I stepped out onto the street and the air hit me like wet cotton, hot and sticky. The second day of summer and already the air is so thick you can taste it. This is the reason that New Yorkers have for decades abandoned the city during the summer. But like that poor guy in The Seven Year Itch, I have to work, so I am not going anywhere. And neither is the humidity.
The city is in heat for so many reasons, and it isn’t just the weather. This weekend is gay pride and within hours a million and a half homos will pour out of who-knows-where like so much sweet sap dripping from maple trees. Like the fireflies that I see rising up out of my lawn in the night hours, the gays know it is mating season and heaven help the man left standing alone when the music ends.
My destination after the show tonight was The Ritz, a small bar on 46th street beloved by the kinds of twenty-something gay men skinny jeans were designed for. Some months ago, a friend of mine ejected himself from Vlada because he felt like the oldest person there. Vlada is a nursing home compared to The Ritz and anyone over the age of thirty-five should be either very secure in themselves or have a dermatologist on speed dial.
Do the kids still have speed dial? My friend Clay got his iPhone 4 today and it is so sophisticated that you don’t even need to program in a name to voice dial. It just already knows who you are talking about, as if by magic. This is the world that the young have inherited. One in which everything happens by magic because no one knows how anything works anymore or how to make anything. Don Draper complained at the end of the last season of Mad Men that he wanted to make something instead of just watch an accountant turn a dollar into a dollar ten. Given how the economy has been for the last few years, I don’t think anyone even knows how to do that anymore. No wonder it is the end of the world. You never need to do anything more than press a button. God only knows who will save us when whatever happens behind the button stops working.
Matt Kugelman was celebrating his birthday today along with his friend Roy (aka the notorious Bianca del Rio). Matt and Roy are not a couple but they are as inseparable as me and my roommate. Thick as thieves is an appropriate expression. That their birthdays fall close together is all the more fitting. Last year, Matt pulled together an elaborate video tribute (which I am in). This year was a more low-key affair, which is fine. Gays just care about drinking and cute boys and drinking in cute boys. They didn’t come for the show.
And there were cute boys. I stood on the landing on the second floor watching them swell up the stairs like steerage passengers on the Titanic after the last lifeboats had gone. Soon the room was flooded with chatty slim-hipped chorus boys and buttoned-down men with grim expressions and clear cocktails. I became fascinated by the horizontal earth tone striped shirt one of them was wearing. It was so like the polyester nightmares of my 1970s youth but with a weird shoulder design. I loved/hated it. I didn’t know whether I wanted to rip it off his body to wear or to throw into an incinerator.
Whatever the reaction, I felt a passion for it so I had to ask him where he got it. Normally, I don’t like to talk to strangers but Matt and Roy attracted a very friendly, accessible crowd. So I asked him about his shirt. It was from a store called G-Star but he assured me it was at least 3-4 years old. This is my kind of guy if not my kind of shirt. Handsome as he was, it never went any further than asking him about his shirt. There was one of those buttoned-down guys standing very near him, orbiting even. He was probably not a boyfriend but certainly a friend that wasn’t willing to be left alone for a split second. I guess we all pair up in our own ways, consciously or not.
Meanwhile, I was very much alone. My brief conversation with porn star Ben Andrews, in his best Newsies drag, ended with him offering to buy me a drink because I looked lonely. I gave him as quizzical a look as I could through all this Botox and he smiled, “I meant you hand. Your hand looks lonely without a drink in it.” A terrible save. If only there was a World Cup ref around to call foul. But he had a point: a gay man standing alone in the middle of a gay bar without even so much as a drink in his hand looks rudderless, lost, and yes, lonely.
As I attempted to finish telling Matt my hilarious story of how I knew I was gay in the second grade so I could leave, I was pulled aside by a drunk straight lady in red. Drunk straight women in gay bars are like devout Catholics in a confessional, you never know what crazy shit is going to pour out of them. She told me I looked like “that guy from Castle. I loved him on that show on SciFi.” She meant Nathan Fillion, a comparison I do not see at all. Then she seemed to tell a story that didn’t have a through line or discernible plot or story but that left me with the impression that she thought that I, like so many of my gay brethren, was just too gay for another gay man to love. Mind you she came to this conclusion from looking at me standing perfectly still and not talking. “You all should just go to a titty bar and start giving lap dances to the straight guys. That (meaning straight guys) is all you seem to want.”
I get that there is an element of the gay community that wants that insanely fine line of a guy that is as masculine has possible while still wanting to have sex with men. Not me, but it didn’t matter. Arguing gay social dynamics with a drunken straight person is like waking a sleepwalker: dangerous. Not that it is any of her business or anyone else’s, but I continue to not be in the mood to meet anyone. Can’t I just be alone without being lonely?
TJ was there, longing for another night with another side of bacon, joined by a guy with a foreign accent. The foreigner was visiting New York for the first time and from the looks of things, he and TJ were already pretty chummy, even though I got the sense that he hadn’t been in town all that long. When I tried to leave, he beseeched me to stay. “If you leave now, how will you meet someone?” But why is it so necessary to meet someone? Yes, it is nice to get laid with some sense of consistency. Being single is kind of like being an actor or a temp. It is always nice to know when one thing is winding down that there is something else waiting around the corner. But pairing up like so many animals on Noah’s Ark just for the sake of survival doesn’t seem much better than mere fundamental survival. Isn’t thriving a better goal for us all? I want to be with someone I want to be with, not just be with someone because I look lonely standing in the middle of a gay bar.
It turned out the foreigner was wrong and I didn’t need to stay at the birthday party to meet someone. While trying to write on the train home, a clearly gay young man positioned himself across from me. He was drunk and fidgeting to get my attention. I finally engaged him in conversation and he turned out to be very nice. He even gave me his phone number. When I got home, I spent a few moments watching the fireflies in my yard enacting their own version of last call at 1:30am. They flashed in the night in the field behind my house like paparazzi at a bucolic movie premiere. I watched one of them as he sailed across my lawn and then suddenly disappeared. Maybe he found a mate or he just gave up for the evening. After all, it was late and there is always tomorrow night.
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