...recently, i visited colorado to see my family, scatter my grandfather's ashes, and catch up with my old college pal, brian...we've known each other since the fall of 1995, when we were both freshmen at UCI (zot! zot! zot!...yeah, you're jealous our mascot is an anteater)...17 years later and we're both parents, squirreling away money in 401k plans and savings accounts so that our families can retire to boca and our daughters can have proper weddings...brian is sure he's going to have to save more than me for said weddings--he and his wife have 2 daughters--but i assured him that the one i have to pay for will tip the scales...after all, i live in georgia...my daughter is already pronouncing the word sauce as "sawwwse" and planning her fifth birthday as a barbecue/princess party...i'm pretty sure that living in the south means she'll have to secure a minimum of 20 bridesmaids and each will have to be provided with at least ten gallons of aqua net...i should probably sell my stockpile of vicodin now and invest the money...
...i had a lovely dinner with brian, his wife, and beautiful girls, complete with a stroll down memory lane about our college days...just as brian and i were beginning to bore his wife, it somehow came up in conversation that a number of then-not-yet-out-of-the-closet men had admired me during those halcyon days...
...i quickly did a mental tally, trying to add up the number of gay boyfriends i'd had...
"I knew about Jonathan," Brian said. "Remember he came to your room at, like, two in the morning and told you how much he was into you?"
"Yeah," I said. I could hear the disappointment in my voice; he is, to date, one of only two men to ever wake me from my slumber to profess his love. Yes, the other was also a gay boyfriend. "And now he's gay," I said. "I found him on Facebook."
"Really?" Brian said.
"Seriously, that's more or less how I know all five of them are gay now. I guess after not being able to make anything happen with me, they all switched tracks and took trains to Gay-town," I said. (Yes, I realize there is no such place as "Gay-town." This is a memorable phraseology I've borrowed from a Greg Proops Improv set I went to...with, yet another, gay boyfriend.)
Brian's wife laughed when I said this, so I didn't tell her I'd stolen the idea.
"It's disturbing," I said. "I kinda have a complex about it. What about me made me so appealing to these guys? Is it my mannish hands? My slightly deep voice? My grandmother warned me of these things for most of my formative years. Not the gay men falling in love with me part, but that I didn't have suitable female features, I wasn't delicate enough. If I were a character in an Edith Wharton novel I'd be described as 'a handsome woman.'"
Brian chuckled. "No, c'mon."
"Really. Were these five attempts some sort of last resort? I've given it a lot of thought over the years. Did my rejection put them off women forever? Did I give va jay-jays a bad name?" (There were kids present. I wasn't comfortable saying "vagina" in front of a four year old) "I was mistaken for a lesbian by my own mother," I said. "So maybe these guys thought I was. Maybe they were looking for beards?"
"But you never had girlfriends," Brian said. And something about his tone suggested that he wanted to end his sentence with a question mark.
"You should feel flattered," Brian's wife said. "Gay men have good taste."
...perhaps...but i'm not sure all gay men are like Christopher Lowell...to imagine what had really gone on was a "shoot for the moon effort" is too conceited...
...maybe it was downright sexual confusion...it was college, after all...in the nineties...it was just becoming cool to be bi-sexual or gay...so cool that a man i lived with in the dorms--and, yes, with whom i had a brief fling--later came out of the closet, participated in a reality television show, and won the hand of another eligible gay bachelor...
...however you slice it, i think i've given liza a run for her money in this category...
Ahh, all the fun I missed dating the same guy since high school! ;)
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