This was a dry sex year for me but not for lack of trying. Along with my job, I began sharing a large apartment in DC with two good-natured and very straight guys I met by chance when we were all looking for apartments. Though we got along well, I didn’t socialize with them much in their straight world of dating and women, and my forays out to find men suffered in favor of six-packs of Bud and channel-surfing the nights away.
Except once. One evening the guys talked me into going out with them and the three women who were visiting. The evening started out OK but later I managed to get drunk enough to throw up in the men’s room of some dance bar, precipitating an early return home. I didn’t set out to ruin everyone’s evening, but socializing was never again a problem.
After that disastrous proximity to the world of straight dating, I resumed occasionally visiting the gay bars along P Street. I never said to my roommates where exactly I went those Saturday nights and they, perhaps knowingly, I don’t know, never asked.
In the meantime, I had discovered the Frat House, another bar along P Street where I could not only drink and watch music videos—once trying to chat up hot guy from India during “When Smokey Sings,” oo! oo!—but also watch a big gay porn screen with club dance music, then go home and jerk off. (Must they always cast young hairless guys? It was like Thai Dancer boys all over again. I had not yet learned young, thin, hairless guys are often referred to as “twinks” and go to “twink bars.”)
For many months, I went out to the bars less often and really didn’t connect with anyone there I thought was attractive enough to me to want to get to know, though I don’t believe I was being unfriendly or unkind (but shallow, maybe).
But even more unhappily, I discovered also an occasional but general unfriendliness or disdain which puzzled me until I later learned is a commonplace gay male posture of disdain called “attitude.” The men in the bars along P Street seemed to have a lot of it. I learned to not take attitude toward me personally though it’s sad to experience, also to witness someone express.
I did meet someone in the Frat House eventually, a handsome guy with a thick beard and nice eyes. He seemed oddly distracted the whole time I was trying to chat him up, to which I should have paid more attention. I found out why later, and $20 wiser, that he was Not A Nice Person. It’s enough to add I was not physically attacked or hurt or anything like that, but I was otherwise so unnerved and discouraged that I stopped going out to gay bars for months.
To give that a good spin, I was at least learning more about being gay.
There was one other moment in the Frat House that also didn’t lead to sex but was remarkable all the same. One evening I was upstairs leaning against the wall, having a beer and watching the big gay porn screen, when a hubbub broke out in the next room. Someone had started yelling loudly but I couldn’t quite hear what was going on.
I gave up on the video and walked cautiously toward the door to the other room for a look.
In the middle of the floor stood a man, well dressed and clearly very drunk, shouting in a slurred British accent, “It’s my fooking burthday! I'm fooking [name] and nobody will buy me a fooking drink for my fooking burthday!” He swayed heavily in a circle, somehow not falling down, and brandished an empty glass around at a room full of astonished stares and mean smirks. (Gay men are the worst!)
Well, no one stepped forward to buy him a fooking drink. The crowd turned away as he quieted down, apparently giving up on his hope for a gift of something he—not to judge—probably didn’t need more of. Of course I’d heard of him, a very famous couturier,[1] but had no idea if this was really him. No one else seemed to know, either (but I did, after many years, meet the legacy of Orry-Kelly, another celebrity clothier).
Weeks later it occurred to me that maybe I should have bought him a drink, just to meet this person and make the evening even more interesting. But I was barely able to slink into a gay bar then, let alone step confidently into the middle of an alcohol-fueled, possibly celebrity-drama spectacle and end up jumping into the Tidal Basin—?