Short-circuited…
Sometimes, Hawaiian turns off his television, and this is a decision he usually regrets.
And such was the case last weekend. While the rest of the country was enjoying a three day weekend, I was reminding myself that if you were to stick me in a crowd of gay men, one of these things is most certainly not like the others. I should have been smart and stuck to the Law and Order:CI marathon on USA. I could have played it safe and watched some sort of collection of shows about grilling on the FoodNetwork. Hell, I could fallen asleep outside and spent all of Monday night nursing a wicked sunburn, and that still would have been better than what I actually ended up doing to myself.
So just to give a bit of background, it’s probably wise to break down the gays for the rest of you a bit. To assign categories. To clear up some mystery. To let you all know that no matter how bad you think straight dating is, at least your bars aren’t segregated by criteria like body fat percentage, price of your jeans, and the presence or lack of chest hair. Needless to say, stepping into the wrong bar in the wrong bit of denim at the wrong point between waxings could be really traumatic for a gay man, which is why I tend to not go out at all.
Anyway, let’s take a look at some of the categories with broad strokes. It’s actually possible that you can cross over a couple of categories, but this is rare. It happens, though, and I’ll have to discuss this in a bit.
So, in alphabetical order….
Bears — Bears, really, are the lesbians of the gay community. They don’t really care about big they get. They don’t do anything to manage their body hair, and they seem to mostly be attracted to men in the same shape that they are. Your typical bear eats a lot of dairy, has a lot of bear friends, and wears very cheap clothing. There’s also usually some facial hair and often a baseball cap.(Are you getting the similarity to lesbians yet?) Bears prefer watching sports to playing them because the playing is bad for their knees, and their bars tend to have names like The Dugout, The Eagle, or something ending in “Saloon.” The bear, like the lesbian, likes a sense of community, and can therefore be found on websites like Bear411.
Chubs — chubs are like bears, but without the body hair or at least the facial hair. It’s really that simple. Without the body hair to fetishize, chubs aren’t usually into each other, and therefore have to rely on a special category of gay men to get action. These men don’t have a specific physical type except that they aren’t big, and are known as Chasers. Chasers can often be spotted attending events like Planet Big. (Please check that link at your own risk, but I really hope you do check it. Because it’s just that wrong.)
Cubs — Pretty much as you might expect, Cubs are just younger and smaller versions of bears. They can usually see their toes if they look straight down. Not always, but usually. They have round heads, short beards. A muscular cub is know as a Musclecub just as a muscular furry bearded guy is typically a Musclebear. Musclebears and Musclecubs can also be…
Gym Queens — Prefer the local Gold’s to the local bar. These men tend to also like each other, but more than that, like men who like them. Their online profiles tend to list activities of interest like “muscle worship” and wrestling. Their online haunts are places like BigMuscle and HardBuddies.
Hipsters — thin, young, Puma-wearing, critical, self-impressed, pseudo-intellectuals. Almost always smokers. Not interested in even socializing with anyone else who isn’t also a hipster and hasn’t also toyed with ideas of communism or immersed themselves in excessive amounts of social theory.
Jocks — If Jake Gyllenhaal were a gay, this would be his category. Jocks are usually wearing something fairly athletic and will happily don a pookah shell necklace regardless of the occasion or their age. If Wentworth Miller came out, this could also be his category, but he’d also be considered a…
Prep — men who usually think they have great educations and carefully selected wardrobes. They’re unfailingly Brat Packish, travel in groups, prefer hard alcohol to beer, and annoy me. I once dated one of these who honestly wore a smoking jacket to bed and had to drink Bailey’s and milk every night before he could go to sleep. And before you ask, he was only 33. Yes, I know. And that’s why I’m not dating him any longer.
Twinks — under 23, under 150 pounds, and more hairless that an Olympic swimmer. Needless tosay, I have nothing in common with the Twinks.
Now, this list is by no means exhaustive. There are Otters(bears without body fat), Leathermen, the outdoorsy granola guys who are sort of hipsters, but are more likely to be high than anything else, and there are men like Hawaiian, who is essentially none of the above. I’m probably some odd blend of musclecub and prep with some tired old straight man thrown in to temper things, but I don’t have a round head, I avoid dairy and I definitely don’t travel in a pack, so that keeps me firmly out of either of those other categories. Of course, when it comes to discussing all of the different gay categories, it’s impossible to forget the most iconic of all gay stereotypes, the Circuit Boy.
