by David Burton
So, Gay Dave joined Hermione (Amber), Legolas (Nina) and The Doctor (Ravi). The experience of creating the children’s show bound us together quickly. When we finished, we set about putting on an afterparty that would become legendary in the halls of the arts faculty. Absolutely everyone was invited.
There were other, older gay guys at uni. Maybe this party would be the point where I would get some sex.
I humbly asked my parents to buy me a sixpack of Vodka Cruisers. I didn’t have a driver’s licence and wasn’t yet eighteen. I had no idea what Vodka Cruisers were. I had never drunk alcohol before. But Nina and Amber advised me to invest. Everyone would be drunk at the party.
I had kept myself locked away for years, certain that I didn’t like company. It all seemed too intimidating. But I really liked these people, and there seemed to be a chance for the sexy times that I had dreamed of for years.
What was the paradise that lay ahead?
Turns out paradise smells faintly of vomit and is very loud. It’s also a weird kind of clumsy soft porn that no one would ever be interested in watching. This was a university party. This is what I had been missing out on.
We were in someone’s driveway. Generic, pulsing music thudded out of the interior of the house. We drank. And talked. And somewhere, somehow, someone suggested spin the bottle. And I found myself sitting in a circle, watching an empty Vodka Cruiser spin.
I had consumed one bottle, and I didn’t feel particularly compelled to have another. I honestly couldn’t tell whether I was actually drunk, or whether I was just playing drunk for the sake of the party, trying to convince myself as much as anyone else. Amber took to a bottle of rum and coke with vigour. Nina, the classiest of us all, had a bottle of white wine. Ravi had several bottles of watermelon schnapps, which he kept offering to everybody.
‘Schnapps?!’ he’d ask, excited. ‘It’s well tasty.’
I would be lying if I didn’t say I was curious about kissing Ravi. He was a guy and he was bi. In fact, at this stage, we were the only open gays in our year. There were another couple of guys that everybody gossiped about, but no hard (get it?) evidence of homosexuality. There were gay guys in other years, from different parts of uni, but I hardly knew them. I wasn’t about to go and try pashing older guys; I barely had my gay training wheels attached.
I didn’t know where to begin. The whole thing was confusing. I seemed to have missed the class where people were taught to flirt. I didn’t understand it. Why would you flirt? Why not just ask the person if you could kiss them?
‘Schnapps?!’ Ravi offered to the people on either side of him in the circle. They each took a swig.
The vodka cruiser bottle was spun. The game was in motion.
I wasn’t about to tell anyone I was a kiss virgin. I was struggling to remain cool without a drink in my hand, let alone with admitting that I’d never locked lips with anyone.
All seventeen of us, a ragged bunch of outcasts, gathered around the bottle. The anticipation was like Russian Roulette.
First up was Hannah, a manic-depressive mature-age student who had dyed her hair blue in an attempt to fit in with the younger group.
The bottle spun to the chants of oooos and ahhhhs. It began to slow down, threatening to stop right at me.
Was this it? Hannah? My first kiss? Really?
It stopped short, landing on the girl beside me. Carmen, a black-haired tattooed girl with a collection of piercings she’d done herself.
Hannah crawled over to Carmen and they stared at each other for a moment before drawing in for a kiss. We all erupted in cheers. The pair didn’t let our applause go to waste. They stretched out their moment together, flicking their tongues into each other as we all laughed. It happened inches away from my face.
Hannah went back to her spot. ‘You’re an awesome kisser!’ she said to Carmen.
‘Schnapps?!’ Ravi said, offering them the bottle.
We went round the circle. People were pashing without a second thought. Dan, formerly of White Pride, kissed Anna, the girl from New Zealand who smelt like onions. Sarah, the self-branding self-mutilator, kissed Russell, the musical theatre-loving bombastic boy who was very keen to tell us that he wasn’t gay at all.
And so it went, missing me each time. I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed. Either way, it would be my turn soon, and I would spin the bottle, and it would, hopefully, for the love of God, land on Ravi. I wasn’t sure if I was attracted to him, or whether I just didn’t want to kiss anyone else.
It was my turn.
Ravi. Please.
The bottle felt cold in my hand. I took a deep breath, and spun.
Please, God, please. Just let it land on someone nice. And please don’t let me be crap. Please don’t let them laugh in my face. And what are they thinking? Is each person in the circle praying that it doesn’t land on them? Are they all dreading the thought of my face pressed against theirs?
It passed Ravi once. Twice. Three times.
It began to slow.
This was my first kiss. A game of chance in a driveway, with one bottle of orange Vodka Cruiser in my belly.
