“Hey hooker, put on some cleavage! We’re going out,” Mike shouts into the phone.
“You got it Jeremiah,” I say, laughing. I had taken to calling Mike “Jeremiah” on account of the ridiculous fake ID he had found on the sidewalk outside a liquor store. Mike and Jeremiah were both about five-foot-eleven, a hundred and sixty pounds and had dark hair, but that is all they had in common. Mike, a stylish, puppy-eyed, and completely “fabulous” homosexual, had a completely different facial structure and haircut than Jeremiah, a rough-faced kid with black dreadlocks. The ID was also expired which sometimes afforded grief, but never does a bouncer say anything about Jeremiah not looking anything like Mike, and the ID always gets him a wristband to buy liquor at any club we go to. This makes me extremely angry because I am eighteen and Mike is still seventeen. He’s not even of legal age to get into a club (much less buy alcohol) until he turns eighteen in October.
“Where are we headed?” I ask.
“Male Box. It’s two-dollar Long Islands tonight. Plus the Hot Booty Contest,” Mike says.
“Oh! I haven’t seen Sabin in so long! She’s hosting right?” I ask.
“Of course. Brandon, Jerry, and Carlos will be there, and I am taking you and Jessica, maybe Sarah, I haven’t called her yet.”
It’s our last summer without responsibilities, the summer after our senior year of high school. We go out on any night of the week, and we don’t get home until the sun begins to rise. It’s a liberating time in our lives, and we are making the most of it before we all have to start college in the fall.
“Don’t bother calling Sarah,” I say. “She’s sitting here with me.”
He laughs. “Okay, well, ho yourselves up and I’ll be by in twenty.”
***
I met Mike my sophomore year of high school. After first semester we didn’t have any more classes together, and I didn’t interact with him much until he started dating my good friend Kayla during our junior year. I was terribly depressed by this and jealous of their relationship because during the summer before junior year I was dumped by my first love, my first real boyfriend, Skylar. He went to a different high school than me and I was always very secretive about my personal life, so no one knew the tragic story of our breakup, but soon Kayla would have one of her own. Her relationship with Mike was almost as short-lived as my relationship with Skylar, and they both ended the same way: they told us that they were gay.
Before Kayla and Mike stopped dating, he developed a pretty close friendship with Kayla’s best friend Sarah, who also happened to be my best friend. Sarah attended a different high school than Kayla, Mike and me, but Mike had met her at a party she hosted the summer after our junior year. Both of them are incredibly witty, and they bonded right away by hurling insults back and forth at each other. After Mike and Kayla broke up, Mike continued to hang out with Sarah, and I thought maybe he was interested in dating her because he hadn’t come out to anyone except Kayla. One night, shortly after the break-up with Kayla, he had visited Sarah and then sent me an instant message when he got home. The conversation went:
Mike: “Hey, you and me and Sarah should hang out sometime soon, I have something important to tell you.”
Me: “What do you need to tell me?”
Mike: “Well, I would rather do it in person.”
Me: “Oh come on, just tell me. What, are you like f*****g coming out of the closet or something?”
Mike: “…Actually, yeah…”
I was on the phone with Sarah during the conversation and she gasped when I told her what I had typed. He had told her he was gay earlier that night.
I was pretty shocked by this revelation. Mike didn’t come off as gay, in the typical effeminate Jack McFarland kind of way, but neither had Skylar. Because Skylar had broken my heart, I was immediately on guard with Mike after his confession because I knew about gays—they say they are bisexual, take your virginity, and then tell you that they are really sorry, but they are pretty sure they are only gay and not bi. Since I never told anyone about Skylar, I had no one to tell me that I was being ridiculous. I eventually convinced myself that Mike was different because he didn’t take Kayla’s virginity, and we became good friends.
During our senior year of high school Sarah, Mike, and I became inseparable. Every weekend we sat in Sarah’s basement, always finding some way to amuse ourselves. It wasn’t until Mike got his first real boyfriend, Justin, that Sarah and I started to really learn what it meant to be gay.
Those were the days before I knew about “bottoms” and “tops”; Broadway musicals and Techno music; the importance of water-based lubricant and the location of the local HIV/STD testing facility. These were things I would learn from boys who wore Gucci sunglasses and carried Louis Vitton wallets. Those were the days when I was completely ignorant to the “fabulous” and “fierce” subculture that I soon descended into.
