The Mandates

IF THIS IS anything like the Grammy Awards, then I have thirty seconds in which to thank the world, God, P. Diddy, all the little people I stepped on to get this book published and, of course, Cher, before they yank me off the stage. So here goes.

Do you know how some things just seem to have a lucky star? This book was one of them, judging by the people who supported
The Mandates.

To my agent Paula Balzer: thank you for your enthusiasm, wisdom, and the uncompromising crticial eye you apply to books as well as hats. Both the book and I are much, much better off for knowing you. Thanks also to the fantastic Sarah Lazin, as well as Hannah Slagle, of Sarah Lazin Books.

To Rachel Kahan, superstar editor: thanks for your brilliant editing, support, enthusiasm, and the priceless emails. Professionally and personally, you have been a joy to work with from the minute we met. Special thanks to the awesome team at Crown who worked so hard on
The Mandates:
Brian Belfiglio (director of publicity), Kay Schuckart (interior design), Mary Schuck (cover design), and Susan Westendorf (production editor), whose role ran the gamut from “big picture” cohesion to minutia like spelling clothing designer's names and Alanis Morisette songs correctly (Sadly, I must have some mental block).

My gratitude goes to Doug Clegg, Parker Ray (aka Ben Rogers), JR Pratts, Bruce Shenitz, Lisa Malmud, Sean O'Neill, Oscar Desierto, and the other writers, editors, designers, and publishers who offered support and insight. To David Rakoff, David Sedaris, Carrie Fisher, Bruce Vilanch, Marianne Williamson, Jill Connor Browne, and Michael Chabon: your books are where I go when the well runs dry and I need some inspiration.

Since the writing of a book is a pretty solitary business, I also want to thank a few friends who supported me and, without always knowing it, kept me company while I was writing: Suzanne Rittereiser, Paul Malmud, Mary Ann Donaghy, Christina Rudolf, Carol Nicotera-Ward, Susan Strawbridge, Liz Wilson, Margaret Rosen, Sara Meling, Karen Quinn, Liz Sorota, Frank Morgan, Gerry Valentine, Randolph Hooks, Tom Downing, Carol Monson, Michael Privitera, the O Positive Promotions chicks (Dude and Kermit, too), and Kim Repp.

I am fortunate to have a supportive family and want to thank them (especially my siblings who make me laugh all the time): Jan, Jim, Bruce, Beau, Judi, Elizabeth, Kaya, Katie, Amy, Matt, Chris, Jennifer, Lee, Libby, and my Dad, for instilling in me through osmosis a great love of words. I'd also like to thank the coolest “family-in-law” anyone could have, including Manny, Lee, Lisa, Jennifer, Sarah, their mates, and kids.

There is no way that this book, or much else in my life, would have happened without the following people. Though I can never fully pay off my karmic debt to them for deep and eternal contributions to my life, there must be some cheap, crass way that I can try. Thanks to: Cathleen Rittereiser, My E-Pop! Partner, constant friend, and the only person who can make me laugh at obscure pop culture references at 7 A.M. in Starbucks; Abby Wilner, whose “Quarterlife Crisis” was just the start of something even greater; Jamie Levine, who gets an honorary
Mandates
award for friendship and bravery in the dating jungle; Ava Seave for your brilliance, mastery of using the “F” word as a verb, adverb, noun, and adjective, and for convincing me it was okay to “come out as funny”; Bobbi Whalen, who seriously makes Washington, D.C. a livable place for me; Bonnie Maglio, my soul mate and confidante in New York for a decade; Winn Ogden and Doug McKay for their friendship and pointing me in the right direction; Cathy Alter, a great writer and even better friend. (How many friends get their first books published at the same time?) Finally, my band of brothers in Washington and New York: Shane Harris, for supporting the plight of endangered cranberries and rare vodka, and your dazzling writing ideas; “young man/old soul” Aron Wilson; Steve Kempf (“Doris Day parking” is your birthright); Russell “You are such a ______” Schrader; Kevin Mischka, who inspires me with bold acts; James “Always true to you in my fashion” Hollander, the irrepressible, and charming Peter Pappas; and my two oldest friends who defy description, Bruce Morman and Bill McGinn.

