Man’s Best Friend

My friend Simon is the domestic type—a homebody, you might say.  His house is impeccable—all the comforts of home, except one:  the husband.

He met the most recent candidate at the dog park near his house.  Dog parks are the new gay bars, especially for the domesticated male.  Owning a dog, Simon says, is like practice for a boyfriend.  If it doesn’t drop dead under your care or piss all over the furniture, you’re ready to move on to human pets.  Simon tells me that men with dogs are sexy.  There’s something about their playfulness that gets to him.  A man can’t be uptight when he’s playing catch with a retriever, or picking up shit with a plastic bag.

Anyway, that day at the park, Simon fell in love with an energetic, dangerously white cocker spaniel who came running at him on his way to catch the ball just thrown by its owner.  The owner, an adorably nerdy guy named Harold, came up to apologize, offered to pay Simon’s dry-cleaning bill, and before you know it, they had a date for Friday night.  Dog men work fast.

In our neighborhood, dogs are man magnets, portable conversation starters.  I’ve seen it in action.  A handsome guy walking down the street alone is intimidating, but if he’s got a leash on his arm, other guys will talk to him.  They can pretend they’re really talking to the dog.  “Oh, how cute are you!” they’ll say, their eyes straying from the snappy little Bichon Frisé up to the clutched biceps holding it in place.

Dogs are the new hankies.  You can tell everything you need to know about a man from what kind of dog he has, and how he behaves with it.  A guy with a toy poodle is a whole different type from the one who’s being dragged around the block by a Doberman. 

Ginger, the cocker spaniel, was spoiled rotten, but Simon didn’t discover that until the second date.  On the first date, over dinner, he learned all about Harold.  And there was a lot to learn.  Harold, it turned out, was a lawyer, so the conversation was entirely about him.

By the time it was Simon’s turn to share, Harold began anxiously looking at his watch.  “Ginger’s probably dying to go out right about now,” he said, squishing his features painfully.  “I really should go.”  He promised to make it up to Simon by inviting him over for dinner.  He liked to cook, he said, and didn’t often get the chance.

Simon’s not great at recognizing red flags.  When it comes to men, he’s color-blind:  he only sees the green ones.  So at this point, he was thrilled:  a man who loved dogs and cooked:  There is a god after all! 

He arrived for their next date on time, but Harold hadn’t started cooking yet.  He placed Simon at a table in the corner of the kitchen with a glass of wine and they chatted as Harold got dinner together.

Meanwhile, Ginger made no bones about letting her needs be known.  She scampered about Master Harold’s feet as he moved from fridge to counter to stove, barking and jumping onto her hind legs as each aromatic ingredient passed above her frosty head.  Simon watched the show from his corner perch, awkwardly trying to make conversation over the barking and get the dog’s attention away from the food.

A white square of fabric was laid out on the far side of the kitchen floor.  Simon peeked his head around the counter.  “What’s that?” he asked, gesturing with his wine glass.

Harold blushed.  “I don’t always get home in time to walk her,” he admitted.  “That’s insurance.”

“A diaper?”

Harold nodded, dipping a limp chicken breast filet in flour.

“But you’re here now,” Simon said.

Harold shrugged sheepishly.  “It’s become a habit,” he said.

“She routinely pisses on the kitchen floor?”

Harold rolled his eyes—aren’t pets adorable?—and bent down to pat the dog’s head.  Ginger turned up her nose to sniff his fingers for poultry.

When Simon went to the bathroom a little later, he discovered that the kitchen was hardly unique.  There were diapers all over the house, one of them stained a pale ocher.  He stepped daintily around it and, back at the table, poured himself another glass of wine.

They walked the dog together after dinner, Simon watching as Harold did the dirty work.  He wore the plastic bag like a glove, scooped up the shit as if it were the most natural gesture in the world, and tossed it in a trash can on the edge of the park.  He would be great with children, Simon thought.

Harold was a pretty good kisser, too, and after he’d washed his hands, he escorted Simon to the bedroom.  Things were going fine until they heard a whining at the foot of the bed.  Suddenly, as Simon lay pinned on the mattress, he was aware of someone licking his toes.  As Harold was kissing his lips at the time, there was only one possible explanation.

“Ginger!” Harold called, for the first time expressing the slightest annoyance with her behavior.