***
Mike arrives at my house forty minutes late, but Sarah and I are expecting that. He takes longer to get ready than any girl I know, and he usually needs to call five people for suggestions on what to wear.
“You know those yellow and blue shoes I have? Do you think they will go with my new black shirt and my blue belt or is that too much?”
“How about the purple shirt and my new Aldos? Is that better?”
Mike is not only a Libra, he is a gay Libra, which I think makes him twenty-times more indecisive than Libras are already known for being.
My cell phone rings. “I’m here. Let’s get this show on the road,” Mike says.
Sarah and I run out to the car, and just as we are about to get in, Mike jumps out angrily.
“A f*g is judged by the integrity of his hags,” Mike yells. “I can’t bring you guys with me looking like that. You look like some f*****g dykes or something.”
As counterintuitive as it may be, most gay men hate lesbians. You would think they would be more tolerant, seeing as they face the same struggles in society, but they don’t care.
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll change.” I agreed to change because it was true. A gay man is judged on the looks of his female friends, affectionately known as “f*g hags.” I’m not the prettiest or skinniest hag in Mike’s circle, but he likes to take me out with him because his friends really appreciate my wit and my giant breasts.
Sarah and I go back in the house and put on shirts that show cleavage. “Much better,” Mike says when we come back out and get in the car. Jessica, another friend, is in the front seat. “You guys look hot,” she says, giggling.
Male Box is just down the road from The Gold Coast, an after-hours male strip club, the first gay club I ever went to. The two clubs are located on Seven Mile just west of Ryan, a pretty shady area. A high chain-link fence with barbed wire at the top surrounds the parking lot at Male Box, almost like the security fences that surround prisons. It costs ten dollars to park in the fenced-in lot, and to me it seems worth it to be sure my car isn’t on cinder blocks when I come out of the club. Mike is driving and is too cheap to park inside the prison fence, so when we arrive we park across the street, pay the cover fee at the door, and make our way to a table where Jerry, Carlos and Brandon are waiting.
“Hey sexy,” I say, poking Carlos in the side. “I saw your show last week, it was so hot!”
“Aww, thanks!” Carlos laughs. Carlos moonlights as a drag queen at The Rainbow Room. It’s not really my kind of place, but last week I went with Mike just to see him perform. He is a very attractive guy, but he makes an even hotter woman.
“Do you know Brandon?” Carlos asks Sarah and me.
“No, I don’t think so,” Sarah says.
“I’m visiting my boyfriend David, I’m not from around here,” Brandon says, shaking our hands.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“New York City. I work at a publishing company,” he answers.
“That’s awesome! I’ve always wanted to move to New York City. I think I have this romanticized idea of it, though,” Sarah says, laughing. “Like, I wanna walk down Broadway every day in my designer heels, and sing ‘Santa Fe’ from Rent on the subway while swinging around on the poles.”
“Yeah, doing that kind of s**t would make real New Yorkers want to kill you,” Brandon says, startlingly serious.
“New York City is so f*****g overrated,” Jerry says, rolling his eyes. Jerry is my favorite one of Mike’s friends; he’s the Jack to my Karen. He’s incredibly sweet, an amazing dancer, and a lot of fun to be around. He attends Eastern Michigan University and is majoring in French and Japanese, so he does the most adorable impression of a geisha. I speak fairly good French, so sometimes we speak it back and forth, talking about people right in front of them.
“Yeah, it is,” Brandon agrees.
“Oh MY GOD,” a man at the table behind us gasps as he strokes a lock of my hair. “Your hair is so hot. What kind of dye did you use on this?”
My hair is half Coca-Cola red, half black and it gets a lot of attention.
“Oh, I bleached half of it and I dye it every two weeks with Special Effects Cherry Bomb,” I reply.
“It looks incredible,” he gushes. “I’m a hairdresser and I would love to do something like that with one of my clients. You’re gorgeous.”
When a gay man calls me gorgeous, it means so much more to me than a straight man saying it. Perhaps it’s because I know that the gay man has to mean it. He’s not just saying it to get into my pants. I also know that at a straight club the dialogue about my hair would never happen either. The only thing a straight man has ever asked me about my hair was if it was natural, trimmed, or shaved.