I knew who it was going to be a second before it stopped. The bottle pointed accusingly at Anna. Onion girl.
I smiled at her. She smiled back. If she was disappointed, she didn’t show it. My eyes flicked to Ravi, who smiled back sympathetically.
‘Schnapps?!’ he offered.
I almost took a swig, but I didn’t, fearing that it would be rude to Anna, who was now crawling towards me with her bulky frame.
One moment she was an inch or two away, the next, her face was on mine. I realised that my lips were dry, and hers were ridiculously wet. I heard the crowd around us cheering. She opened her mouth and I felt her tongue on my lips, which I kept tighter than a cat’s arse, not daring to let her enter. Finally it was over, and she drew away.
‘You taste really nice,’ she said.
‘Thanks, so do you,’ I said, not really thinking about it.
‘You taste like orange.’
I shrugged and smiled, ‘The vodka, probably.’
And then the game kept going.
That night I went from having kissed no one to kissing my entire class. Sixteen people in total. Ravi was my second kiss. His spin landed on me. My curious desire was about to be satisfied, and I wondered briefly whether this would be an evening we would both remember and laugh about in years to come. Was this how a romance would start?
Our lips drew together. His face was warm, and I realised instantly how different kissing a man was, if for no other reason than the mashing together of facial hair. I was confident now, and I felt ‘experienced’ having kissed a total of one other person. I opened my mouth and stabbed my tongue like a weapon into his face, but his lips remained tightly shut. I knew what that meant. It was exactly what I had done to Anna.
We drew apart and he smiled at me, and the game kept going.
I think I was disappointed. Possibly heartbroken. But the whole thing was so casual, so mundane, that I didn’t know what to feel. And, as I kissed a dozen or more others, I began to ask myself why
’d I’d been so worried all this time. Why had I longed for a romantic partner as though it was significant? Affection, for us, at that time, didn’t seem to be too significant at all. In fact, it seemed like nothing. I suppose I should’ve felt relieved. But, somehow, I left feeling even more empty.
The cops turned up eventually. Ravi and a few others were talking about moving the party somewhere else, but I was done. It was midnight and I was cold. Any thin grasp the vodka had held on me was well and truly gone. Anna dropped me home. She’d been sober the entire time.
I crawled into bed and drifted into an uneasy sleep, the chanting and music still in my head. I was becoming a person I barely recognised.
For that, I was extremely grateful.
13
Fluids
‘Right!’ says Donna, clapping her hands with enthusiasm. ‘Today we’re going to talk about gender!’
She’s standing at the front of the classroom, beaming at us. We’re nearing the end of our first year, but we’re still as green as ever, and I spot a few students around me shifting in their seats. Donna’s lectures have a reputation for being mind-blowing for most, but confronting for a few.
For example, only a fortnight earlier we’d learnt about Beckett, a famous absurdist playwright. But with Beckett came a profound and quick education in existentialist philosophy and the work of some real party-throwers like Nietzsche, Sartre, Kafka and Joyce. This upbeat crowd had gotten into a bit of hot water in their day. Nietzsche, for example, was extremely fond of telling people that God was dead. The idea was received with about as much enthusiasm as could be expected of a nineteenth-century crowd. There was a similar response among the young student body of this particular regional university arts department. Regardless, it was an important part of arts history, and Donna taught it with zeal.
Donna’s classes were intense. She brought her flamboyant personality into the room and into her teaching. We would often leave the lecture theatre with cheeks sore from laughing. I found each lecture an amazing revelation. I was being introduced to new ideas almost every day.
But this class was slightly different. When Donna started talking about gender, we knew she was serious. Her PhD thesis, I had recently found out, was an examination of the role of boys in drama classrooms, which are usually filled with girls, and how young males relate to their gender. I realised that Donna might be able to help me with some of my confusion about being Gay Dave.
Or, on the other hand, I could just end up even more confused.
We were studying a play written in the spirit of 1970s feminism: Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill. It’s an amazing play for many reasons, but it raises some really tricky questions, like: what does being a man or woman even mean?!
Good question Caryl. Very good question.
In the final scenes of the play, a young man sits with his female friend. He’s desperately confused. Uncertain of his preferences, desires, or standing in society, he concludes the scene with a bewildering realisation: ‘I think I’m a lesbian.’
Wait.
Can men be lesbians?
Words like ‘queer’, ‘bisexual’, and ‘gay’ became a muddled mess in my head. Ravi, annoyingly, seemed to have it all figured out. I was fascinated and baffled.