Ginger chose to interpret her name as a call to action rather than a cry of frustration.  She hopped from the foot of the bed and into flagrante delicto, sniffing Simon’s sweaty chest like a pig hunting for truffles.  Harold swatted her away matter-of-factly and continued what he was doing.  He seemed used to Ginger’s insistence.  Each time he pushed her off the bed, she jumped back up—as if it were a game.

Simon, on the other hand, was finding it hard to focus.  “Why don’t you lock her outside?” he asked as his erection threatened to plummet.

“She’ll just scratch at the door and annoy us all the more.”

I’ll wear earplugs, Simon thought.  But by this point, he was so worked up he became somewhat desperate.  He bunched the covers up around them, like the barricade in Les Miz, and got back to business.  He wasn’t thinking anymore, at least not with his big head.  After all the anticipation, Simon’s dick had taken over, and it wasn’t about to let a cocker spaniel win the contest for Harold’s attention.

Of course, it was only a priapic victory.  The battle brought out the worst in him.  As he thrashed atop Harold, he felt that coarse tongue on his foot once more, and—instinctively; he would forever after say it was purely instinctive—he kicked his leg out.  There was a startled whimper and a sudden crash as Ginger skidded across the hardwood floor and knocked over a pile of books in the corner.  And then the room was filled with the sound of her sharp claws scampering against the floor outside and a whimper that quickly diminished as she ran down the hall.

Harold jumped out of bed to tend to her, and that was the end of that—the evening and the relationship.  A few minutes later, as he undertook the walk of shame through the dog park, Simon found himself rethinking his theory.  Dogs might be a great way to attract men, but also a perfect excuse to keep them at bay.  They didn’t prove that their owners were domestic, so much as domesticated.

Suddenly, Simon felt something squish underfoot.  That’s how it is with relationships, he thought, checking his sole:  you’re always dealing with somebody else’s shit.

Prince Albert in the Can

As a rule, after a breakup, you never again see your boyfriend’s penis.  So when John dragged me into the bathroom that night, I was a little taken aback. 

It was only a couple of weeks after the breakup, and as soon as I walked into church (don’t worry; our church is as pagan as it is Christian; we’re good, free-thinking homosexuals), he took my arm and said, “Come here, I want to show you something.”

Now, the last time a man brought me into a public restroom … well, that’s another story.  The point is, I didn’t know what to expect—especially when he started undoing his pants.

And suddenly, there it was—glittering under the fluorescent light, a shiny silver hoop emerging from the head of his dick.  The hoop itself was rather thin, but it loomed large—and painful—in my imagination.  It seemed the final barrier between me and this part of John that I had loved for so long—like a “no trespassing” sign, a reminder that what I had once tenderly caressed was irrevocably off limits.

John had wanted a P.A. for a long time, but I had always pooh-poohed the idea.  I’d had experience with them before, and I knew that they could be kind of fun—as a novelty, a momentary diversion—but the idea of facing it each night, my beautiful boyfriend’s beautiful member forever foreshadowed by this formidable, glinting piece of steel, was hardly appetizing. 

But my opinions no longer mattered.  That was the point, I realized, standing in the bathroom, eye to eye with John’s defiant penis and the bossy piece of metal that had taken possession of it.  The piercing was his declaration of independence, a way of demarcating his life with and without me.

(No one seems certain of the association between Prince Albert and the piercing named after him.  Whether Victoria’s dear husband had such a piercing himself remains a mystery, as far as I can determine.  Legend has it that he had the piercing done because his dick was so big it needed to be secured in his trousers to avoid an obvious bulge.  If true, this could explain why Victoria so dramatically mourned his passing for forty years.  It would indeed be ironic if the queen whose name is synonymous with sexual repression had had such a kinky husband.  But, as Ted Haggard and Larry Craig among others have taught us, it’s the uptight ones you most have to watch out for.)

The human race has a long tradition of commemorating internal change on the body.  And in that season of breakups, when several of our friends—some even longer-established couples than us—separated over the course of a few months, there was a lot of change going around.  One of our female friends bleached her hair after her breakup and now styled it in dramatic spikes that screamed defiance.  A male friend grew a devilish goatee.  (Why, I wondered, does everyone choose the dramatic, slightly risqué path?  Why doesn’t anyone start wearing Laura Ashley sundresses or get their hair permed into Pre-Raphaelite ringlets?)