When we all go out, we tend to frequent a lot of places, but our favorite is Male Box. Not only is the name incredibly clever, our favorite Metro area drag queen hosts the Hot Booty Contest on Tuesday nights. The contest (which is basically a line of guys mooning the crowd while shaking their asses, with the crowd-determined winner taking home fifty dollars) is entertaining enough on its own, but Sabin, the ugliest but funniest drag queen I’ve ever met, always turns up the hilarity with her antics and witty gibes at the contestants.
Sabin comes out to do her first dance of the night. Tonight she’s wearing a crimson sequined one-piece leotard with black make-up. Sabin, unlike most drag queens, doesn’t wear a wig or fake breasts. She is completely bald and wears tight fitting outrageous outfits over a bare chest. Tonight her make-up consists of her signature high penciled eyebrows that make her look like she is in a state of constant shock, black lipstick, and bright-yellow glittery eye shadow.
Sabin is dancing to “Believe” by Cher. She’s quite acrobatic and the crowd goes wild when she jumps into a full split. People surround the floor and hold out dollars for her to take, which she accepts by giving everyone a kiss on the cheek. When she gets to me, I hold my dollar out at my chest and she grabs it, poking my cleavage before she turns away. I laugh.
After her dance, Sabin takes the microphone and does her usual announcement about the Hot Booty Contest, then she turns to Sarah and I, saying, “Everyone we have four very special guests tonight: T***y 1, T***y 2, T***y 3, and T***y 4!” Sabin points at our chests and everyone laughs.
“Oh my f*****g god, that is awesome!” Mike says.
“You guys are like infamous now…or at least your tits are,” Jerry says, laughing. A lesbian standing next to us looked our way, like we might be upset, and maybe we should be, but there’s something about how a gay man says something that is degrading or chauvinistic that makes it not degrading or chauvinistic. If Sabin were a straight guy though, it would be a problem.
Carlos is on stage in the Hot Booty Contest, and before contestants get to dance, Sabin interviews them a little bit.
“Oh Carlos, we all know who you are,” Sabin laughs, since Carlos is well known by everyone in the drag and gay scene. “So, let’s skip to what really matters. Are you a bottom, a top, or versatile?”
I remember when I first learned about bottoms and tops. Mike was dating Justin and I just flat out asked, “So, who’s the pitcher and who’s the catcher?”
Mike wasn’t offended at all and simply said, “Well, I’m a top, and so is Justin, so we have to be versatile, but I sure wish he was a bottom.”
“Wait. Top?” I asked.
“You know, the pitcher. And versatile means you’re a switch hitter.”
“Oh,” I said.
Carlos laughs at Sabin’s question, claiming he is versatile. After he wins his fifty dollars in the contest, we all dance for a little while and then decide to head home. Brandon decides to ride home with us because Jerry and Carlos live on the other side of town, and he asks if his boyfriend David can also ride with us. Mike’s car is already cramped with him, Sarah, Jessica, and me. Adding Brandon and David seems impossible.
“Don’t worry,” Brandon says, “he said he’ll ride in the trunk.”
When we get out to the car Mike opens the trunk and I speak up.
“Hey, wait a minute,” I say, turning to David. “How about you just sit across our laps in the backseat? It’s going to be really hot in…”
“Get away, Fish. I don’t like girls. I’ll just ride in the trunk,” he snaps. I hate these kind of gay men. They think that just because they don’t f**k women they don’t ever have to interact politely with them. I roll my eyes as David climbs in the trunk and I squeeze in the backseat next to Brandon and Jessica.
As much as I love my queers, I hate a lot of other ones. Guys like David can make me feel one inch tall, but guys like Carlos, Jerry and Mike always make me feel like I belong, no matter what ditzy thing I say or how badly I dance.
***
Mike is definitely my most trusted friend. He’s the Will to my Grace. I trust him with things I don’t trust anyone else with, and he is the only one I really ever show vulnerability to, and vice versa. Being as funny and witty as we are, we were ultimately shoved into the role of The Clown—that is, whenever anyone in our group of friends is having a rough day and needs cheering up, they call us. It’s nice to be able to make people laugh and we revel in it, but this makes our friendships extremely non-reciprocal and one-sided. Whenever one of us is feeling down there is no one who can make us feel better except for one another. If I call anyone other than Mike when I’m depressed, they only make me feel worse because damn it, I am the funny one and I’m not supposed to have feelings. Stop being emo Jamie, what do you have to be sad about? You’re hilarious!
