by Tim Anderson
“But, do you really want to spend the rest of your life in New Jersey? Don’t you want to see more of the world, like Ohio or North Dakota?”
“Not really,” he replied. “What I really want is no different from what everyone else wants: the house in the suburbs with the white picket fence, the dog, the big backyard, the station wagon.”
So he was just an old-fashioned kind of guy. It was kind of cool in a way. Harmless and sweet.
“Yep, just me and my mother,” he finished, staring off into the distance.
I felt, for the first time ever, like the most well-adjusted person in the room.
So, my roommate was going to be no help in assisting me out of my dreary sexless wasteland of a love life. Fine. And he would probably not be able to keep me from slipping into a diabetic coma in the middle of the night, either. Sure, OK. For the latter problem I would just make sure to go to sleep every night with a row of Twinkie packets under my pillow. For the former problem, hmm, maybe I should check out the LGBT group?
If there was a conglomeration of stable, easy going, and blissfully happy souls on a college campus in 1991, it was surely not the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender group at Guilford College that met once a week to catalog their disappointments and cry on one another’s shoulders. The meetings were under-attended stone-cold-bummer festivals. Jam-packed glitter ball party-bomb free-for-all hedonistic bacchanals were more what I was after, with games like Gay Charades, Gay Naked Twister, Gay Strip Poker, and Pin the Tail on the Smooth Bleached-Blond Men’s Underwear Model. I needed a safe yet lively space that would allow me to lose all my inhibitions, shed my desperate diffidence, and maybe make some barely dressed new friends, who would travel with me down my own yellow brick road to the Emerald City where we could cut loose at invite-only tickle parties with the Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s harem of hairless boy toys.
At the LGBT meetings we never even played a quick game of “Gay or Just European?” I had hoped that the folks in the LGBT group would push me out the closet doors with their strong, large hands, not reinforce my own neuroses about how awful our plight was and what a tough, non-yellow-brick road we’d be traveling down in life, especially us ugly ones, because I’m pretty sure we all thought that most of us were hideous. It was basically a small group of morose, socially awkward souls who, truth be told, I had little desire to see naked. Sad-eyed, pale, and unkempt, most of them looked as if they had spent their entire adolescences hiding in their rooms with the lights out reading Michel Foucault in their Jedi robes. In short, they reminded me too much of myself (though, full disclosure, I’d never been able to make my way through even one chapter of a Foucault book), and God knows I didn’t have any patience for any more of my kind of low-rent nonsense. I was craving slutty sophistication, classy coital catharsis: blow jobs on yachts, rim jobs on private planes, taint rubs in penthouse hot tubs with chocolate fondue fountains at every corner. This LGBT was not delivering any of this, not even the fondue. (I was under the impression all gay gatherings would have fondue.)
The leader of the group was a sad-faced boy named MJ, a bisexual who lived just a few doors down from me in Milner Hall. He had an angular haircut—severe bangs in the front, playfully jagged cuts on the sides, a few curly tassels in the back—a coiffure that overall seemed a reverential shout-out to eighties glory days long since passed. MJ had a nerdy, deceptively friendly, boyish face; he always seemed on the verge of a smile, but once it arrived his smile could only be described as…sarcastic. Like, he wasn’t really smiling at you, he was just going through the motions of smiling at you so you would piss off and leave him alone. This what-are-you-looking-at defensiveness of his ensured that I kept my trap shut good and tight during the weekly meetings. Still hypersensitive about bringing attention upon myself, I was having a hard time saying the words “I’m gay” out loud and had greatly overestimated my ability to say it even in a room full of others of the same persuasion. So, though I attended the meetings every week, I would try my best to blend in with the furniture while listening to other people jibber-jabber endlessly about some depressing thing or other: skinny, pimply, bespectacled Daniel lamenting how he doesn’t fit the muscle-bound gay ideal; jowly Jarvis talking about how nervous he was about telling his parents the truth about himself; affable Alyson wondering why she should come out on Coming Out Day if she didn’t even have a girlfriend; and glum MJ bringing things in for a landing by complaining about some homophobic slight or other that he had suffered in the past week, like being told to turn down his Pet Shop Boys, for the love of God, by our RA. (MJ was a big fan of their second album, and the entire dorm knew it.)
Not that I would have been any better, if I’d had the balls to even speak up. Had I done so, I probably would have started things with a dramatic “Why am I so alone?” and then just started weeping. But I was a complete and utter coward, so I decided I would not say anything until called upon to do so, and even then only with a gun to my head. I planned to just sit there until someone hot walked into the room, sat down next to me, popped open the first few buttons of his Calvin Klein top, gripped my knee with his strong hand, and, leaning in, whispered into my trembling ear, “Tell them, Tim. I’ll be right here, with my shirt off.”