According to Hollywood gossip, Roseanne and Tom Arnold wore tattoos of each other’s names, and had to have them removed after their divorce.  Not quite as easy for Roseanne as changing her legal name back to Barr, but perhaps more meaningful.  Of course, the fact that he had chosen to stamp “Rosey” on his ass should have been a sign from the beginning, but I won’t speculate.

You could say that my relationship with John was framed by piercings.  We’d been dating only a month when I casually mentioned that I’d always fantasized about getting a nipple ring.  That was all John needed to hear.  Within minutes, I found myself at the piercing parlor down the street, lying shirtless on a table in a walled-off area of the shop. 

I’d had both ears pierced long ago and had barely felt it.  But, as I soon discovered, there’s a lot more sensation in the nipple.  John held my hand and tried to make me laugh as the piercer leaned over my chest with his shockingly large needle.  I tried to get all Zen—focusing on my breath, convincing myself the process would be over very quickly.

But Buddha wasn’t with me that day. You know those moments in life when time stands still?  Well, that needle was in my nipple for all of two seconds, but those two seconds compressed the pain of two hours.  And I screamed bloody murder.

The space we were in was a glorified cubicle, its walls a few feet lower than the ceiling.  Everyone throughout the shop could hear me, and suddenly there were titters of laughter everywhere.  “Sorry!” I called out when the pain had passed and I was able to laugh at myself.  I imagined my scream frightening someone in a distant corner who had a needle poised over another victim:  one slip of the wrist and a testicle could be history.

My nipple is a constant reminder of John, who held my hand and gave me the courage to go through with it.  He gave me the courage to do a lot of things, and the nipple ring has become a symbol of that.  Love changes you.  It leaves its mark. 

So when I was confronted with his piercing—which marked the end of our relationship, not its beginning—I had to wonder what it—and I—meant. 

The wound was still fresh, the skin around the hole disturbingly red.  And while a nipple ring doesn’t take up that much room on a chest, a P.A. is hard to miss:  no matter how big your dick, that piece of metal becomes its dominant characteristic. 

Is this what our breakup had done to him—a mutilation?  Or, worse yet, was this his way of commemorating the relationship itself?  Was our time together that painful that he needed to mark it through violence? 

Penises are sacred.  The thought of harm to my own causes as visceral a reaction as similar thoughts about my eyes.  You could say that I am my penis.  At some primal level, I think most men would agree.  We identify with our penises in a way that other parts of our bodies will never know.  We even give them names.  (For a long time, mine was known as Brad.) 

Decades before (I won’t say how many), my foreskin had been sacrificed to honor someone else’s belief system.  And now I look enviously upon the few that I see.  Sure, they’re not particularly attractive, but it’s a question of function over form in this case.  Because someone else made an arbitrary decision on my behalf when I was completely helpless, I will never know how much sensitivity I’ve lost in my most sensitive place.

An old friend of mine used to say:  the first breakup never takes.  John and I had broken up twice before.  I think that piercing was his way of saying:  enough already!  It was like cutting an umbilical cord.  At some level, I think he thought it would make him less attractive to me, put the kibosh on any chance of getting back together.  I hope I’m not that superficial.  Even when it comes to penises, beauty is only skin-deep.

The Mark of Zora

I’ve been in withdrawal lately.  Project Runway withdrawal.  There’s just nothing quite as gay on television now that this year’s fashion queen has been crowned.  I know, there’s still American Idol, but that banter between Ryan and Simon just isn’t enough. 

It doesn’t help much that my own dating life has been a bit tepid lately.  So there’s no love in either reality at the moment—reality TV or reality life.  That perfect storm has made me nostalgic for the good old days, when reality shows were new and love was more often the premise.

My obsession a few years ago was Joe Millionaire, the guilty pleasure about a poor bloke—young, dumb, and … well, you can imagine the rest—who pretends to be a millionaire in order to test the greed of the American female.  Think of it as Donald Trump in a Skinner box, picking out the next trophy.

On the night of the first season’s climactic episode, my friend James had a sex date.  As the burly bulldozer was choosing his lady love and telling her that his bank account was drier than David Letterman’s humor, James was planning to be the meat in a sex sandwich. 