When I am depressed, most of it stems from my relationship. The boy I have been seeing since my senior year of high school, Deryck, decided to move to Montreal with his mom after we graduated, but we decided to maintain an open relationship. It is definitely not because we are in love—I stopped believing in such nonsense after being with Skylar. Our relationship is more an excuse to have sex when he comes to town to visit his dad than it is an emotional attachment. For the most part, Deryck is an a*****e; however, he speaks fluent French, plays the guitar, and is incredible in bed, thus the basis of his appeal. He is never jealous or possessive, which is nice on some level because I see the way Jessica’s boyfriend gets jealous when we go out dancing with our queers. He gets mad that Jessica goes out and dances with other guys, disregarding the fact that they are gay. I could never deal with that kind of possessiveness, although I wouldn’t mind some minor show of jealously; at least I would feel like Deryck cared about me a little bit.
Mike is the first person I ever told about Skylar, and he is the only one who knows the extent of my relationship with Deryck. It’s because Mike is more sensitive than an average guy and can understand the female way of thinking better, and I’m pretty sure it is because he is gay. I know I can call him with a problem and say, “Mike, I’m pissed. Can I vent?” and he will just listen and make me laugh about it. He won’t do what most straight guys do and try to solve the problem—if a girl wants a solution, she’ll ask for it. If she’s given a solution when she just wants to vent, she will be angry because her feelings aren’t being validated and because she takes the solution as a way of saying she couldn’t figure out how to solve the problem herself. Mike gets this—my boyfriend never seems to.
“Deryck is such a d********g,” I say to Mike while we are driving around running errands.
“What did he do now?” Mike asks.
“He just said some really mean things to me.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I got mad at him because he told me not to visit him in Montreal in August because he doesn’t want our relationship to complicate things with this p***y he’s got on the rotation. I told him that we should just break up if that’s how he felt. He was like, ‘Oh no. I don’t want to do that to you.’ I asked why, and he said something like, ‘Because I know you can’t do any better than me.’”
“He did not. Aww, how sweet! He’s always thinking of your feelings!” Mike laughs sarcastically.
“He’s a dick,” I say, laughing. I’m glad Mike made me laugh, because I was on the verge of crying, which would have been really uncomfortable because Mike and I don’t like to deal with emotions in an emotional way. I tell him the mean things Deryck says instead of telling a female friend because they would just tell me to leave him, that I’m too good for him, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, he’s incredibly insensitive and an a*****e, I know, I should leave him, I know, but I don’t want to. Why? I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it, so I tell Mike knowing he’ll help me laugh it off. We are experts at avoiding true self-examination—masters of laughing at things so we can skirt the solutions for the real root of our problems.
“It seems like things are so much simpler when two guys are dating,” I say, changing the subject.
“Well, we have our problems,” Mike says. “I mean, we are kind of s****y because we can’t get pregnant, and that leads to the whole thing about how shallow most gay guys are. Like me, for example, and the physical standards for I have for boys that I am gonna put it in.”
“Yes, I know all too well,” I say. “I guess that is a problem since you never end up finding anyone you can connect with personality wise because you’re too bent on looks.”
“Yeah. It’s why most of us are dead inside…I think that is why a lot of my friends do coke. They are trying to forget how on the whole we use sex and drugs to validate our lives because our parents think we are a burden and/or don’t love us anymore,” Mike says, sighing. “And some guys end up plucking their eyebrows too thin because of it all. It can be funny, but it is a serious problem.” We both laugh at Mike’s comment, lightening the conversation that was getting too serious for us.
As much as Mike makes me laugh, we do have some successful serious conversations; however, they are not about us and usually take place at the Macomb County Health Department.
“Did I tell you about Shawn?” Mike asks as we sit in the white-on-white waiting room, waiting to get called back for STD/HIV testing. I really don’t need to be tested, but I tell Mike that since I’m in an open relationship it couldn’t hurt to be sure. Mike usually takes a friend with him to the testing facility like it is some kind of exciting outing. “Come on guys,” he’ll say. “You know you wanna get your goodies swabbed with me!”
“No,” I say. Shawn is a close friend of Mike’s and he is really fun to hang out with. He used to host raucous costume parties at his house in Lansing that I always went to. “What happened with Shawn?”
“Well, you know that guy he was dating, the one he moved down to Florida with?”
“Yeah, Victor, wasn’t it? What about him?”
