There is a sense of urgency to date that, for me, comes along with being single. The fear of being alone factor, I like to call it. It’s the same factor that gets me to crawl into bed with random strangers and fornicate. It’s the factor that will eventually lead me to a wonderful man that I will spend the rest of my life with. How cliche.
Tonight I am walking alone along Connecticut Avenue north from Dupont Circle. I watch the highly stylized men dance across the floors of small shops to my right. They peruse this or that knick or knack attempting to look occupied while catching furtive glimpses of this man's ass or that man's arms. On occasion, two will make eye contact and the reaction is either sweetly seductive as a grin spreads across one or both's faces, or a more violent and wrenching display of contempt and disinterest. These people exude sex.
I find myself in one of these boutiques, a bookstore, trying desperately to find some book which will connect me with this community. Openly gay now for sometime, I still feel quite the outsider, a trespasser if you will, when walking in Dupont Circle. Or the Castro in San Francisco. Or Chelsea in Manhattan. Or in the Lesbian Gay and Bisexual Union meeting at the Wesleyan Foundation back at college.
I was naive, and idealistic, that year in school I decided to first try to introduce myself to the fledgling gay community at the University of Virginia. I had come to terms with my person my first year of school. Once I found myself comfortable with who I was, I began slowly emerging from the closet something like the timid head of a turtle from its shell, hesitant and anxious, and always ready to clinch back in so much faster than I had left. But telling people you are gay is not like pushing any body part out of a shell, or giving away a key to a locked room.
Its more like broadcasting the combination to a particular lock on public radio. Depending on who you tell, the secondary audience can be huge, or tiny. Its information, and once given, you cannot retrieve it. Not by coercion, or begging, or violence.
After the significant people in my life were fully informed, my mother, my best friend, my fraternity, I decided to attend my first LGBU meeting, encouraged by propaganda of acceptance, friendship, and an ear willing to listen. Once in the meeting, I was highly encouraged by the diversity of people that I met. Cute and ugly men, fat and thin men, white, black and asian men... women... It took me about three meetings to realize this group wasn't succeeding at living up to its sell. Acceptance is a finicky word, it comes with many hidden restrictions and constraints. I finally learned that these men would gladly accept me as a gay... they just wouldn't accept the rest of my personality.
These books I read introduced me to gay men much more like myself. To men with lives that paralleled my own. To men who made decisions similar to mine, to men who faced dilemmas such as me. To men whos world existed beyond the color of the eyes of this month’s boyfriend, last night's fuck, the glamorous man at the end of the bar or dancing on the box. Who weren't rebels for sake of rebelling.
I was a romantic stuck in a desert of eroticism. I was an idealist stuck in a land of the dismissive and jaded. I was a man who wanted to explore but who was rebuffed at each turn by people saying it wasn't worth it... don't go there boy, there's nothing there to find. Why bother boy? Its not interesting. Don't think about it kid, you aren't missing anything.
I fell in love not long there after with a man four years older than me, an eternity when measured with a 21 year old ruler. And I lived quietly and comfortably for the next three years hanging on to this man. I loved him, made love to him, supported him, and memorized the color of his eyes. I no longer felt the need to explore, the need to feel part of the gay community, the need to see into other's lives. I had his life to explore. And I could explore his life more than I could explore anyone's life. He wasn't open, but that was the challenge. Learning this man from outside in almost without permission. I was engrossed. I was swallowed whole by his promises. I was entranced by his ambition. I liked to lick at his sarcastic wit.
He is not here now. Not on this cold Halloween night in Dupont Circle. I have spent many hours with him here. Wandering these same boutiques. Eating at some of these restaurants. Criticizing these same tired gay men. Reading yesterday's editions of these same newspapers. There is a wind, and it bites at my chilled skin.
I think I'm basically the same person now as I was then. Yes, I'm not as shining, just like a copper roof, I've weathered, tarnished. Jaded. But green is a lovely color, no? And my backpack is now much fuller. The journals there have more pages. More writing. More people. More places. More experiences. But they are still my journals. And its still my voice in the lines and curves inked to the pages. And it still the same urge to explore and document, no?
I've turned back now, I've reached S Street and I'm not comfortable with moving too much further north. I will stay to the comfortable little areas that I know the few blocks around Dupont Circle. I cross Connecticut and head south along the opposite sidewalk. Even in this nearly treeless city, there are golden and burnt red leaves along the curb. The smell of diesel hides their familiar scent and the prior rain has silenced the brittle rustle the wind would bring, and I kick them slightly with each step as I gouged my hands into my jeans to warm my icy fingers.
I want to explore one of those lives. I want to read again about a man who thinks the way I do. I want to hear that I'm not the only pensive man who is disappointed with the promise of the gay community. I cut across Connecticut again, at Q Street, back to the bookstore, desperate to find some shared experience in the words on the shelf.
But I can't enter the bookstore. I can't even bring myself to cross the last bits of asphalt to reach the sidewalk. I know him.
He is my height. He is my weight. He is my build. He had green eyes and light brown hair. This was the man I'd slept with in college on a random encounter. One of those strangers that my fear drove me to crawl into bed with. Except there was no bed. It had been a brief, dirty encounter there in the class room building, only feet from my advisor's office there at UVa. And when he had done, and I was done, he zipped up and left wordlessly and I had been more lonely and afraid than ever.
I had walked home that night in college and sat in the shower, crying, as the scalding water poured over my skin. He hadn't been the first man I had slept with. He wasn't ugly. He hadn't treated me badly. But that night something had begun to die within me and I was crying because I could feel it. In fact, that night, there was nothing about him at all that concerned me. The only thing I felt was the desperation. And no shower could remove it. That only came with the long-term relationship.
But now here he was again in front of me. This man who I knew, and yet didn't. His hair was ragged, dirty, wind blown. His face was hollowed, sagging and lifeless. There were deep blue bags under his languid protruding eyes. His was dressed in a clean white T-shirt and dark blue but faded jogging pants. He didn't seem cold in the autumn cold. On his arms were scars from drug use. Some of the wounds looked fresh.
I pulled myself together and walked beyond him and towards the shop window where I watched safely without him seeing me. He was hooking. When his prospective John didn’t stop to talk, he turned and followed him into the bookstore with his eyes. That’s when he saw me first. He began to approach me, obviously thinking he had found someone who was interested. But as he got closer and could see me clearly in the light from the bookstore window, his face changed as he recognized me, and who I was. He hurriedly grabbed the bag by the newspaper box not far from where he was standing and ran up the street, wordlessly.
Disconnected, I no longer felt the need to enter that bookstore at all. And so I fumbled my way towards the metro station to go safely home alone, sleeping slightly in the electric hum of the train car.