That said, there were some evenings when a ray of light shone through the grim proceedings, like when the Guilford gay group cohosted a party with UNC-G’s gay group, an event that brought in some new folks from the other side of town, thus joining country mice with city mice. The party was taking place at an on-campus student house called the Pope House, where the most visible gay boy on campus lived. His name was Matthew, and he was a full-time homosexualist: He had bleached-blond hair and never left the house without some queer-themed T-shirt on or other. It was ACT UP one day and a screen print of two hot dudes kissing the next. He never really hung out on the Guilford campus, spending most of his time with the townie queers. And he definitely didn’t go to the LGBT meetings because, hello, he already had a life. But he was apparently happy to host a meet-up at Pope House before everyone adjourned to the bars.
I didn’t have any friends at Guilford yet, so I went to this party by myself. I only had to hang out in the bushes for about a half hour before deciding that enough people had shown up there to make it safe for me to slip in without causing a scene. A few folks were standing in the doorway, so thankfully I didn’t even need to knock, I just squeezed through them as they talked absently, not noticing me. The outer rim of Pope House’s first floor was flecked with folks conversing and drinking, some of whom I’d seen around campus. I went through and slouched down into the first seat I could find, which ended up being in the living room, smack in the center of the house. I tried to look like I belonged there, moving my head to the music, smiling, and picking up snacks from a tray on the coffee table and nervously nibbling. Matthew walked through looking annoyed, searching for someone or something that had displeased him, and caught sight of me, a mysterious stranger in his house eating his snacks like he owned the place.
“Hi,” he said. “You go to Guilford?”
“Yes, I…Milner, you know, over there, I do, uh-huh. From Raleigh.”
He nodded and furrowed his brow slightly, unused as he was to the exciting new English syntax I was making up as I went along. I was ready to let him know my favorite bands and foods and career plans, should he ask.
“Huh,” he said. “Well, welcome!” And with that he was off to solve some party problem or other. I figured I would just wait until later to tell him that my favorite movie was Blade Runner and I planned on being either a stenographer or Greg Louganis’s personal assistant.
At that moment a new pack of partygoers arrived amid a flurry of kisses, declarations of “Haaaaaaay,” and impromptu flash dances. I figured the gaggle of gaywads twirling around the hallway must be from UNC-G. They were way too uncouth and gay-positive for Guilford. As a few of them made their way into the living room, I noticed a girl I’d seen at one of the Guilford LGBT meetings.
She’d been a guest speaker from the UNC-G group and had a remarkably friendly face for a lesbian. She also had the most preposterous hairstyle I’d ever seen at that point in my life. (It would be another eight years before I made it to Tokyo.) On one side it was shaved close to the head, with a bit of puff starting about an inch above the ear, but this puff grew as she turned her head, traveling diagonally down in the back as the hair got longer and curlier, until on the other side of her head it was a full-fledged bob. I had to give her points for originality and chutzpah. Her absurd coiffure, coupled with her chubby frame and overall friendly demeanor, made me think to myself Now this is a person I can surely talk to. Because all fat people are jolly.
All fat people are not jolly. She lit a cigarette and sat down in the chair next to me, moving her head in rhythm with the beat of the obnoxious rave music that was playing on the stereo. (She had great rhythm for a lesbian, too.) Seeing her responding to the music so groovily made me listen a little bit closer to what was playing, and what was playing was a house anthem whose lyrics went something like this:
“Fi- fi- finger. (Ah!) FingerFUCK. Fi- fi- finger. (Ah!) FingerFUCK.”
Color me shocked. I was, I’d always thought, no prude. I prided myself on my broad palate for the degenerate arts. I considered the Buzzcocks’ “Orgasm Addict” a pure pop classic. I happily sang along to The Sugarcubes song “F**king in Rhythm and Sorrow” while riding around in my Plymouth in high school. Bongwater’s The Power of Pussy was one of my current favorite albums. I only dry-heaved three times while watching Pink Flamingos. But this was…this was…just so shameless and gross. It was one gloriously offensive word sung over and over and over. It had nothing going for it but sheer lowest-common-denominator smut.
“I’m sorry,” I said, turning to my new best friend with the idiotic hairmop, “is she saying…fingerf*ck?”
She stopped moving her head to the music, looked at me with an affronted expression as if I had just asked her if gravity was provable, and said, “Uh, yeah.”
“Put your p-p-p-p-put your finger p-put your finger in the hole.”
I nodded, still not believing my ears. She looked as if she couldn’t believe hers either. “Have you not heard this at the clubs?” She sneered with her lesbian lips. “It’s pretty much all over the place.”
