Authors: Dave Holmes
Party of One (14 page)
And I never failed to show up. On the Upper East Side, my signature move became The Ghost. I'd be out with my friends, listening to the Dave Matthews Band at Dorrian's or The Gaf, and then, at around 2:00Â a.m., after the appropriate number of draft beers, I would act very tired. Ostentatious yawns and stretches. I might tell a friend I was going home to hit the sack, or I might just leave. Either way, I'd hit the street, shake off the fake fatigue, hop in a taxi, and go downtown. Two a.m. is the hour when people get less picky about whom they talk to and possibly take home. Two a.m. is when a guy like me can shine.
When you're very young and you don't know how to find (or be) a real boyfriend yet, you make one up out of what's around. You have your friends, who take care of your emotional needs, and then you hook up with strangers, which checks off the intimacy box. You cobble satisfaction together. It's not perfect, but it works. It did for me, anyway.
The great thing about New York, I quickly learned out of necessity, is that you don't need to be in a gay bar to meet other gay people. It is a big, diverse city full of single twenty-three-year-olds who are desperate to pair themselves and their friends off so that they can have dinner parties and pretend to be older than they are. There are all kinds of people, everywhere, and they are free to mix wherever they choose.
One major pitfall about being a single gay man in New York in 1994, as the community was starting to gain visibility and power, was that peopleâprimarily women, it must be saidâwere beginning to see gay friends as a hot accessory. They would get very familiar with you very quickly. They would tell you about their sex lives when you didn't ask. They would call you
girlfriend.
They would look at you, like a dog awaiting a treat, expecting you to say something saucy and fabulous. It's really easy to let people down in this context.
It is also very easy to
be
let down in this context. You would be set up on blind dates by people. “You have to meet my friend Thomas/Richard/Harold, you guys will be
perfect
together,” someone would tell you, and then you'd go have a drink with someone with whom you have no chemistry whatsoever and realize: the reason this person thought we'd be perfect together is that we're both homosexuals and there are no other reasons. What you thought was careful matchmaking was just your friend congratulating himself for knowing two gay dudes.
Otherwise, I met and dated four kinds of guys:
â¢
T
HE GUY WHO HAD JUST FIGURED OUT HE WAS GAY.
Once I learned my way around the bars and clubs of the city, I found that guys like this gravitated toward me. Solid, broad-shouldered guys with names like Rob and Pete and Jim. They were not yet out of the closet, barely able to acknowledge their sexuality to themselves. So when they met me, they felt relaxed. Easy. I reminded them of their fraternity brothers. I was a guy they could drink beer and have very shallow conversations about sports with. These guys needed me. I made them feel safe. I could relate to them the way they had been taught guys should relate to one another, and then once we had drunk enough to feel comfortable with our sexual needs, they would kiss me. They would kiss with such eagerness! Such hunger and passion! We would have clumsy drunken groping sessions that we called sex, and then in two weeks they'd get tired of me and go deeper into Chelsea. I'd run into them a couple months later and they'd be in a tight tank top and a Caesar and their names would be Robert and Peter and James. I was their Ellis Island. I stamped their papers and pushed them off to a new life in a brave new land. It was sad and lonely, but somehow better than nothing.
â¢
T
HE GUY WHO DEFINED HIMSELF FULLY BY BEING GAY.
This guy snapped. This guy knew the Peniston deep cuts. This guy would say things like “Andrew Shue? Oh, she's
fine.
” This guy would live in the gay neighborhood and go to the gay gym and buy his gay food at the gay grocery store. This guy would say, “You live on the Upper East Side? Girl,
why
?” This guy couldn't see a life outside of the gay bubble and didn't want to. And if I would express interest in doing something else, not even something
straight,
just something
else,
the response would be some variant of: “You want to see
Jerry Maguire
? Girl, you are so self-loathing.” They were right, of course, but I had much better and more sophisticated reasons for hating myself than just for liking boys.
â¢
T
HE GUY WHO DEFINED HIMSELF FULLY BY BEING UN-GAY.
This guy burped. This guy knew the Hootie deep cuts. This guy would say things like “Who's Andrew Shue? Oh, he's on
Melrose Place
? That's for fags.” This guy would live anywhere but Chelsea and would be out of the closet, but would be so desperate to convince you he wasn't one of
those
kinds of guys that it would immediately be exhausting. It's the flip side of the coin, but it's the same shitty coin.
â¢
T
HE MESS.
And then there was the drunk-on-Saturday-afternoon, sexually compulsive, emotionally stunted and volatile mess who couldn't connect with another human being if his life depended on it, which it pretty much did.
I also
was
all four of these guys. And I get it; we had all, in our own time and in our own ways, come to the realization that we were a part of a segment of the population that we'd been told all our lives was bad. Broken. Embarrassing. Unhealthy. Those words applied to
us
now, and we had to figure out what we were going to do with them.
And because we were trying to be men, we mostly did it alone.
