Almost simultaneously, I feel fear, anger, boredom, contempt, fascination, lust, affection, and a deeper social yearning I can’t quite put my finger on. Often, I feel more myself with them - or at least some seldom-accessed part of myself I can’t quite name - than I do with gay male or female friends.īut despite all of those positive experiences, I still experience a not entirely warm and fuzzy mess of feelings at the mention of “straight men,” writ large. (He didn’t like it we were both more partial to jazz and the Blake Babies in college.)Įver since, I’ve not painted straight men with one brush this is New York City, after all, and in my 25 years here I’ve met, and sometimes befriended, some of the smartest, most gifted, funniest, sweetest, and most thoughtful straight men on the planet. Probably because of David I was able to make similar straight male friends in college, many of whom, to varying extents, are my friends to this day, including J., who now lives in Park Slope with the wife I introduced him to and their two kids, and who only last week went to the opera with a buddy from his all-male book club. He broke down a wall in me and let me see that there were smart, artistic straight men in the world who would love me for the effeminate, pretentious little sass mouth that I was, and who might be far braver than I, in fact, in showing their hand emotionally. No straight man had ever told me he loved me. Only later, upon arriving home, I read his inscription to me: “I tease you because I see so much of myself in you.
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When the summer ended, I wrote something appropriately snarky and bombastic in David’s yearbook. David had a deep, raspy voice and a strong jaw, and composed acerbic, Elvis Costello–like love songs to idealized women on his guitar, and when we would jam out for a room of impressed peers to “Don’t Go Back to Rockville” - him on guitar, me on piano - I felt a kind of joyous male bonding that I’d observed but stood apart from amid years of suffering through hockey, baseball, and soccer teams.
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We would engage in dizzying verbal jousting that, at the time, was the closest thing I’d ever had to sex. David, who was Jewish and from a richer town than I, matched my bombast word for word, allusion for allusion, ridiculous alliteration for ridiculous alliteration. If you were going to throw me in the mud and steal my bike - and, sadly, this was the kind of thing that happened to me on a regular basis between the years 19 - I’d be damned you’d do it without me calling you a cretinous troglodyte as you rode away.īut that summer I went to a special program for gifted public-high-school kids and met David, the first straight male soul mate I ever had. Consequently, I’d built up a thick, defensive wall of big words around me. I’d grown up in a middle-class Massachusetts town, which was largely Irish and Italian, and, frankly, prior to that summer, I’d not known much in the way of tenderness or warmth from straight men. By this time I knew deep down I was gay, though it would be another five years before I’d come out.
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The turning point in my life with straight men came in 1986, the summer before my senior year in high school. Rock Hudson and Robert Lansing in A Gathering of Eagles.