Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (8 page)

And she isn’t alone in her no-nonsense approach. The couples at Flushing House seem to engage in a distilled form of dating. There’s a practicality that comes with knowing there are cer- tain undeniable limits to how long a romance can last, or what romance at the age of eighty-five even means. Gone are cer- tain external factors (financial viability, child-rearing capability, long-term life goals); compatibility can now boil down simply to the types of shared interests that traditionally populate per- sonals ads—taking sunset walks or reading paperback mysteries. Couples may tell one another, as Kitty told David, “You’re the best thing in my present life,” but when they do pass on, they’ll often be buried next to their first spouses, as if their latter-day loves never took place.

All of which takes the pressure off; no one here is burdened with finding the loves of their lives. The cafeteria’s complex pecking order may recall high school, but relationships don’t have nearly the same all-consuming nature as when residents were younger. Of those now dating, only Henrietta and Herb have moved in together, despite the economic advantages of double occupancy. For the most part, people don’t feel the need to alter their lives substantially. “I want a little peace in my life for the first time in seventy years,” Roosevelt tells me. “I want my space, and I want freedom. And I finally got it.”

Bridget, a tiny woman with cherry-red hair and an Irish ac- cent, met her ex-boyfriend Nelson a few weeks after moving into

Flushing House when they were outside the building waiting for Access-a-Ride. (“How romantic!”) “I had my eye on him,” she says. “He wasn’t a good-looking man, but he had nice lips.” Things progressed quickly from there: “Your time is limited. When you reach eighty, what have you got to lose?”

However, when Nelson left the facility to move in with family who could give him more care and asked Bridget to come with him, she was more “levelheaded.” She had already been married and knew what it was like to tailor her life for a man.
Why can’t it just be about having fun?,
her thinking now goes. Bridget has since become something of a flirt. She prefers to spend her time in the company of men and particularly likes one named Jim, who has so far been unresponsive, even after she tried bringing him his favorite dessert, sugar-free cookies. “He’s like a stone,” she says. “I can’t move him.”

One evening a few months ago, Flushing House’s nightly poker game was shaping up to be a lively one. This is where Al fell in love with Sally. The only permanent player not in a couple was Doc, who usually deals. “Full house!” Al announced at the end of one game.

“
Ooh
, Albert, that’s beautiful!” Sally proclaimed.

“Uh-huh. Can I have all that, please?” he asked, swooping a stack of dollar bills toward his end of the table and then looking over to Sally. “You’re rich, sugar.”

“Oh, thank you, sweetheart,” she purred.

“Oh, get me a shovel!” Rita exclaimed in mock disgust. She met her husband, Irving, a World War II vet, at an upstate weekend retreat for older singles after both of their previous spouses had died. (“We like to say they ran off together,” she says. “To heaven.”) They married in their seventies and moved to Flushing House a few years later.

Someone asked Roosevelt, who had just joined the game, why he didn’t come in to play earlier.

“I got caught on the outside with one of the residents.” “With one of the women?” asked Irving.

“Yes. She wanted to confess to me.” “Her love or what?” Rita smirked.

Roosevelt grinned back at her. “I don’t want anybody hanging on my arm.”

“Roosevelt, you got a line of bullshit that will sink a ship,” Irving boomed, then he suddenly grew pensive. “Let me tell you something, just to be honest with you. If I didn’t have Rita backing me…” He didn’t complete the thought, but then he didn’t need to. It was clear he relied on Rita’s care, which was why their last trip to Atlantic City had been so hard. They’d been given a room with a Jacuzzi, and Irving had wanted to get in. “I wanted the two of us to go in there to see what we could do,” he said, looking over at Rita. “But when it came to trying to get in, I couldn’t lift my foot up high enough to get over. And if I would have gotten in, how am I going to get out?”