So listen: I have no idea how sexual orientation is determined, and I don't really care. Some say it's genetic, which the Tony Perkinses of the world refute because no specific evidence of a gay gene has been found, and as we all know, everything that hasn't been discovered yet doesn't exist. (It's why we canceled science and told all the researchers to go home.) Others say it's environmental, and point to the fact that the more older brothers a boy has, the higher his chances of being gay, which makes me feel even worse for those younger Duggars. I would imagine it's a combination of the two, plus, in my case, a megadose of scorching hot men in the popular culture of my adolescence. I'm not saying these guys made me gay, though they probably did; what I am saying is that they cast a shadow that stretched all the way into my adulthood. Here are a few of the men whose impact on my young psyche made it impossible for me to commit to any actual human beings I met later in life.
The first ten seconds of the video for “I Want A New Drug” rearranged me at the cellular level in ways that I am only now able to understand. They are elegant in their simplicity: a hungover Huey Lewis wakes up and putters around his San Francisco apartment, in boxer shorts. That's it. He is just a grown man with a thick outgrowth of chest hair in a sensible pair of boxers in America's gay-friendliest city. He fills a sink with ice and water and dunks his head in, because this is a man who understands self-care. He is just the tiniest bit debauched, and he knows how to bring himself back to life for showtime. He can pull off a red suit. He does not try to be sexy, and he is therefore the sexiest thing going. He even gets a little come-hither stare from a guy on the ferry to Sausalito, and takes it in stride. The man is a magician, and I would still hit it, just tell me where to be.
Valley Girl
This one has gone entirely off the rails in the last decade or so, to the degree that from today's perspective it's actually startling how hot he was in his youth. But good Lord, he is something in
Valley Girl.
Soulful basset-hound eyes, chest hair in a perfect Superman-logo pattern, the very best of Merry Go Round's 1983 men's collection, great taste in music. He's from the wrong side of the Hollywood Hills, and we don't even hear about his parents, much less meet them, like we do her health-food-store-owning folks. He doesn't wear the right clothes, he has a jazzy streak of red through his hair, he has a goofy best friend who wears equally mall-punky clothes, and their relationship is either kind of homoerotic or I just remember it that way because I wanted to see them kiss. Either way, I credit him with getting me into two important things: The Plimsouls and dudes.
Before he was on
Married With Children,
I knew Ted McGinley as the Hot Guy Who Showed Up Places. Oh, there's Ted in short shorts on
The Love Boat
as jocky Ship Photographer Ace, the year the boat had a full-time dance team on it. Hello, here's Ted in running shorts in
Revenge of the Nerds
as the president of the evil jock fraternity. Whoomp, there he is on
Happy Days
asâ¦I don't remember, but some kind of jock, probably. If a script called for an obscenely handsome guy with a tasteful tan and perfect legs, the casting director called Ted McGinley, and 2 to 5 percent of America's preteen boys took special notice.
Top Gun
I mean,
Top Gun
is deeply homoerotic, full stop; it's Tom Cruise in the Navy, for Pete's sake. But by the time Maverick, Goose, Iceman, and Slider took to the sandpit for the volleyball game, it was all over. A young Tom Cruise who is somehow all trapezius muscle. A Val Kilmer in full bloom. An Anthony Edwards, who takes a good long look at his costars and wisely keeps his shirt on. And then there's Rick Rossovich, whose body is an absolute marvel of engineering, and who, in the middle of everythingâas a fey Kenny Loggins song called “Playing with the Boys” hits the nail right on the headâstrikes a bodybuilding pose. Dude somehow flexes every single muscle from his waist to the ends of his hair, as though this were a thing people did in the middle of beach volleyball games (which I am sorry to tell you it is not). In this moment, anyone who may have been on the fence about their sexuality simply surrendered. Gayness had us on target lock.
Sixteen Candles
Here's how hot Jake Ryan in
Sixteen Candles
is: all we know about him is that he sits idly by while his girlfriend throws a party that destroys his parents' house; he spends the whole thing up in his bedroom trying to call a girl two years younger than him in the middle of the night; he's a little bit racist to Long Duk Dong (which, in fairness, so is John Hughes); and he sends his blackout-drunk girlfriend home with a boy who doesn't have a driver's license, with the clear understanding that this boy is going to at least try to have sexual intercourse with her. And yet every time I watch the movie, I am left thinking:
That's the guy for me.
That is a powerful thing right there. That is weaponized hotness. No wonder the actor who played him left the business and moved to rural Pennsylvania to make furniture; the responsibility must have been too great. (Unfortunately for him, the idea of a Jake Ryan who rejected the industry and makes armoires in a forest with his hands is about the hottest thing I can imagine.)
WKRP in Cincinnati
Beats me, folks. I just know it's true.
There was a time when men's jeans actually told you what was going on in the crotch and buttock area of the American male. Things got kind of
packagey.
You could tell a soccer guy from a hockey guy if you spent enough time staring and analyzing. Back in the day, a pair of jeans straight-up announced a butt. Now, who even knows what's happening down there? Sure, we have banished acid-wash back to Hell, but at what cost? Hurry up and cycle back around, fashion.
Another questionable one, but the crotch wants what it wants. He is loose-limbed, flexible, hairy-chested, always up for a good time; his hair has body and volume. A friend of mine saw his comeback tour a couple of years ago, and I asked how old David Lee looked, and he said: “Like a creature from Hebrew mythology.” But we'll always have the cover of
Crazy from the Heat.