Sex dates per se are not exactly standard operating procedure for James.  Don’t get me wrong:  rare is the date that doesn’t end with sex, but a sex date is a totally different breed.  A sex date is structured solely around the act—no dinner, no movie, no sly seduction necessary.  When you make a sex date, both partners know exactly what they’re there for.  In fact, the cardinal rule of sex dates is not to make them with people you’re seriously interested in dating.  Even people who are relatively new to sex dates know that. 

A sex date requires only two things:  a willing partner (aka fuck buddy) and fortuitous scheduling.  The tricky part is the scheduling.  Since the essential principle of a fuck buddy relationship is freedom from expectation, spontaneity is the name of the game.  Unlike a boyfriend, a fuck buddy doesn’t whine when you have to work late—or, more to the point, when something better comes along.  Hence, the second rule of sex dates:  they are always trumped by real dates, and fuck buddies never get jealous.  Fuck buddies know their place.

Rob and James had been fuck buddies for a year or so, though they didn’t get together very often—basically when the spirit moved him, Rob would call and fit James in on his way to the gym or on his way home from work; an hour or so of their standard routine, and he would be off again—as simple as meeting other friends for coffee.  Their great fantasy—the one thing they always talked about doing, but had never gotten around to—was a threeway.  That was the only thing worth making an actual date for.  Actually, it was pretty much essential to make a date for that:  relying on spontaneity is hard enough with two people; juggling three busy schedules was next to impossible.  So finally, thanks to gaydar.com, they had located a suitable candidate—in point of fact, someone James had already tested out and approved, and someone Rob had been eager to meet for a while.  So they made the date—and, as lust would have it, the only time all three of them were free was the night when Evan Marriott was set to choose between Slutty Sarah and Sweetie-Pie Zora.

James had the VCR primed to go as soon as they arrived.  By his calculation, he would miss only the last half hour of the show; he could easily catch up after the others had left and still be in bed by midnight.  And then Rob called.  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, his voice wavering uneasily between despondent and frantic.  “Remember that flight to London I’m booked on Wednesday?  Well, it turns out it’s actually tomorrow.”  He was knee-deep in work and still hadn’t packed.  The flight left in twelve hours.  “I don’t think I can make it tonight.”

James and I had a cardinal rule of our own:  never call during Will and Grace, Queer as Folk, or the Tony Awards.  Silly me; I had forgotten to add Joe Millionaire to the list.  But when I heard his voice on the machine, I knew it meant trouble.

James told me all about it as I half-listened, one ear still turned to the TV, where the pre-show was in full swing—a flashback to Mercenary Melissa sidling up against Evan, eyeing his crotch with the subtlety of Dame Edna stroking a gladiola.

Impatient, I told him not to worry about it.  The third guy, Fred, was still coming over; the night wouldn’t be a total loss.  But James is a sincere guy.  He couldn’t stand the idea that Fred would think he had made up the whole Rob thing just to see him again.  “So call him,” I said—a bit too abruptly, I thought, but the next segment was about Heidi; I was practically hyperventilating.

When the phone rang again, an hour or so later, I almost didn’t pick up.  The moment of truth was about to arrive:  Evan was sitting down next to Zora in the grand salon.  I flipped on the VCR but kept watching the screen.

As I’d suggested, James had called Fred, the other slice of bread in the fantasy sandwich, and left him a message:  “Rob can’t make it tonight, but I’d still love to see you.  Just didn’t want you to show up and be disappointed.”  Sometimes James is just too considerate.

Fred had only just called back.  “I’m wondering if we can have a rain check,” he said.  “Not that I wouldn’t love to just play with you.  But I was out until six this morning; I really could use the sleep.”

As I listened to the real soap opera, Evan was babbling on, recounting the ups and downs of his dates with Zora while she strained against the nervous smile pasted on her face:  ever the realist, she was prepared for the worst. 

“Out until six?!” I repeated as Evan drew in a breath.  “Doing what?” 

James had no idea.  All he knew for sure was that, for the second time in a single evening, he had confronted the Flake Factor—the occupational hazard of fuck buddies.  Spontaneity is a beautiful thing, but reliability is not a characteristic of the breed.

“Are you watching this?” I asked suddenly.  Something was about to happen.  Something important and inevitable. 

James fell silent, and through the receiver I could hear Evan on James’s TV across town.  Stereo Neanderthals.

And suddenly, Zora began to smile broadly.  She had been chosen:  she was the one.  Now all she had to get used to was the fact that Prince Charming was really Oliver Twist.