“That was supposed to have been a handicapped room,” Rita jumped in, protectively. “It wasn’t a good room.” (A few months after I met Irving and Rita, Irving passed away.) Sally gripped Al’s arm. Their relationship was still hot and heavy at the time. Yet when the cards were put away, they headed back to their respective rooms. No matter where they are as a couple, they’ve never spent the night together, though Al has wanted to on many occasions. “She has a really tremen- dous bed with pillows, beautiful linen. My bed, she almost fell out of! I had to hold her.” But Sally values her space and her rest. From their own beds, like high-school sweethearts, they’d

usually call each other from under the covers. But their conver- sations, as Sally recalls, were anything but sweet. “When we’d talk on the phone, I’d say, ‘If anybody is listening, their ears will burn off!’”

notes from a Unicorn

Seth Fisc her

Back in 2002, when I was still in college, I lived in DC for a quarter in a quad dorm room that felt like the set of a queerish Adam Sandler movie. I—a semi-closeted bisexual drunk—lived with a gay guy from Beverly Hills I’ll call Mark; James, a kind- hearted straight stoner with whom I shared a room; and Mark’s best friend, an even straighter dude who looked exactly like Corey Feldman. I had a secret crush on Mark. Sometimes the four of us would stay up late at night watching CNN and drinking. For special occasions, we went to the Cheesecake Factory. Then we’d get up and be interns, whatever that meant, for the people who ran the world because that’s how we thought we could go about saving it.

Mark hit on me the way gay men hit on straight men they’re already comfortable with, the way straight women hit on gay men. He’d go “Mmmmm” when I walked by and say, “Why are

you straight again?” He could tell it made me a little uncomfort- able but not too uncomfortable. He could tell I liked it a little. He was tall and good looking and rich, and he’d tell me all about his trips giving road head to hot flight attendants in the Florida Keys. He might have been telling me the plot of a porn he’d watched or it might have been the truth, but I was enthralled and jealous and disgusted and turned on.

One night, the four of us went out together for drinks. Across from our dorms was a place called The Fox and The Hound where we smoked cigarette after cigarette. For three bucks, you could order a whiskey and Coke, which meant they’d bring you a bucket glass full of well whiskey and a tiny bottle of soda. We drank and gossiped. Mark’s foot brushed my leg. I don’t know if it was on purpose or if he thought it was a table leg, but I let his foot keep brushing mine, over and over, and I lost my breath for a second. He was looking at Corey Feldman, talking about some date he’d just been on. He hated straight places. “I’m bored I’m bored I’m bored,” he said, jumping out of his seat, trying to talk us into going to a gay bar. Corey Feldman wasn’t having it. “Fuck,” I said finally, “Let’s just go back up to the room.”

We stumbled across the street, made it to the apartment and sat down in the living room, all of us on the couch but Mark, who was standing. He still wanted to leave. Someone plopped on CNN.

It had been eating at me. He’d been flirting with me since I moved in. I hadn’t told many people, but this was different. He had to know, or if he found out later, he’d have a right to resent me. I didn’t want that.

“Mark,” I said, and then I mumbled at him for a bit until he rolled his eyes at me.

“Spit it out.”

“You should know that I’m bi.”

This was the part where in my imagination he smiled, maybe gave me a hug, and welcomed me to his club, where the streamers came from the ceiling and the music started blaring. Instead, he took a seat on a chair near the couch. His smile disappeared. Ev- eryone was sober all of the sudden. Corey Feldman, who was sitting next to me, said something like, “That’s my cue, bro,” and went to bed. James stayed put, his eyes glued to the TV, but not a peep came from him, either.

I sighed and fell back farther into the couch.

Mark looked down at the ground for a minute and shook his head. He wanted to say something and stopped himself. He picked his head up and looked me right in the eyes.

“You like men
and
women?”

“Yep,” I said. I hadn’t told many people yet, but I’d done it enough. I knew that the questions were coming.

“I don’t believe in that.”

I flipped him off, smiling. “I’m sitting right here.”

He recoiled a little and rubbed his hands through his hair. “No, no, sorry. What I meant is, well, do you prefer one or the other?”

His whole body was turned toward me now.

“It’s just…the person. I’m attracted to the person,” I said.

He stared at me. The wrong facial expression, just a little something wrong with the curl of my lips, and he would never believe me. He could mark me off as gay but not ready or just out for attention. I had to be just the right amount of angry and the right amount of confident.

He turned the TV down.

“So why aren’t you out?” he asked.

“I want to work in politics,” I said, enunciating now like Peter

fucking Jennings. “I’m lucky enough to be attracted to women, too, you know? This business isn’t easy.”