“Well, Victor got tested last week and it turns out he has The Hiv.” As a way to lighten the mood when HIV and AIDS is brought up, Mike and all of his friends refer to HIV as The Hiv, pronounced like a word, not an acronym.
“Oh my god,” I say.
“Yeah, so Shawn is freaking out because he has been bottoming with him without a condom,” Mike says.
“You have got to be kidding me. What was he thinking?” I ask.
“Well, they were in a relationship. The guy tested clean the last time,” Mike says. “Plus no one wants to hassle with condoms. I mean, I don’t usually wear one with guys I know well because I’m a top and it is almost impossible for me to get AIDS from a bottom unless my c**k is lacerated or something.”
“Still, that’s scary. I hope Shawn is okay, I would be so sad if he got AIDS. He’s so talented,” I say.
“Yeah,” Mike sighs.
“You know, you should always be using protection,” I say. “You can’t trust these skank-a*s hos.”
Mike laughs as the nurse calls him back. I shake my head.
After we get our results, we are walking to the car and I am reading my printout when Mike abruptly asks, “What would you do if I got The Hiv?”
I ask myself that question all the time, and I worry about Mike a lot. I’m terrified of it actually happening and I have no idea what I would do except for cry. But instead of being serious, I look at him very sincerely and sing. “I would say, ‘There’s only us, there’s only this, forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way, no day but today!’”
“Oh my god, if I die you have to get everyone to sing ‘I’ll Cover You’ at my funeral!” We laugh, but when I actually think about it, I shudder.
***
“Jamie! Long time no see,” Jerry smiles, as he gives me a hug.
We are at Menjo’s, and Jerry is a Shot Boy, meaning he walks around in nothing but tight black underwear carrying a tray of shots. He makes an astronomical amount of tips because he’s so damn adorable. Tonight he has the night off, but Mike, Sarah, Carlos, and I met him here because he could get us all in for free.
“You should have come with us to Ice last week!” Jerry shouts into my ear over the music. Ice was a club in the ghetto of Hamtramck, known for its random explosions of dry ice from the ceiling to cool off people on the dance floor. An asthmatic passed out once because he was too close to one of the dry ice vents, so now Ice has a warning posted outside the door:
CO2 IS USED IN THIS NIGHTCLUB.
IF YOU FEAR YOU WILL HAVE AN ADVERSE REACTION,
PLEASE DO NOT ENTER.
All of my intelligent friends and I laugh at the sign because of the terrible phrasing of the warning and sheer ridiculousness of the idea of anyone not having an adverse reaction to high concentrations of carbon dioxide. While we are laughing a ditzy drag queen or effeminate gay guy will say, “I don’t get it. What’s so funny about them using carbonated gas? It works in my Diet Pepsi!”
“What happened at Ice last week?” I ask in Jerry’s high tone, mocking his excitement.
“We got to meet Chris Crocker! He was so ridiculous, I loved it,” he gushes. “I even got him to sign my shirt!”
Chris Crocker is a gay Internet celebrity best known for his YouTube video in which he begs the press and people in general to stop saying bad things about Britney Spears. “How f*****g dare anyone out there make fun of Britney after all she has been through? She lost her aunt, she went through a divorce. She had two f*****g kids. Her husband turned out to be a user, a cheater. And now she’s going through a custody battle. All you people care about is readers and making money off of her. She’s a human!” he wails. Then he starts to cry harder, shouting, “Leave her alone! LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!”
“I can’t stand that whiny b*****d,” I laugh. “F**k Britney! F**k Britney hard!” I yell, mocking Chris Crocker.
“Keep your voice down when you say s**t like that! You better watch out, most f**s would cut you for that. I’ll let it slide however, since…” Jerry grabs at my shirt, cupping my breasts and pushing them up toward my face. “Since these look so damn magnificent tonight!”
Then they are on me. Twenty gay boys poking at my shirt, saying things like, “Even I like those b***s.” A drag queen saunters by noticing the circle of my worshippers and blurts, “I wish I could get those implanted on me!” Mike revels in this, like a pimp who has the best hooker on the block.
“Okay, okay. Hands off, don’t damage the goods,” Mike says, laughing. I know he noticed I was getting uncomfortable but didn’t want to seem like he was protecting me. Jerry gives me a kiss on the cheek. “Wanna dance?” he giggles.