Still connected by the phone wire, we watched the rest of the show in silence, riveted.  Only during the commercials did we share our reactions:  gloating when the last of the evil stepsisters got her comeuppance; horrified when she revealed (assuming—inexplicably—that for the first time in a month she was not being videotaped) that it wasn’t only Evan’s lips she had been sucking on in the woods behind the chateau; crossing our fingers as Evan sweated out Zora’s delayed arrival in the ballroom and her weighty decision.

In the end, despite my distaste for Evan’s more primitive moments, I gave in to the sublime manipulation of the show.  There was a tear in my eye when the newly crowned (and suddenly wealthy) couple danced passionlessly under the twinkling lights.  I gave in to the fairy tale, wanting it to be true—wanting to believe that the TV-made Cinderella had found her prince. 

And maybe she had.  Maybe not.  Probably not.  The important thing was that she wanted to believe she had, and so did I.  So did both of us.  If Zora could find her prince, then James and I could, too.  But we weren’t going to do it with sex dates.  Evan had proven the adage:  don’t buy the cow when you can get the milk for nothing.  Slutty Sarah had offered the milk.  Zora had withheld, and she ended up with the prize (give or take $49 million). 

And all at once, in the middle of that sappy, manipulative moment, I realized the point:  there had been enough Sarahs in our lives, enough people who saw us as meal tickets or an evening’s diversion on the way home from the gym.  What we needed, I told James, was a male Zora—the boy next door who cares for the elderly and wears tanktops in the hot tub. . . . Well, I could do without the tanktops, but you see where I’m going with this.  In the end, Zora admitted that the money had been the one turn-off with Evan; she was more interested in the real thing, the guy on the bulldozer rather than the one with the private jet.  She wasn’t after his money and she wasn’t after his body.  Throughout the show, Zora had been the one who was hard to read:  she didn’t wear her heart on her sleeve; she made Evan earn intimacy, earn the right to know who she was.  She knew that that process takes time and effort.

In the end, Zora got her man.  But she left her mark on me.

 

Coming Attractions

Whenever we disagreed about a book or a movie, an old college friend of mine used to blithely say, with a rather strained smile on her face, “De gustibus non est disputandum.”  (It was the Ivy League; people dropped Latin into conversations the way Martha Stewart drops blue cheese into a salad.)  In other words, there’s no accounting for taste.  Which is pretty much how I feel about heterosexuality.  I’ve been there—or let’s just say I’ve gone through the motions—but I’ve never quite understood the attraction.  So while heterophobia makes complete sense, I must admit to being absolutely stymied by homophobia.  It seems to me that finding your own sex repulsive just can’t be healthy, from a self-image standpoint.  Straight men are forever saying they don’t understand what makes men attractive.  This suggests two theories:  a) they’re lying, or b) they’re lying.  Any man who wakes up in the morning, combs his own hair, and picks out his own clothes is obviously consciously trying to make himself look good.  I know there’s a fair number of straight men walking around in coffee-stained wife-beaters and shoes that don’t match the belt, but the overwhelming majority seem to do pretty well for themselves, so someone’s not telling the whole truth.

Of course, I also have a pretty good idea of what makes women attractive.  Give me a choice between Catherine Deneuve and Golda Meir, and I think I’d pick the right one.  But that doesn’t mean I have any grasp of the greatest of sexual conundrums (well, second greatest; we’ll deal with trannies later)—the bisexual. 

Take my friend Clay, for instance.  He’s never actually slept with a woman, but he is curious.  The closest he’s come is straight pornography.  Not just any straight pornography, though—more like gay straight pornography.  (It suddenly occurs to me that porno should have its own rating scale—not G to X, but 1 to 6, like Kinsey.  In Clay’s case, it would definitely be a 5.)  Clay’s favorite pornos are the ones that show women experiencing anal intercourse.  He can’t explain it himself, so I’ve stopped asking.

According to Clay, straight porn makers aren’t quite as creative as their gay counterparts when it comes to titles.  So while we have movies like Saving Ryan’s Privates and A Rim with a View, on his most recent trip to the “straight” side of the store, he rented something rather prosaically called Up Your Ass.  Actually, it was Up Your Ass, Number 17.  I guess the series is even more popular than the Halloween movies.

