becoming a marketing segment. Suddenly all you needed was a drum machine, some rudimentary recording equipment, and a shouting black woman, and you could be a gay bar superstar. Black Box, La Bouche, Corina, Real McCoy, too many to mention. They aimed for “Let the Music Play,” and when they missed, at least they landed among the “Gonna Make You Sweat”s.
There were a handful of bars in the still-intimidating East Village, and I thought if I didn’t find my home there, maybe I’d just get stabbed to death and the whole thing would be less of an issue. I immediately felt more at home in these places: The Boiler Room, The Phoenix, Wonder Bar. They had less hostile guys and more adventurous ninety-nine-compact-disc jukeboxes, stocked with ninety-eight fresh, interesting albums—Stereolab, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Soul Coughing—and, in position ninety-nine, Madonna’s Immaculate Collection. And come 11 p.m. on a Friday night, the Chelsea boys in their Caesar haircuts would start to arrive, and your Morphine would be cut with “La Isla Bonita.” It never failed.
And I never failed to show up. On the Upper East Side, my signature move became The Ghost. I’d be out with my friends, listening to the Dave Matthews Band at Dorrian’s or The Gaf, and then, at around 2:00 a.m., after the appropriate number of draft beers, I would act very tired. Ostentatious yawns and stretches. I might tell a friend I was going home to hit the sack, or I might just leave. Either way, I’d hit the street, shake off the fake fatigue, hop in a taxi, and go downtown. Two a.m. is the hour when people get less picky about whom they talk to and possibly take home. Two a.m. is when a guy like me can shine.
When you’re very young and you don’t know how to find (or be) a real boyfriend yet, you make one up out of what’s around. You have your friends, who take care of your emotional needs, and then you hook up with strangers, which checks off the intimacy box. You cobble satisfaction together. It’s not perfect, but it works. It did for me, anyway.
The great thing about New York, I quickly learned out of necessity, is that you don’t need to be in a gay bar to meet other gay people. It is a big, diverse city full of single twenty-three-year-olds who are desperate to pair themselves and their friends off so that they can have dinner parties and pretend to be older than they are. There are all kinds of people, everywhere, and they are free to mix wherever they choose.
One major pitfall about being a single gay man in New York in 1994, as the community was starting to gain visibility and power, was that people—primarily women, it must be said—were beginning to see gay friends as a hot accessory. They would get very familiar with you very quickly. They would tell you about their sex lives when you didn’t ask. They would call you girlfriend. They would look at you, like a dog awaiting a treat, expecting you to say something saucy and fabulous. It’s really easy to let people down in this context.
It is also very easy to be let down in this context. You would be set up on blind dates by people. “You have to meet my friend Thomas/Richard/Harold, you guys will be perfect together,” someone would tell you, and then you’d go have a drink with someone with whom you have no chemistry whatsoever and realize: the reason this person thought we’d be perfect together is that we’re both homosexuals and there are no other reasons. What you thought was careful matchmaking was just your friend congratulating himself for knowing two gay dudes.
Otherwise, I met and dated four kinds of guys:
• THE GUY WHO HAD JUST FIGURED OUT HE WAS GAY. Once I learned my way around the bars and clubs of the city, I found that guys like this gravitated toward me. Solid, broad-shouldered guys with names like Rob and Pete and Jim. They were not yet out of the closet, barely able to acknowledge their sexuality to themselves. So when they met me, they felt relaxed. Easy. I reminded them of their fraternity brothers. I was a guy they could drink beer and have very shallow conversations about sports with. These guys needed me. I made them feel safe. I could relate to them the way they had been taught guys should relate to one another, and then once we had drunk enough to feel comfortable with our sexual needs, they would kiss me. They would kiss with such eagerness! Such hunger and passion! We would have clumsy drunken groping sessions that we called sex, and then in two weeks they’d get tired of me and go deeper into Chelsea. I’d run into them a couple months later and they’d be in a tight tank top and a Caesar and their names would be Robert and Peter and James. I was their Ellis Island. I stamped their papers and pushed them off to a new life in a brave new land. It was sad and lonely, but somehow better than nothing.
• THE GUY WHO DEFINED HIMSELF FULLY BY BEING GAY. This guy snapped. This guy knew the Peniston deep cuts. This guy would say things like “Andrew Shue? Oh, she’s fine.” This guy would live in the gay neighborhood and go to the gay gym and buy his gay food at the gay grocery store. This guy would say, “You live on the Upper E
ast Side? Girl, why?” This guy couldn’t see a life outside of the gay bubble and didn’t want to. And if I would express interest in doing something else, not even something straight, just something else, the response would be some variant of: “You want to see Jerry Maguire? Girl, you are so self-loathing.” They were right, of course, but I had much better and more sophisticated reasons for hating myself than just for liking boys.
• THE GUY WHO DEFINED HIMSELF FULLY BY BEING UN-GAY. This guy burped. This guy knew the Hootie deep cuts. This guy would say things like “Who’s Andrew Shue? Oh, he’s on Melrose Place? That’s for fags.” This guy would live anywhere but Chelsea and would be out of the closet, but would be so desperate to convince you he wasn’t one of those kinds of guys that it would immediately be exhausting. It’s the flip side of the coin, but it’s the same shitty coin.
• THE MESS. And then there was the drunk-on-Saturday-afternoon, sexually compulsive, emotionally stunted and volatile mess who couldn’t connect with another human being if his life depended on it, which it pretty much did.
I also was all four of these guys. And I get it; we had all, in our own time and in our own ways, come to the realization that we were a part of a segment of the population that we’d been told all our lives was bad. Broken. Embarrassing. Unhealthy. Those words applied to us now, and we had to figure out what we were going to do with them.
And because we were trying to be men, we mostly did it alone.
So listen: I have no idea how sexual orientation is determined, and I don’t really care. Some say it’s genetic, which the Tony Perkinses of the world refute because no specific evidence of a gay gene has been found, and as we all know, everything that hasn’t been discovered yet doesn’t exist. (It’s why we canceled science and told all the researchers to go home.) Others say it’s environmental, and point to the fact that the more older brothers a boy has, the higher his chances of being gay, which makes me feel even worse for those younger Duggars. I would imagine it’s a combination of the two, plus, in my case, a megadose of scorching hot men in the popular culture of my adolescence. I’m not saying these guys made me gay, though they probably did; what I am saying is that they cast a shadow that stretched all the way into my adulthood. Here are a few of the men whose impact on my young psyche made it impossible for me to commit to any actual human beings I met later in life.