at long last

my new column came out today, but the online version of baltimore gay life is down for some reason. so, without further ado, i here cut and paste this week's column for gay life:


Super-you

I was really into him. He had a tattoo and Sonic Youth posters on his wall. He played classical violin and made me a mixed tape the second time we hung out. He’d gone to the trouble of deciding which songs to include, transferring them one by one from CD to cassette. He’d typed out each song and who it was by, and which album it was from in case I liked it and wanted to go buy it. What it meant to me was that he’d been thinking about me in the four days since I’d last seen him; thinking about me as much as I’d been thinking about him. On our third date we went to a Chinese restaurant and sat in awkward silence, avoiding eye contact while chewing our egg rolls and drinking green tea. I’d never had green tea before and I didn’t want to seem like I didn’t know what was going on. I grasped the little cup and sipped the tea, pretending that I hadn’t just burned my tongue.

“It’s funny,” he finally said. “It seems like the longer I know you, the queenier you get.” His proclamation didn’t piss me off as much as you may think. I knew exactly what he was talking about. When I’m around my friends I let myself go; I never consider what I look or sound like to them. But when confronted with someone I’m interested in, either romantically or sexually, I clam up. It’s a bizarre phenomenon: I imagine how I’m looking when I make a certain face or how I sound when I talk. When the guy I was dating informed me that I got queenier the longer I knew him, it made perfect sense. It meant that I was getting a little too comfortable, letting my guard down a little too quickly. It meant that the person I really was, the guy who doesn’t have stiff wrists, the one who has a faintly effeminate lilt to his voice, was showing through. And he’d noticed. It wasn’t the guy with the excitable, high-pitched voice for whom he’d made the Sleater-Kinney mixed tape. This moment has stuck with me—the moment it was pointed out to me that I have a date-face. It made an impression on me that I can’t let go of, and I can’t even remember this guy’s name.

“I’m talking to my friend Dave,” Michael, the guy I’m dating, said to me last week, “and it seems like he’s really into the guy that he’s dating. He told me he’s worried, though, because he knows that he’s too much of a queen for this guy, so he tries act butch whenever he’s around him.”

My God, I thought. I’m not the only one who does this in relationships. It made me wonder, how much do we all change ourselves to fit the wants or desires of the person we’re interested in? Sure, there are plenty of people who would claim that they never do—that they’re always themselves, no matter what. Be honest, though, admit it: when you’re first starting a relationship you don’t want the other person to see all the flaws (or what you perceive to be the flaws) you have. You do your best to present them with a sexy, funny, well-dressed, easy-going super-you. It’s only after you’ve dated them a while that you let them see the real you: the person who leaves the toilet seat up or drinks out of a three-day-old glass or cuts their toenails. Or the person who sometimes screams when he sees a bug or makes kissy-faces into the mirror. The person that you let your friends see, the one you’re afraid is too queeny for guys to be attracted to.

“I’m writing about how we try to present a better version of ourselves to people when we first start dating them,” I told my friends over dinner at Dionysus on Friday. “For me, it’s usually that I try to butch it up around someone I’m trying to impress.” “I don’t think you’ve done that with me,” said Michael. I looked at him and caught myself: Great. Now I’ve pointed it out. I’m neurotic and “gay-acting” and I just HAD to bring it up in front of someone I’m dating. “Well,” I said, “you made it very clear when we met that you don’t have a problem with non-traditional gender expression.” “Way to use the big words,” Tom said. “He means I like queens,” said Michael.

So maybe I’ve taken the first step towards presenting me as myself—funny, awkward, flawed, neurotic, and kind—instead of the me I think someone would rather see. If I want the person I’m dating to really like me for who I am, I have to at least give them a chance to see who that is. I’m working on it.