“Sure,” I say, “but no motorboating!” I had to make this a rule since at party a couple months back when Jerry and I were dancing, Jerry was so trashed that he actually pushed my breasts together, stuck his face between them, and blew a raspberry. Not to be a prude, but I thought that was kind of crossing a line, so after that I laid down some rules about how much molestation I considered friendly.
“Aww, never mind then,” Jerry says laughing, leading me towards the floor.
“Gays are an organized people,” Mike claims loudly, a little too loudly for the small eatery we are seated at. After Menjo’s we to go to The Gold Coast for after-hours and then to our favorite diner, Linda’s Place, an affordable Coca-Cola themed restaurant that is open twenty-four seven. No matter what clubs we go to, at the end of the night we usually end up here.
“Why are gays organized? Just because they know fashion and interior design?” I say quietly, trying to give Mike a hint to quiet his drunken voice. People were staring at us questionably already, probably due to Carlos’s entrance as he danced his way back to the table, or perhaps because of Jerry who has glitter on his face and jeans. Being four in the morning, there are a lot of younger people who don’t mind, but it is the piercing judgmental looks from elderly early-risers eating their Super Breakfast Specials that make me shift uncomfortably in the bright red booth.
“No, no. Think about it. We put s**t together like no one else. We know how to get the word around about people. In the gay world, you know how everybody knows everybody? I got f**s from Sault Saint Marie to Dayton who find me on MySpace like, ‘Are you Gay Mike from Eastpointe that is friends with Tyler from Lansing?’ They know me by word-of-mouth. It’s like we have a secret network,” Mike explains.
“Yeah,” Jerry laughs. “It’s like the fabulous underground railroad!”
We all laugh.
Mike takes a sip of his Sprite and says, “Yeah, but what I was really thinking of is Gay Day at Cedar Point.”
Cedar Point is an amusement park located in northern Ohio on Lake Erie, and it’s about a four-hour drive from where we live.
“Oh yeah,” I say. “When is that again?”
Jerry jumps in, explaining, “It’s on Fathers Day, and all gays make like a pilgrimage from all over. Like, it’s not just gays from the Midwest who come. There are people from California, New York. It’s crazy.”
“And why I am saying we are an organized people is because that s**t was organized by gays telling more gays. Word just got around. It’s not like an official event hosted by Cedar Point or GLADD or some s**t,” Mike adds.
“Aww. That’s cute. All the f**s decided to protest their fathers disowning them for being gay by going to Cedar Point,” Sarah says.
“Ain’t that the f*****g truth?” Carlos sighs.
“Yeah, it’s like, ‘Hey guys, we all know your fathers don’t wanna see you today, so how about we ride some f*****g roller coasters?’” Mike says. We all laugh.
“So true,” Carlos says.
“I kind of resent it though,” Mike says. “My dad still loves me! What about the guys with open-minded fathers? We get the shaft!”
“I’m pretty sure ‘open-minded father’ is an oxymoron,” Carlos says.
“Well, I think our parents’ generation is a lot less liberal on the whole, but I think some of them understand,” I offer.
“Rarely,” Carlos adds.
What bothers me the most is that they have it right. When I get home that morning from the diner, my mom is getting ready to go to work. “Just getting in?” she asks as I walk toward my bedroom.
“Yeah, we all went to Gold Coast after Menjo’s then to Linda’s after Gold Coast,” I say.
“Is that another f*g bar?” she mutters, putting on mascara.
“Yeah, it’s the after-hours stripper one,” I say, laughing.
“I don’t know why you wanna hang out with all those f**s. I would worry that people would think I’m queer too. Gross,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I mean, what do you get out of it?”
“What I get out of is that they are fun people and we have a good time. I think you should be happy, you don’t have to worry about me getting date-raped at Male Box,” I say vehemently. I just don’t get her logic. Shouldn’t she be happy her daughter is at a club getting her breasts admired by guys that behave like girls instead of at some shady bar being felt up by men who actually have bad intentions?
“But aren’t there lesbians that hit on you? And why they hell do you want to watch men make out?” she asks, shuddering.
“Yes, there are lesbians, but most of the time they can tell by how you carry yourself or what you are wearing that you are straight. If they don’t and they hit on you, you just say, ‘Sorry, I’m straight.’ Simple as that,” I explain. “And the boys aren’t gross; they don’t just sit and make out. They dance and have a good time, just like everyone else. I always have more fun with them than I have ever had at a straight club with all the men trying to knock their c**k on you while you are trying to dance with your friends.”