Finally, I'd like to thank the many guys who participated in research for this book. My favorite definition of comedy is that it is “tragedy plus time.” That was certainly true for some of the guys from around the country who shared their dating stories with me and inspired me with their resilience. I was fortunate enough to find many guys who are leading the way by sharing their wisdom and insight about what actually works. This is a compendium of your stories and, by sharing important aspects of your lives honestly and openly, we all get a chance to learn, laugh, relate, and move forward. That openness and honesty is a hell of a lot more than previous generations of our gay brethren had. So here's to you.

Introduction

HOW THE MANDATES WERE BORN

Of course, you don't know anything about gay dating until you're out there on the frontlines. I certainly didn't.

To borrow from the opening of
Great Expectations:
I was born. I lived. I came out. I started “dating,” which I defined as an often slow, tedious process of getting acquainted with a variety of men. Once you meet someone who shares your attraction and interests, then you consider dating him on an increasingly intense level leading perhaps, one day, to a relationship.

But I didn't like dating back then. I didn't know what I was doing and there were no guidelines, so I hit plenty of bumps and potholes on the road to love. I soon chose “immediate serial monogamy” as my dating alternative since it felt less bumpy and more romantic. After all, you meet a guy you like, and after fifteen minutes of mutual sustained attraction, you become a couple. What's wrong with that? Didn't it work for Loretta Lynn in
Coal Miner's Daughter?
Maybe, but after a few attempts, I learned it didn't work for me. I'd jump into relationships faster than a paratrooper, then emerge from monogamist seclusion a year or two later, shake off the dust, and wonder what the hell happened when it was obvious to everyone else how mismatched my partner and I were. I'd take a break, chalk it up to fate, and start the cycle over. That's the life of a gay serial monogamist. I don't recommend it. When you jump into relationships that quickly, with only a shred of postbreakup analysis in between, you often end up with lovers whose interests, personality, values, and goals don't match yours at all.

After a therapist assured me I wasn't really a lesbian, despite my penchant for Sapphic insta-relationships (lifetime commitment by the second date, moving in with U-Haul on the third) and fierce Stevie Nicks CDs, I decided to quit making the same mistakes and dive into the dating pool.

I spent many nights at coffee houses, dinners, and movies with a variety of guys I met at parties, the gym, and work. I noticed that all my gay male friends were dating constantly, too, but spending an even greater amount of time talking about it.

I logged hours listening to tales of jerks, losers, the one who got away, the hot one at the bar last night, the one who wouldn't leave the house the next day, the one who seemed so sweet before he went into a drug-induced rage, and the one who came on strong like a hurricane and left without a trace. I'd like to say that we did
not
resemble the cast of
The
Broken Hearts Club,
but, unfortunately, like them, we spent our Saturday mornings at coffee shops pouring over Friday's dates, and anticipating the three-ring dating circus that would follow on Saturday and Sunday. Sunday evening, we'd retrench with drinks and more dating rehash than a greasy-spoon diner.

What did I learn from all this?

I learned that there are 8 million gay men, and four stories.

I learned that tales of dating woe poured out before my required-and-stipulated-clearly-in-my-contract morning coffee made my eyes glaze over.

I learned how to get the most out of a “screener” drinks date in thirty minutes or less. This lopped off an hour and a half off my initial two-hour time. It was all about asking the right questions.

I learned that the Alcoholics Anonymous definition of insanity is on target: “repeating the same behavior over and over and expecting a different outcome.”

Most important, I realized that the stories I was hearing were strikingly similar to my own. Like characters in an all-male cast of
Groundhog Day,
we were experiencing and doing the same things again and again. My friends and I discussed other men as if there were somehow two different species, “us” and “them,” which, of course, made no sense.

Here we were, reasonably attractive gay guys with more opportunities than previous generations ever had, more places to be open, and certainly more coffee- and beer-induced “date talk” than I ever imagined. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, we quickly located gay neighborhoods, bars, and restaurants anywhere in the world, as well as found the actual men via phenomenally packed chat rooms and increasingly popular on-line personals. Popular Web portals such as
PlanetOut.com
,
Gay.com
and
AOL.com
(the mother of all Internet love) became virtual one-stop shops for romance.