Circuit Boys are a special kind of gay — they aren’t necessarily cookie cutter in appearance(though they’re almost always Gym Queens), but they are essentially uniformly identical when it comes to behavior. They usually date each other, take vacations that involve large circuit parties like Southern Decadence or Atlantis cruises, and have no problem with going out on Sunday night to drink, dance and do a little X before work on Monday. Circuit boys essentially look like porn stars, party like rock stars, and spend money like former child TV stars, so I was really, really surprised when was of these most odd creatures decided that he was absolutely, undeterredly, most definitely interested in me.
I thought it was a bit of a joke at first. Though I’m a reasonably good looking guy, there isn’t a single shirtless picture of me anywhere in existence, I don’t really drink, I definitely don’t think doing a line is a great way to make new friends, and being on a gay cruise ship is pretty much my idea of hell. I know I should have run the other way the very first time he said “My friends all laugh at Six Feet Under, but I really don’t understand dysfunction at all.” And I’m sure the fact that he has a boxing trainer, a personal trainer, a housekeeper, a cardio coach, and was desperately trying to lose 5 more pounds from his already chiseled midsection before the height of pool party season should have clued me in to what lay in store, but I was being fairly dense about that as well. I mean, let’s be honest — I was both flattered and fascinated. And I’m not sure which of those emotions is more rare for me, so I had to see where things would go.
Anyway, fully expecting to spend Monday night working on a personal project and watching some kind of marathon, I was completely surprised to get a “hey, I’m flying up to see you tomorrow” phone call on Sunday night. (Yes, he lives in West Hollywood, and no, we hadn’t actually met in person yet.) I couldn’t exactly say no to this offer. I didn’t have any other real plans, I didn’t have an easy way out of it, and, frankly, I didn’t entirely want out of it. I was curious. I was interested. I was bored.
To call the night a disaster would be, well, an understatement on my part. To be very clear about something I think I’ve mentioned before, I do not like small men. And yes, I know there was a date with a pocket gay, but that was an experiment. I knew he was small before meeting. I knew that. But this one was supposed to be bigger. I had a very clear weight promise of 185. And I’m telling you now, there’s no way in hell this man was 185. And even if he were 185, that wouldn’t really make up for the fact that as he was getting ready for bed, he looked at me and said “Yes, before you ask, I do wear girls’ socks because my feet are that small.”
The truly sad thing about that comment was that after a full two hours at dinner where he didn’t ask me a single question, this was the most self-aware thing he managed to say all evening. Clearly, this date would not have been a sleepover if a flight hadn’t been involved and if he hadn’t been leaving again at 5 the next morning. Oddly, nearly everything he said actually sounded like a question because of the upward drift at the end of the delivery, so dinner consisted me asking questions and of him giving me answers like “So I was on a gay cheerleading squad?” and then silently watching him conduct an internal debate aloud(with many, many changes in frontrunner) about what was truly his most favorite episode of Sex and the City. By the time he passed out and started snoring, I was more than ready to sit outside and call a friend, and ask myself (and her) why I would ever, ever do such a thing to myself. I needed something to remind me to not let this ever happen again.
And I got that reminder the next morning while he took a shower and I stared at my wall, waiting for 5:25 to roll around so that he could leave and I could go back to sleep. You see, I keep pretty big soap in my shower. It’s Nancy Boy, actually. The tea rose scent. And it’s lovely. And I somehow knew that he wouldn’t be able to resist it. But the bar is big and his hands… well, his hands sort of go with the feet. So over and over, I heard a big and whopping thud! that told me each and every time he dropped the soap.
I started laughing out loud by the fourth time, and it happened so many more times in the next five minutes that by the time he was dressed and ready to leave, I couldn’t quit smiling. “I wasn’t sure if you enjoyed yourself last night, but yeah, I’m really glad I came up, too,” he said, completely mistaking my amusement for interest.
I didn’t really have to words to say what I really wanted to at that moment, so instead I let him and his Tumi luggage, his Dior necklace, his True Religion jeans, and his girl socks leave without saying much else. And then I took the soap out of the shower. It’s so dented that it looks like I tried to carve it into something. I think I”m going to save it, and the next time I’m tempted to do something like say yes to a short circuit boy, I should have to rethink my final answer and wash my mouth out with soap.