“I just know I’ll never be caught dead at a place like that,” my mom says, shaking her head. She grabs her purse and heads out the door and I collapse on my bed, wondering why my mom can’t just see people as people.
She does raise an interesting question though. What do I get from hanging out with gay men? Aside from the obvious things like their impeccable fashion sense, razor-sharp wit, and incredible dance moves, I am not too sure. I know that I can tell them anything, and they won’t judge me (except of course, if I tell them I’m wearing of flat shoes with skinny jeans). They know how it feels to be judged for something that they can’t do anything about. Like Mike, the gay guys I hang around with are men, so they can give me rational solutions to problems, but they also have a sensibility, a feminine sensibility that tells them when they just need to shut up and listen. I can lie on their chests and have the feeling of security and comfort that women want when things go bad, but I don’t have to worry that they are comforting me just because they want a blowjob later.
***
After our summer of going out to the gay clubs and drinking in moving vehicles and driving drunk and being irresponsible, I move to Ann Arbor for my freshman year of college. I still come home on some weekends to go out with Mike, but I feel so isolated and out of place in a dorm full of hippies, vegans, and people with no fashion sense. The only place I feel I belong is The Necto Nightclub on Friday nights: Gay Pride Nights.
One Friday night I am all dressed up, heading out to Necto to meet Jerry and Blakk Robb (one of Jerry’s infamous friends from Ypsilanti, who is so well-known at Necto people clear the floor for him to dance), when I pass a hall mate. He whistles and drawls, “Damn Miss Thang, you’re looking fine tonight. Where are you headed?”
I turn and laugh, immediately classifying the effeminate voice as belonging to a gay boy.
“I’m heading out to Necto to meet some friends,” I say.
He giggles. “Me too. Wanna walk together?”
“Sure,” I say. “I’m Jamie.”
“Scott,” he says.
It is love at first sight, and back in the dorm I no longer feel so alone.
A few weeks into our friendship, Scott decides he wants to help me learn to dance. I will dance when I go out if I get drunk enough, but I am by no means coordinated and I lack a basic sense of rhythm. Scott has giant speakers in his room, so he pulls me in one day, pushes all the furniture against the walls, and tells me I am going to learn to “shake it like you mean it.” He decides the first thing he is going to teach me is a routine to “Let’s Get it Started” by The Black Eyed Peas, choreographed by Wade Robson. He learned the dance by watching some dance show on MTV.
“I don’t know, Scott,” I say. “Isn’t Wade Robson the really awesome dancer guy who did the choreography for like, *NSYNC and Britney Spears?”
“Precisely. If he can make that skank-a*s ho look good, then he can definitely make you look good,” Scott says firmly.
“Aww, that’s so sweet!” I say sarcastically.
Luckily Scott is a good teacher and I learn the first five steps of the routine in about an hour and a half.
After the dance, Scott and I collapse on his small couch and commiserate about boys.
“I need a real relationship,” I say. “This long distance ‘f**k-every-six-months’ bullshit I have going with Deryck is starting to drive me crazy. I want a sweet boy who will take me out to dinner, someone sensitive but not in a p***y type of way.”
He laughs. “Yeah, who the f**k doesn’t?”
“They are so hard to come by,” I say with a sigh.
“It’s because you only hang out with queers.” He chuckles.
“What can I say? They are the only ones who love and understand me. Plus, I can never find a straight boy who will take me shopping and tell me what’s in and out.”
“Maybe you just have a fear of finding a man that you think is attractive and him rejecting you, so you just hang out with gay men so that will never be an issue.”
I don’t say anything, thinking silently, “That’s a little harsh Scott, but I think it’s because you hit the nail on the head.”
“This weekend, we are going to Necto on Saturday instead of Friday,” Scott continues.
“But…Saturday is straight night,” I say.
“Exactly. You are going to face your fear and we are going to find you some c**k to put on the rotation. Straight boys need love too,” he says, laughing.
I reluctantly agree, knowing that on Saturday night, if all else fails, I will still have Scott. If a straight boy rejects a f*g hag like me, she might be crippled, but it is comforting for her to know that she will always have a set of fabulous crutches: the gay boys who will never judge her, who know and love her for who she really is.
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