So with all these new ways for gay guys to meet and interact, why weren't we happier about it? Were there now too many options? An oft-repeated criticism of the nineties Information Age boom was that too many options do not, in and of themselves, improve anything. You need to learn to pay attention to commonsense guidelines so you can navigate through all those choices.

During an all-guy dinner full of laughs, empathizing head nods, impatient eye rolls, and attempts at advice for tale upon tale of dating woe, the idea for
The Mandates
came to me. Surveying this smart, attractive, and frustrated singles group, I asked myself the following question: With so many gay guys experiencing the same damn dating patterns, where were our rules?

PUTTING THE DATE
IN MANDATE

Let's do some “dating” math. There are 95 million men over the age of eighteen in the United States, according to the Census Bureau. Forty-two percent, or 40 million, of them are unmarried (27 percent have
never
been marriedâthe really suspicious ones). That means up to 4 million of them are gay and single, if you believe the Kinsey study that claimed one in ten men are gay.

Aside from a few stray loners, celibate closet cases, and inmates, many of them are dating. But it's a sad, twisted tale of men alone in the cold, wreaking havoc on each other, and lost without dating guidelines.

Can a conscience rest with news like this? Historically, no civilized society has ever been without codes or norms for dating. From Australia to Zimbabwe, every society has rules about courtship, rules that young people absorb before they wade into the swamp of dating. But across the world, eligible gay men are still “social outlaws,” a ragtag gang of hormonally driven cowboys riding into romantic battle with guns, “ammo,” and no clue.

Gay men are in the early years of a new millennium with a whole new century of possibility. But it'll be a new century full of Friday nights alone at bars, hunched over computers virtually propositioning chat-room habituÃ©s, or watching television repeats of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
unless we learn how to put the “date” in mandate.

DATING RULES: NOT JUST FOR
STRAIGHT WOMEN ANYMORE

All the single people I know (sadly, some of the married ones, too) want to date more successfully. Straight or gay, most singles want to rise from the muck and mire to win the dating game. But somehow, straight women are the only ones getting advice on how to do this.

In fact, women have been inundated with romantic rules lately. Don't call him. Don't seem desperate. Be “a creature unlike any other,” whatever the hell that means. Fool the hell out of him if you want your shot at the goal, which, according to
The Rules,
is a
Leave It to Beaver
marriage with bread-winner husband, lovely children, fidelity forever, and a yellow brick road.

Thankfully, after
The Rules
came a vicious backlash. Independent women revolted at those outdated notions of how to nab a man, wrangle a ring out of him, and then ease the poor worm down the aisle. Thenâsurprise, surprise!â an author of
The Rules
announced her divorce after publishing a sequel of “time-tested” marriage guidelines. As I watched late-night comics have a field day with the irony, I thought to myself, “At least straight people have rules to complain about.” And if we were going to have rules, what would they be? What kind of rules would work for gay people? I wouldn't want them to mirror typical straight rules. It's clear that they are no panacea for dating woes.

Dating rules, and the backlash, focused on straights, missing completely the other 10 percent of the population who endure the messy dating process. Why? Well, you can argue that openly discussed gay life is a relatively new concept. How can you examine gay dating habits and develop dating rules and goals when gay people are in a closet? About thirty years ago at the Stonewall riots, the first martyred drag queen put her oversize high heel down, kicking off the gay rights movement (with great style and bearing I am sure). Until then, we lived in a shadowy, secret society with no distinct goals. Now, we're pioneering pilgrims of another age, but please, without the buckle shoes.

WHAT'S THE DATING GOAL FOR GAY MEN?

So three cheers and two shakes of a feathered tambourine for all this newfound dating freedom, but what the hell do we do with it now? Traditionally, marriage with children is the long-standing goal for straight relationships, as well as the benchmark for “girl gets boy” dating rules. But what's the dating goal for gay men? How could there be just one?

