Giving It Up

Boy Meets Boy "Giving It Up"
By Matthew Rettenmund

From Boy Meets Boy

I didn't go out on what I would consider a true date until after I'd slept with at least two men. Well, two males; how can you really consider your 18-year-old friends "men"? My first date came after my first kiss, which had been given to me in my senior year of high school by a bi-curious best friend who took pleasure in stealing innocence no matter its gender. He loved women too much to ever be gay, but his confident kiss, forceful and hot, slapped onto me in his apartment with a clueless straight comrade just out of sight around a corner, made me finally feel 100 percent gay. It was like he'd shown me with his mouth what I'd been looking for all those years ago, when I'd been waiting for the eyelashed kid to drop his pants.

(Actually, this was my second kiss. His first attempt had been aborted by my extreme preoccupation with whether or not it would work, voiced at the exact right moment to have caused it to fail; the sound of four lips banging dryly for an instant. But I don't count that, because there was no tongue involved and as anyone knows -- anyone who doesn't take old movies too literally -- kissing isn't kissing unless both tongues are present and accounted for.)

Compared to the elation of my first kiss, my first date is too boring to record. In fact, I have to say I'm not sure which one counts as a first date.

I once was asked to go to Denny's by an extremely clever Irish exchange student who everyone knew was queer, and who shared with me an ill-advised true love for a grumpy soccer player who kept us on a string and at arm's length. The Irish guy wasn't very good-looking. At all. But he charmed me and I think we enjoyed the thrill of amateurish handjobbing mostly to spite our jealous hetero love object, who was beside himself when he found out we'd passed him over in favor of each other. But that wasn't a true date because I'd had no idea that the Irish wit had designs on me until he'd reached over on the drive home and placed his dead-white hand on my thigh; it was a date only in retrospect. No doubt I might have behaved quite differently had I been informed in advance.

The next date, also at Denny's (this was Michigan, after all), was more obvious: a meeting with an adorably tiny future Gap employee whom I'd heard about through a friend. We both knew the score as we downed our cheap milkshakes, and were tragic boyfriends within the month. On the date, we'd spilled our hearts out to each other, confided a mutual passion for Depeche Mode and then gone to see Mystic Pizza, a movie I will forever hold responsible for our eventual disintegration, his flight into the arms of a sexier closet case, and his general flakiness. It was no great loss. Short men are nice to look at, but the proportions are a drag.

After that was blurry stream of date-mates ranging from the sweet but stupid to the utterly repulsive, both physically and spiritually, though rarely both. As wildly diverse as they were, from the selfless Christian Korean academic to the sincere and perceptive Mexican janitor to the two-dimensional Missouri stripper with a truly unique take on HIV transmission ("I always ask if they're positive before I do it without a condom"), my involvements with them were marked by three similarities: they were insubstantial; they were extremely short-lived, with three months standing as a record; and there were virtually no true 'dates' involved. I met them the same way most gay guys meet -- at bars. I met the stripper at a record store and seduced one or two -- okay, one -- repressed college students in my dorm, but for the most part, it was outside my realm of experience to see someone I liked, get a phone number, call him up, pop the question, then do dinner and a movie.

I don't think it's just me. Do gay men "date" in the same way straight men do? Or straight women? I've always found it hilarious to listen to a straight female friend narrating the events of a date she's been on, culminating with her thoughts on how he was a nice boy but she thinks they'll just go out for a while, no sex involved. It seems that queers don't really date unless the sex is a given. Dating becomes the stuff you do to pass the time before you take off your clothes and laugh at the hetero world. Dating is sometimes understood to be synonymous with fucking (I think I'm plagiarizing this sentence from my own novel!).

The one time I recall going out on a getting-to-know-you date during my early twenties, I returned to find that a treacherous friend of mine from home had lost his virginity to my horrifying roommate, the very one I'd complained to him about so loudly for months, the very one who'd nearly vetoed my friend's visit in the first place. I wasn't informed that they'd coupled until days later, but somehow I knew. As a joke, when I'd entered the apartment and had seen them so immersed in, so undistractible from their individual pursuits, I had asked loudly, "What did you two guys do while I was gone? Have sex?" I'm better at recognizing guilt now. Then, I had interpreted their brittle stares as simple embarrassment or even distaste.

As I hit my mid-20s and beyond, barhopping had lost its appeal. I'm aware that many gay men still feel a sort of euphoric redemption when they snag a dish at a club, whether or not the connection is intended to last indefinitely or for twenty minutes. For me it's a thing of the past, like vinyl records or my attraction to collecting sports cards. Bar boredom mandated that I find men some other way, a dire challenge for even the most bold and outgoing and imaginative queer. With dry spells extending as long as a year or more, I knew I needed to socialize more or I'd never get any. Love, sex, or conversation.

The first time I had a truly adult date that was a date from start to finish -- that started with my seeing him, him seeing me, numbers being obtained, and an invitation extended -- it didn't happen at Denny's and didn't end in three weeks. It was with a nice guy whom I still see frequently. I see him every single day when I open my eyes and he's out cold next to me, hoping I won't make him wake up and go to work. (When my boyfriend first read this, after uncomfortably skimming the preceding revelations about my dating history ["You dated a stripper?"], he demanded to know who this guy was, this guy I still see so frequently. Then he re-read the paragraph and cooed.)

Dating is not easy, nor is it fun. At the time it's happening, it's usually queasy and vaguely mind-boggling. You're never sure you're connecting, even when he tells you he feels it, too. He could be lying. Nobody knows why men lie in these situations, when it would be so much easier to tell the truth, but they have been known to do it.

Dating is a hardship, an organized stressfest: "Would you like to meet me at a cafe somewhere and spend an hour or so extremely ill at ease?"

But even though it's as evil as a publicist, dating is a necessity if you have any hope of finding a man to spend more than three months with.

The best thing about dating is that the more you do it, the better you get, until you finally find someone with whom to give it up forever.

MATTHEW RETTENMUND is the author of the novels Blind Items and Boy Culture, and the nonfiction books Encyclopedia Madonnica, Queer Baby Names, and Totally Awesome 80s. He lives in New York City, where he works as a magazine editor.