Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (21 page)

At least I left him his Deidre Hall poster. But when I met Deidre at an autograph show in 2012, it was all I could do not to tell her how low-class her biggest fans are.

All of my early sexual encounters seemed to be tied into music. The guy who took my virginity had done it after dancing gamely with me to Stacey Q’s “Don’t Make a Fool of Yourself”. A Latin guy who picked me up at a bar and drove me to his bachelor pad, decked out with blown-up photos of his toddler-aged daughter, put on “Like a Prayer” while teaching me why I should be jealous of his foreskin. I almost moved in with a doe-eyed boy with a body of death (one always hoped not literally, rubbers crossed), but he told me in a shouted conversation while Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” blasted, that he was an aspiring bottom for whom anal sex hurt too much—and that sounded like too much work for me. A dental hygienist who seduced me in his car outside the trendy shoebox of a club called Berlin had rather unhygienic ally convinced me to go “skinny-dipping” to the tune of Pete Shelly’s “Homo Sapien”, except it wasn’t in a body of water so much as all up inside his butt. My stripper Jack had worked in a music store, taken his clothes off to Banderas, and had introduced me to George Lamond at a party for the release of “Bad of the Heart”, where George signed a Styrofoam plate for me with a ball point pen.

To the beat, I was beginning to explore my sexuality, and to discover my turn-offs—but I felt like going to bars was a limited way of meeting people, especially since I was usually soaking wet with sweat from dancing at the end of the night. I once decided to place a personal ad, which back in the late ‘80s was considered something you did out of desperation and now is considered something you might do on a lazy Tuesday.

“BOYISH GWM STOCKY 5’10 COLL ED BR/BR 1/2 GAY 1/2 QUEER BOTTOM SKS CUTE GM 20-35 (?) 5’9+ INTLGT FUNNY NO DRUGS; NON-SMKR/D, DARK ARE +. NO CLUB MONSTERS, CLOSETS. FRDSHP, THEN…?”

It was Chicago, so asking to find a gay man who didn’t smoke or drink was like asking to find a gay man who was still in middle school. The “1/2 GAY 1/2 QUEER” was political and confusing, so I’m pretty sure that’s what kept Hart Bochner from answering. I was becoming despondent over my lack of a boyfriend. What was wrong with me, other than the fact that I insisted on thinking I was 5’10”?

I then attempted to go from personal ad to personal lad, answering a
Gay Chicago
posting for a guy looking for a houseboy. The dude in the ad wanted a boy ready to get to work as well ready to get to work on his “man meat” (he sounded like a poet). I had visions of gay porn star Chad Douglas, who looked 50 to me and was probably 30, a hulking, shaggy, impossibly well-endowed dude who would call me, command me to show up at his Boystown duplex, and would answer the door in a white terry cloth robe from which his chest, leg, and forearm hair would be bursting. He would invite me in and lead me up a flimsy spiral staircase, allowing me to stare up into the robe, giving me a good look at what would be sucking up all of my time when I wasn’t, I don’t know, dusting or something.

Then, he would sit on a futon with one knee up, obscenely flashing me while taking my SS# for his bookkeeping and telling me that once I committed to be his houseboy, I could not say no to anything I was asked to do, including windows. Or his friends.

Of course, the actual person who placed the ad was probably a fat weasel hunched under a cheap rug who wanted to grope each applicant free-for-nothing before agreeing to any actual wages, which would never be forthcoming. But I’m guessing, because in spite of how decent I thought I sounded on paper (maybe the part about being college-educated was a red flag?), he never called. It’s just that I’d seen some great porn with houseboys, and they usually worked for stunning guys who looked like college football players or handsome dads who looked like college football coaches. Then again, the houseboys were usually blond and would fit into one leg of my jeans, so there’s that.

I was beginning to think gay porn wasn’t without its down side. It was creating expectations that were rarely met. Case in point: I’d fooled around with plenty of guys, but…I’d never had an orgasm in the presence of any of them. The problem seemed to be not that I couldn’t cum, and not that I couldn’t stay hard, but that it took me
forever
, and that guys looking for a trick (that’s what hook-ups were called in the olden gays) weren’t really excited about taking things slow and figuring out which buttons their partners wanted pushed. Instead, they wanted every encounter to be porn-hot and porn-efficient: Get naked, get sucked, get fucked, cum, get dressed, head off to the gym or the video bar or the record store or the Exposé concert down by the pier.

That ailment—such a minus for a gay guy, such a plus for a straight one—haunts me to this day. No matter how many times you ask me to give you that load, I won’t until my trick dick is good and ready. I’m not sure if I’m too in my own head (keep in mind, I made it through big-city gay life in the ‘80s and ‘90s without doing poppers, Ecstasy or drinking alcohol…and am beginning to question why), or if I’m just wired differently. It probably doesn’t help that the first time I achieved orgasm, at 16 in the bathroom of my family home with the door locked and the non-business end of a paintbrush-shaped notepad inside me, I was absurdly using the only lube I had handy, Calamine lotion. As I was trying to get off, I was aggressively rubbing a numbing agent into my genitals. Why this didn’t strike me as counterproductive, I do not know.

But even factoring in my lone sexual quirk, a look in the mirror revealed a reasonably fit (if not worked out) dude with pretty brown hair and a bright smile (I’ve always maintained that all the soda I drink eats away any tartar). I had no ass to speak of, but I was 20 years old and eager to do weird sexual stuff to prove to myself that I was a good gay. What was not to like?

Other than getting banged unsafely by the racist and foolishly becoming involved with the stripper, I had one more regrettable run-in with romance, and it was Omar’s fault.