He looked back at the TV, where I’m guessing something or other was blowing up on the other side of the world, and nodded. “That’s probably pretty smart,” he said, a little bit of edge in his voice. I took another shot and headed off to bed. James asked me if I was okay before he headed into the shower. I said, “Sure.” Mark sat in the chair, alone now, flipping through the chan-

nels.

Two weeks after I came out to Mark, I met a woman named Kate in a course about drug policy we had to take while doing our in- ternships. Our professor ranted every day about the evils of needle exchanges and medical pot. Anytime I disagreed, he’d say, “You must be from Santa Cruz.” He was right. Both Kate and I were students at Santa Cruz, but we hadn’t met until that quarter in DC. After class, I caught her eyes as she was trying to make an exit and asked, “So, do you want to hang out?” She said, “Sure,” and then ran off. But I messed up and forgot to ask for her number. I never ask anyone out, but I couldn’t get her out of my head. I waited for the next week, and then I got in the same elevator she did and asked for her number, in front of everyone, so she had to give it to me. Then—I’d never done this before either—I actually called her. And she said yes. She went out with me on date after date and every fucking second I was around her I wanted to be touching her, somewhere, anywhere, even just her wrist.

After a couple of dates, we went to her room. One of her roommates was always out at clubs looking for Navy guys and the other was gone. We had some drinks. I held her hand and said, “Can I kiss you?” like a fucking idiot, because I had no idea how to do this, how to be the one smitten. I kissed her cheek, then her

ear, then her mouth, and she kissed back. I started shaking, my back started shaking, and I tried to figure out how to make myself stop, but I couldn’t, so I just went with it. She didn’t say anything, but she moaned back when I kissed her. We eventually made it to her bed, and even though she lived in a crappy dorm, too, it was the coziest place I’d ever been. She told me I smelled bad—get- ting used to DC’s humidity wasn’t easy after Santa Cruz. Instead of taking it personally and storming off or ignoring her I replaced my deodorant with antiperspirant and started putting it on every single day, which she thought was hilarious. Later, she said, “I like your smell now, but you should keep the antiperspirant on for other people’s sake.” I went around for about a day thinking, “She likes my nasty smell!” and dancing with myself.

A few weeks into it, I told her I was bi—the first time I’d ever told a girlfriend that—and she said, “Does that mean you’ll break up with me for a guy someday?”

“No, of course not,” I said.

I didn’t. Instead, we broke up because I chose to take a job working for a congresswoman in Palo Alto instead of moving with her to Manhattan.

In the few years I spent working in politics pretending I wasn’t bi, I learned a lot of things, but the most disturbing thing I learned was how to win: What you do is find the simplest possible mes- sage that resonates with people—and when I say simple, think, “It’s the economy, Stupid” or in local races just, “Bob for State Senate”—and then you repeat it ad nauseam and get other people to repeat it ad nauseam and then ask them to get other people to repeat it until every front lawn and bulletin board and doorhanger and public space in the place you care about is filled with your message.

Somehow, in the last half century, LGBT activists have pulled off one of the biggest public relations coups in history while dealing with one of the most complex issues. It was less than forty years ago that the American Psychological Association agreed to stop saying non-straight people were sick. Today, I work at a school with a program that’s created just to train therapists to be sensitive to the needs of LGBT people. Ten years ago, in
Law- rence v. Texas,
the Supreme Court stopped thirteen states from prosecuting people for sodomy; today, seventeen states allow gay marriage or domestic partnership.

All still isn’t good. Besides ex-gay camps, which have destroyed countless lives, LGBT people are victims of violent hate crimes at six times the overall rate, it’s legal to fire people for being gay in twenty-nine states, and being gay is illegal in seventy-six coun- tries and punishable by execution in five. That’s the short list. I could go on for pages.

But now that we’ve had some success, now that we have a voice and a foothold, gay rights advocates who are fighting for LGBT rights—for my rights—have to choose between two dif- ferent talking points:

1. Gays and lesbians are intrinsically attracted to same-sex partners.
   

2. Gays and lesbians do not have a choice about being attracted to same-sex partners. It is intrinsic to who they are. While no one has a choice about their sexual orientation, sometimes, not always, bisexual people are attracted to more than one gender. So those people who are born with a more fluid sexuality can choose who they sleep with, and sometimes they may be choosing between a man and a woman, but that doesn’t mean they have chosen to be attracted to both men and women.