Gay Threesome

A good friend of mine was visiting town this past week. Like the terrible person that I am, it completely skipped my mind that I could have cleaned the apartment and offered that he crash my place for the extra nights he stayed that weren't conference-related (and therefore paid). Oops. Anyway, we hung out a few nights -- most times much later than I should have for school nights -- hitting some the gay bar scene that I hadn't explored in a long time. I learned two important things:

1. Throwing Your Cell Phone at a Boy Is Not an Effective Way of Breaking the Ice.

I learned this wholly by accident, and it involved a boy I (thankfully) wasn't planning on saying anything to anyway. I was at 30 Degrees, waiting for my friends to show up (actually I didn't know that they were already upstairs at Cobalt, so I made a round of the relatively dead downstairs first), when I wanted to check the time. Watchless, I reached for my standby to get the time: my phone, tucked away in my back pocket.

Thing about these Razrs -- so thin, so elegant, so chic, so difficult to hold on to. I pulled it out of my pocket then promptly lost my grip on it. My efforts to keep from dropping it only compounded matters, as I ended up batting it upward and sending it soaring across the room, where it landed near the feet of some random guy sitting there with his drink.

"Uh, sorry," I said sheepishly as I bent down to pick it up. I can't even begin to imagine how stupid I must have looked juggling my phone in my hands (and failing).

The guy didn't say anything. About 20 seconds after I retrieved the phone and continued my milling about, he got up and left. Maybe some other time I'll try to do this again with a guy whom I might actually want to talk to, but I'm not sure I'd want to risk throwing my phone around so much.

2. The Gay Men in this City Can't Get Enough of Skinny White Guys.

I've reached the conclusion that this city is filled with gay men who have little to no appreciation for diversity, and who have consumed with full force all that the media has to offer with respect to what is considered "hot."

My friend and I made our way to Wet one night (who knew it was still open?) (and that dude on the webpage is scary) because he has thing thing for stripper boys. And if you're in a city where it all hangs out, well, you gotta hit the strip joint. We were enjoying watching the crowd hover around various unclad men gyrating the thrusting and bobbing (not their heads) on the bars, socks overflowing with singles. There were black guys and white guys, all of whom were slim and tone and none of whom I would kick out of bed for eating crackers....

Then the amateur night started. And I say this not to try to be snarky about the dancers, I really mean they allowed people from the crowd who were not "professionals" to hit the platform to compete for a prize. In what I can only assume was sheer fortuity, the contestants presented a virtual Benetton ad of diversity: a black guy, an Asian guy, and a white guy hit the bar and started strutting their stuff. In my humble opinion, the black guy wasn't as cute or hot as the other two, but okay.

Then it came time to vote. We were told to clap for who we thought was the best amateur of the night. The crowd (not a huge surprise) selected the white boy. (I voted for the Asian boy.) Of course, the host had to act like he couldn't tell who won, making us clap again, and this time some kind of groundswell starting surfacing for the white boy. People started chanting his name, trying to drum up support for him, as if they felt a need to claim, once and for all, that the white boy was the superior one of the three.

I clapped for the Asian boy for several reasons. First, we Asian peeps need to stick together. More importantly, though, I couldn't help thinking that the white boy amateur really wasn't all too different from the white-boy professionals who were working the bar before the amateurs started. I mean, really, after a while, some of these tall skinny (naked) white boys just become fungible. Give me something a little different once in a while. Like, an Asian boy. Oh wait, there was one, but the crowd decided to make damn clear they didn't really care to see him naked.

Of course, the city's overwhelming bias in favor of skinny white boys also explains why I can't get a date to save my life.

3. Beware the Alcoholic.

When you find yourself wandering around the city at 2:30 am in search of a bar that's still open, you may have a problem. Likewise, when you shut down a bar then offer to buy up a part of a friend's alcohol stash from home so you can continue drinking after leaving the bar, that's a bit much.


And that is today's lesson.