Gay marriage is certainly one possible goal for those with access to Amsterdam, Canada, and possibly one day New England, where ten thousand gays with rainbow rings will descend on Ben & Jerry's country, standing before each other, God, and a field of cows to say “We do.”

But since marriage isn't a realistic option right now, maybe relationship-oriented gays can anticipate celebrating that all-important milestoneâthe first-year dating anniversary. If you measure gay relationships in dog years (seven for every one), you'll be hitting the twenty-five-year mark in no time.

If long-term commitment is your goal, you can always strive to co-invest in real estate, a much harder union to dissolve than marriage. Ask anyone who's ever bought a home with a significant other and then suffered through the traumas of a breakup. That's when the promise “till death do us part” becomes a dare.

Straight dating rules have one goal: the “together forever till death do us part” marriage vow. But that isn't the only gay dating goal. Gay men are too diverse to share one common dating goal. We are not subject to the same societal pressure for us to marry. Many of us wouldn't want to if we could.

Instead, the real goal of
The Mandates
is for men to date successfully. That means finding a man who attracts you, sustains your interest, makes you as happy as you make him, and wants the same level of dating as you.

That doesn't necessarily mean celebrating your fiftieth anniversary together surrounded by your grandchildren, though a few gay couples may be able to do that. That doesn't mean all the traditional trappings of straight rules, with their white weddings and promises of love everlasting. Rules shouldn't set you up for failure or set unrealistic expectations or promise impossible things. Life doesn't work like that. But rules for gay people can be guidelines and that's better than anything we've had.

Dating is difficult for anyone, but it's harder for gay men for a few reasons:

It's a numbers game.
From a sheer numbers standpoint, the population of available men is relatively smaller for gays than straights (though if you live in Chelsea, the Castro, or Dupont Circle, my gay friend Steve argues, “You can't swing a cat by the tail without hitting ten of us”).

We've had few role models.
Off the top of your head, think of five current or past gay dating relationships you can point to and say, “I want that!”

There's a disproportional focus on youth and
beauty.
This doesn't apply to all, of course, but there's a gay culture emphasis on youth and beauty that often eclipses other important elements of a dating relationship. The gay “biological clock” is linked to aging, not ovaries.

It's a straight, straight, straight world.
Almost all the romantic images we grew up with are straight, so we must reinvent romance for ourselves. That can be a slow process. The baggage that gay guys initially bring to datingâsuch as negative gay stereotypes we grew up with, and expectations based on what we saw in our families, society, movies, and televisionâgets lighter as the trip gets longer. But, despite more positive images than ever before, gays still have fewer role models on which to base our romantic interactions. Since we are pioneers, it probably takes us more time and more tries to find Mr. Right than it does the average straight. Hopefully, we figure it out before we end up gumming Jell-O during singles night at the old gay folks' home.

Matchmaking and fix-ups are a rarity.
Where is your “Auntie Yenta” when you need her? In addition to a smaller gay single population, even fewer gay couples are willing to play matchmaker. And with your single gay pals, you can pretty much bet that if some hot guy comes along, they aren't likely to wrap him up as your birthday-surprise fix-up. More likely, they'll nab him if they can. Men, after all, are taught to go after what we want.

Gay men have a propensity toward dysfunction.
Okay, it's a broad generalization, but find me one gay man who will refute it. I am speaking more of emotional dysfunction than other kinds of dysfunction. No one would dispute that gay men in general are very functional within the community. For example, no one can gentrify a neighborhood better than we can. While there's no mistaking that gay men are functional in many ways, studies show that our community has higher instances of alcoholism, drug addiction, and self-loathing than the straight population. All of which make dating tougher, unless your dream guy is a Tennessee Williams character.

There's a wide range of dating goals.
Want a challenge? In a community with such diverse dating goals, try to pinpoint the guy who wants what you want. Despite headline-catching battles for legalized gay marriage, many gay guys have zero interest in getting married. No societal pressure on gays to marry is a curse for some, but a blessing for others who relish freedom from traditional social constraints. Since a long-term relationship with a lifetime commitment isn't the only gay dating norm, you have to figure out what you want and then find an emotionally and physically compatible guy who wants the same.

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