Donna showed us a long series of slides that screwed with our heads. Jennifer Lopez with a beard. Still sexy. Still beautiful. But bearded. A still shot of pumped-up manly footballers, grabbing at each other and fondling, so close to kissing when you looked at it the right way.
I went home that day to a pile of Men’s Health magazines, which I kept for the false promise that I would one day become a beautiful beefcake. But the six-pack abs and perfect pecs took on a new meaning now. They were a result of fashion. It was like a secret pact had been made by society, in some place far away, that said, ‘This is what beautiful men look like, and this is how men behave.’ And because of this, I had always felt like I wasn’t beautiful, and I wasn’t behaving as a real man should.
Never mind Men’s Health, what about porn? Men with huge penises and tightly constructed bodies. Women with impossibly tidy vaginas and absurdly shaped breasts. What did it actually mean? And how did I fit in with any of it? What had porn been telling me about myself?
As I kept studying and talking with Ravi and Donna, I found the core of my thinking was changing. I had thought of gender as built on a rigid set of foundations: male, female; straight, gay. But my class’s indiscriminate horniness and the perspective that came with gratuitous amount of study on the topic made me realise gender was far more fluid than that.
Who would I be, who would I be with, if I suddenly lost all of this baggage about stereotypes and was just me?
Within the year, I found myself in bed with two people at different times: one male, one female. I would very soon get answers to many of the questions that had bothered me since my first timid sexual experience in the bathroom when I was thirteen.
Whether I would like the answers was a whole other matter.
Meet James. Glasses, blond wispy hair, and always fashionable. And considerably more well-built than me. Despite his attention to style, James looked ‘heterosexual’ according to my unexperienced perception. He was in the theatre department, but he was in the stage-management section, which was made up of electricians, technicians and generally straight men.
James was also a perfectionist and was involved with every production the university did. The staff, constantly grateful for James’s ceaseless volunteering, defined him as a ‘special case’, letting him stay extra late alone in the sound studio, armed with a can of Red Bull and an industry-standard sound desk. James would plug in his iPod and shake the walls of the studio with dubstep. In this private den, he would set about accomplishing whatever task was required of him. Amber would often join him.
Amber was also hard working, and as the two of us became closer, she asked me to help with a project that she and James were working on. So I found myself alone with James in the sound studio late one night. We were sharing a single computer screen and the long, dull task of waiting for huge amounts of data to be transferred from one hard drive to another.
It suddenly hit me: James and I would end up making out. I was almost certain.
Don’t ask me how. We weren’t doing anything special. It was just in the way we smiled at each other and talked. This had been what I was missing for all these years. An alignment of deliberate attraction, one side not outweighing the other. I didn’t feel guilty, pressured or ashamed. I knew, somehow, that James felt the same curiosity towards me.
So that’s what it felt like, to find someone who feels the same way about you as you do about them.
It felt remarkable.
It felt grown up.
Meet Rachel: red hair, big smile, perfect teeth, wonderfully intelligent.
Rachel and I had known each other since high school. She had attended an all-girls’ school across town, but we met at a school leaders’ conference. We had fallen into an easy conversation, and the friendship grew from there. We’d see each other at events, and then spend a lot of time talking online. Rachel put a lot of pressure on herself to succeed academically. It was a notion derived from a high-powered career-focused mother and father, and I had been the m
ost supportive friend that I knew how to be.
One evening, a few months after we’d first met, Rachel handed me a delicate handwritten note, politely informing me that she was in love with me.
I turned away her affection, clumsily and vaguely. But, because she was forgiving, because she listened to me, and perhaps because she was outside school and family, we stayed friends. She was supportive and kind, and she didn’t blink when I came out. We continued our friendship when I went to uni, frequently sleeping at each other’s house.
But I knew that the scales of the relationship were unbalanced. She was way more invested in me than I was in her.
Rachel gently insisted that I might not be gay.
James gently insisted that I was very gay.
With his hands.
James would keep touching me. Cheekily, briefly, in the most intimate of places, without any apology.
I went to Amber to talk about my feelings. I was attracted to James. It all seemed so funny and easy. But we barely saw each other outside uni—how would we make something happen?
I didn’t realise that James was talking to Amber as well, asking her almost exactly the same question.
So, Amber did what Amber always did. She made plans. She invited us both around, with Ravi and Nina, for an ‘Italian Night’, a feast of food and booze.
‘And if you get too drunk,’ she said, ‘don’t worry, there’s the spare room.’
Amber knew exactly what she was doing.
Rachel also knew what she was doing.
For my birthday, she surprised me with an all-expenses-paid four-night trip to New Zealand for me, herself, and her mother.