At the end of the semester, Omar announced he was moving off-campus. This was normal. Most kids at the college did not stay in the dorm system all four years like I did, moving out in the summer and back in the fall. But so as not to leave me open to having a random freshman assigned to my room, Omar introduced me to an acquaintance of his named Vincent. We met up Downtown one day after I left work, had cheap hamburgers and talked gay politics and British authors. Vincent was a very serious student (they
all
were at that place) with glasses and an extensive vocabulary, one that seemed to incorporate a large percentage of the official Scripps National Spelling Bee word list every time he spoke. He was a bit of a snob, but I felt like I’d been aiming pretty low, intellectually, when it came to the guys I was convincing myself I was attracted to, so in spite of what a bad idea I knew it to be to fall for someone I was going to be living with, I did let myself get a little turned on.

On the way home, we rode the Jeffery 6 public bus, standing side by side. When his hand slid down the pole and connected to mine, I figured he was letting me know he was into me, too, so I pushed back. He pushed back. Soon, we were pretty openly grinding against each other while pretending not to be as the other riders, stone-faced commuters who kind of looked like they might attend church and most definitely did not look like they’d appreciate a live gay sex show, pretended not to notice.

Back in my room—in
our
room—Vincent stripped down to show off his insanely ripped body. He was an egghead, but was one who had approached physical fitness with the same relentless logic that had allowed him to grasp algebra. He had actual biceps and pecs. He also had a penis that would’ve elicited a double-take from Chad Douglas himself. I’ve never been unhappy with what I’ve got, but faced with something that big, I didn’t really know what to do with it. I felt like I should be feeding it peanuts or something.

He enjoyed my struggle, I did not. I didn’t wind up doing much, though I tried…and wound up scampering away like a sand crab when it started to hurt way before it was even close to finding its mark. He laughed and we had fun anyway for a while once he moved in. He slept in a large closet with a window (I’m telling you, that building was to die for—the closets had windows) and no space for anything but a mattress, where we fooled around and talked Nietzsche.

Unfortunately, the guy with the big prick revealed himself to be one—a fussy, annoying roommate who wanted the room to be quiet all the time and who talked about his flawless body often enough that it reignited my complex about not really being up to porn standards. And why hadn’t I noticed he talked like Snagglepuss?

After what would be our last time fooling around, and a propos of nothing, Vincent, thinking aloud, was sizing up his attributes and then said of mine, “Let’s be honest, you have to rely on your face.” That he had the kind of face only a mother could love didn’t seem to matter; it didn’t make him less confident about the body any daddy could love more, didn’t make him feel reluctant to criticize the person he was living with and who was helping him have orgasms.

I of course kicked him out. The notes from that period are pretty bitchy, too, like
Designing Women
on testosterone.

But my love life wasn’t a total bust. I did date a couple of nice guys (I hope I’m not the stripper/racist/roommate in the stories of their lives), including a Mexican janitor my age named Lalo. Lalo saw me at C-Street, we danced, and he followed me the few blocks home to my summer residence, John’s apartment on West Belmont, where we copulated right on the kitchen floor as he whispered, “I love you…” in my ears. He spoke almost no English, so he probably wasn’t trying to be as too-fast-too-soon as he came off. I mean, 10 minutes ago we’re dancing to Depeche Mode, now he’s inside me and in love?

Speaking of coming off, the condom broke, which meant another AIDS scare, which was becoming the rule and not the exception to it. It seemed every one of my encounters was either blatantly unsafe (the racist thought we were semi-safe because we did it in the shower), with someone who I would have bet money had “It,” or started out safe, moved into safer, and ended up questionable. Lalo didn’t even tell me the condom broke, nor did it stop him. That makes him sound like a jerk, but he really wasn’t. He introduced me to his family as a friend, which exposed me to a whole part of Chicago in which all the signs were in Spanish and no one for blocks spoke a word of English.

Only his little half-brother, a 16-year-old playa with high, crunchy hair and permanently clutched imaginary pearls, could easily communicate with me, and he used our connection to hit on me hard, plying me with sweet nothings like, “You look
niiice….
”

I did “cheat” on Lalo, making out and fingering an adorable Mexican boy (a pattern emerges) guy upstairs at a gay bar called The Vortex. My roommate John caught me in the act and archly pointed out I was cheating on the guy I’d just met the night before and who had already fallen in love with me. Of this new boy, John asked me, “Was he drunk?” John and I were dear friends but damn, he knew how to put me in my place.

I didn’t think Lalo would mind so much. After all, he used his four words of English to wolfishly inquire about my new straight roommate once I moved back into the dorm, a sexy alternative-type guy with a goatee named Linus. Lalo would say Linus’s name like he was devouring flan, just to bug me.

I had a true, if short, romance with Lalo, who showered me with Bart Simpson drawings and trinkets, playfully called me “Gordito” (which sounds a lot better than what it means, “little fat one”) and who posed for pictures whenever I asked, proud that his new boyfriend wanted to take them. Eventually, we ran out of things to say and parted, though we stayed in touch. His great love just before me later died of AIDS, inspiring Lalo to improve his English and work for an AIDS outreach group and later for a testing facility. I met him and his partner 20 years later when the movie based on my novel
Boy Culture
debuted in Chicago. How incredible that a three-month romance when we were boys meant so much to us both that we made a point of reconnecting as grownups.

But then again, I had always run my sex life (that makes it sound like a McDonald’s franchise) as nostalgically as I run my interest in popular culture; for the longest time, whenever I would get a guy’s number at a bar in Chicago, I would tuck it into a little folder I’d made, on which I’d drawn a Keith Haring-esque broken heart. I didn’t even think about it until now how odd it is that I put the numbers in there
before
the guys broke my heart.

I think my heart might have arrived pre-broken, and that all along I’ve been looking for the right person to fix it.