The problem came when he got it home.  He popped it into the DVD player and couldn’t find a single complete scene.  All he saw were previews—and previews can be especially frustrating in porn:  all that titillation and no payoff.  To save face, I would have just ignored the problem and dropped the DVD silently into the return bin the next day.  But Clay went back that night to complain.

“It’s all previews,” he said to the woman behind the counter—a short, pleasantly plump Latina who seemed not the least bit nonplussed.  Which really makes me wonder.

“Previews of what?” she asked innocently.

Poor Clay.  The woman had asked a simple question; his finely honed Southern manners told him that she deserved a simple, honest answer.  “Up Your Ass, Number 18,” he said.

You could say the woman got what she was asking for.  After all, did she really expect that the previews would be for Lilo and Stitch?  But she was apparently a true professional who had seen it all before.  She didn’t bat an eyelash—which is more than I can say for Clay, who, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, realized that there were children all around him, pulling their parents madly toward the cartoon videos and M&Ms displays at the checkout.

“I don’t know,” said the clerk, gazing seriously into her computer screen.  “It’s been rented 28 times before with no complaints.  Let’s take a look.”  She led Clay to the office in the back of the store.  And there, in a cramped, windowless room with DVD and video boxes piled to the ceiling, the clerk turned on a TV on the desk and ran Up Your Ass, Number 17.

“This looks like a complete scene,” she mumbled as they both stared directly at the TV to avoid eye contact.  On the screen, a large-breasted woman was settling herself into place on a bed before a surprisingly hairy man.

The woman clicked to another track and they gazed silently for a moment.  “This looks okay,” she said dryly as another well-endowed thespian dropped to her knees.

The next click brought them to one of the scenes that gave the movie its name, and Clay felt sweat trickling down his face.  The clerk continued to call up scenes—a series of women crying out as their heads bounced uncomfortably against pillows and headboards and kitchen tables.  Clay kept his eyes anxiously fixed on the screen, but there was no risk of arousal under these circumstances.  He just silently prayed that his companion wasn’t watching him, getting any ideas he would be unable to fulfill.

The clerk stopped the player and pulled out the DVD.  “Here’s the problem,” she said, turning the disc over in her sweaty palm.  “It’s double-sided.  Look—the other side says ‘previews of coming attractions.’”

“Oh,” Clay said, a bit too loudly.  His voice echoed off the concrete walls.  “I didn’t know they made double-sided DVDs.”

“Oh yeah,” the woman said, snapping the disc back into its holder, “we get them all the time.  You gotta be careful.”  She snapped the box shut and handed it to him.  “You still want it?”

Again, Southern politeness.  “Sure,” Clay said nervously, taking the box.  “Thanks a lot.”  And he ran out of the store.

He watched the whole movie that night—two solid hours of big-busted women taking it up the ass.  He told me the whole story a week or so later, when he was finally able to laugh about it.  Despite the weirdness of watching the movie with the video clerk, the most embarrassing part for Clay was the fact that it had never occurred to him to simply turn the disc over. 

It’s hardly surprising.  When it comes right down to it, we all have a tendency to overlook the fact that there are two sides to everything.  One man’s turn-off is another man’s fetish.  In sex, like everything else, there really is no accounting for taste.  And if we insist on looking at the issue only from our own point of view—homo, hetero, or something in between—we might just miss the money shot on the other side.

The Homo in Ms. Jones

The conventional wisdom—at least in gay circles—is that “Sex and the City,” the TV phenomenon about randy urban women as alive now on DVD as it was on HBO every Sunday night, is really about gay men.  Surely, we say—hope?—women don’t talk about sex that much, that graphically.  Surely women don’t have sex that much, that . . . graphically.

And we’re not the only ones questioning the show’s veracity.  A woman friend of mine notes that straight men—her current and ex-boyfriends included—can’t stand the show.  They cringe at the thought of women sitting around talking about their sex lives—talking, in point of fact, about them (not to mention their penises).  They refuse to believe that it happens.  But, my friend assures me, it does.  It happens all the time.

Maybe that’s precisely what makes “Sex and the City” so fascinating—the fact that those of us who are not women have never heard these things coming out of women’s mouths before. 

Still, we gay boys do have a point.  It’s not hard to understand the confusion.  Tune in to any episode, close your eyes, and imagine the voices a couple of octaves deeper, and you could just as easily be overhearing the average Sunday brunch on Fire Island. 

That image got me thinking (this is where the camera would do a close-up on Carrie’s laptop):  Even though gay people are all over the media these days, does anyone outside of the gay world really know what we talk about?  Maybe it’s time they did.  Rather than putting our words in the mouths of fluffed, glossed, and mascaraed fashionistas teetering atop ridiculously expensive Manolos, I thought it was high time to let gay men speak for themselves.  Or one of them, anyway—namely me.  With a little help from my friends, of course.

I had a blind date recently—well, not blind exactly; we had seen each other’s photographs jpegged on match.com.  (By the way, my friend Dick refuses to call these obligatory meetings blind dates.  Since they’re always conducted at cafés and inevitably seem more like interviews, he stubbornly refers to them as “blind coffees.”)  Anyway, as I was in mid-sip on my no-foam latte (the last thing you want is a foam mustache when you’re trying to make a first impression), the inevitable question arose:  “Which character on ‘Sex and the City’ would you be?”  It’s become standard shorthand for getting to know people—the gay equivalent of Barbara Walters asking her guests what sort of twee they’d wike to be in their next wife. 

All the types are there—slutty Samantha, neurotic Miranda, innocent Charlotte, and woefully adjective-deprived Carrie.  But, despite this embarrassment of carnal riches, everyone claims to be Carrie.  No one will admit to being any of the others, least of all Samantha (now there’s a red flag on a first date).  Actually, it’s not hard to understand why:  in this fictional universe, Carrie is the only complete human being; the others are merely her id, ego, and superego floating around hopelessly, seeking completion in sometimes-slutty, sometimes-romantic, sometimes-together, sometimes-a-mess Carrie. 

Samantha, of course, is more fun:  like Carrie, we want to live vicariously through her life (and deny that we ever do the same things).  But to keep Carrie from being easily seduced by Samantha’s exploits, Charlotte sits demurely on her other shoulder, reminding her about romance, the perennially unproven theory that men are meant for more than fucking.  As for Miranda—well, she’s great to have around primarily so that Carrie can feel superior to her:  sure, she has a great job and a great apartment, but she’s the most neurotic creature to hit the screen since Alvy Singer met Annie Hall. 

But here’s the rub:  We may all want to be Carrie, but do we really want to hang out with her?  Do we really want to see everyone from all sides, all the time?  Do we really want to be reminded that other people, too, are fully fleshed human beings?

I’ll admit to lumping several friends into the more extreme categories—it makes life simpler.  If we actually acknowledged all people as complex characters, how would Jerry Springer earn a living?  We’d probably all walk around smiling all the time, saying “Have a nice day” to everyone we meet and actually meaning it.  I don’t know about you, but that sounds like hell to me.  Or Cleveland.

Besides, to put it bluntly, who has time?  Let’s face it:  achieving a balanced, complete view of the self is a lifetime goal.  It requires years of reflection, meditation, therapy, weightlifting, endless shopping, and—for some of us—the occasional liposuction.  And still no one notices:  we are forever pigeonholed as somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, somebody’s boss, somebody’s sex partner, somebody’s projection of their own unfulfilled childhood needs, etc.  No, it’s just too much trouble.  I’ll focus on my own wholeness, thank you very much; you take care of yours.

Which brings me back to Samantha.  Ask any guy who he’s like and, sure, he’ll say Carrie.  But ask him who he’d rather have a cosmo with, and there’s no contest.  Of all the ladies who brunch, the leggy blonde with the potty mouth is the one we prefer—by a landslide.  If our favorite foursome were ever magically transformed into men, she’s the one who would fit in the easiest in the Castro.  Carrie makes a fabulous fag hag, but with that fashion sense, she’d make one lousy fag.

Samantha Jones lives for sex, and that, apparently, is something we can relate to.  If men in general think about sex every five seconds, only gay men act upon it with anywhere near that frequency.  Samantha’s our vindication, our evidence that successful, professional, well-mannered people can still be sluts.  Every time you’re faced with a risqué temptation—the UPS man smiles a little too slyly in his tight brown shorts, a muscle boy removes his towel in the steam room, your local sex club places discount coupons in the newspaper—ask yourself what Samantha would do, and your fears are vanquished.

Every time I hear someone complain about Will Truman and Jack McFarland—the eunuch and the bimbo of sitcom-land—I like to refer them to Samantha, the only real gay man on television.