“Oh, um, no, not at the places I’ve been going.” The places I’d been going were, in order of highest to lowest frequency: my bedroom, class, the cafeteria, the library, the computer lab, the men’s showers at my dorm, and the LGBT Gatherings of Doom and Sadness. And no, I hadn’t heard “Fingerf*ck” at any of those venues.
It was 1991, of course, the year that rave broke big in the US, and it came to Greensboro in a big way. All the kids were falling over themselves to be first in line at the next all-night ecstasy orgy sponsored by glow sticks, pacifiers, and dirty ’n’ degenerate electroshock tunes on the turntable. But I didn’t know any of this yet. I hadn’t gone to my first rave, though I was weeks away from it. I was an innocent babe in the woods who didn’t know that it was even legal to name a song “Fingerf*ck.”
Thoroughly disgusted with me, my ex-new best friend stood up and lip-synced as she danced away and rejoined her friends to tell them that this weird square she’d just met hadn’t ever heard of their favorite song to dance to while souped up on crazy drugs and giving each other inner thigh massages. So perhaps I should go to one of these raves. Maybe fatuous, repetitive, epileptic ear-rape was what was really missing from my life. Apparently it’s what all the gay boys like. If you can’t beat ’em, fingerf*ck ’em, amiright?
So a few weeks later I went with a few folks from the Guilford radio station to a rave party downtown. I’d just joined WQFS as a new DJ, getting my own radio show in the highly coveted two-to-five a.m. slot on Saturday mornings. I tended to hear some of the scuttlebutt about what folks were up to for the weekend. When I heard from another DJ, Becky, that there was a rave party in the offing, I jumped at the chance and invited myself along on the field trip into town.
Becky and I walked over to the dorm where we were to be picked up by whoever she knew who had a car, and on the way I took the opportunity to do some reconnaissance.
“So, have you been to a rave before?”
“Kind of,” she said. “I went to this one club night at this bar, and it seems like it started turning into a rave the later it got. You know, lots of laser beams and spontaneous massages and children’s clothing. Not sure what this one’s going to be like.”
“Have you heard of the song ‘Fingerf*ck’?” I ventured.
“Oh yeah, that song is retarded. But, you know, hilarious. Kind of like raves in general.”
We strolled in and ordered nonalcoholic beverages because none of us were of age. It didn’t take long for me to get bored, but then miraculously, a song came on that I recognized: Blur’s “There’s No Other Way.” Sure, it was a severely chopped-up and reassembled rave remix, but beggars can’t be choosers, so we the WQFS DJs entered the dance floor and started shaking. It wasn’t long before I felt someone touching me on the neck and shoulders. I turned around and saw that it was a young lady vampire with short bleached-blonde hair, alabaster white skin, a black lace corset, fishnet tights, a spiderweb drawn at her left temple, and fuck-me pumps. How was she dancing in those? I smiled at her, and she moved her hands to my chest, squeezing and massaging my admittedly smoking hot pectorals. Was I being seduced? Already? By this undead lady? I really wanted to ask that she take a breath and perhaps give her boyfriend Lestat a chance to charm my pants off, but I was enjoying the attention too much. She eventually moved on to some other chump, as folks in the capricious throes of ecstasy-fueled dance mania are wont to do, and after a few endless rave jams about sex and orifices and breasts and dicks and other indecent vocabulary words, I moved to the sidelines to watch others dance stupidly.
Becky and the WQFS folks scattered in different directions, and I quickly lost track of them. A new song was coming on, and it was a slow burner that some folks weren’t sure they could dance to, so the floor started clearing off. But one guy appeared to know the song, whose only lyrics seemed to be “Make me cum.” He toddled onto the dance floor and started moving, beguilingly. In the next few minutes I would get an eyeful of him and another strapping young buck “dancing” together, a tableau that would convince me that I was gazing on the immaculate image of my two future husbands. Because I was ready to propose to both of them.
Bachelor #1 had a backward black baseball cap on, turned at a slight angle. He wore no shirt, just a criminally tight black pinstriped vest against which his rock-solid upper body muscles pressed adamantly. His black jeans were also tight, his junk also adamant. His dancing style was minimalist. There wasn’t any flailing about or “fag clapping.” He just stepped around swaying rhythmically, occasionally wiggling a little in the manner of the Twin Peaks dwarf, one of his arms raised with his hand clenched in a seductive fist. His lips were curled into an “I’m too sexy” smirk of the first order, one that said, “Yes, I know you’re watching me, keep doing it, because just you wait.”
Bachelor #2 was the show-off. Not even bothering with a shirt, he prowled the dance floor like a Nellie panther, circling #1 with a glint in his eye. He wore tight blue jeans and Doc Martens and had a tattoo of a cross on his back, which was both sexy and wholly inappropriate, seeing as what he was about to get up to. He honed in on #1 closer and closer until their bodies touched, sending an electric shock through my body: #2, approaching from behind, placed his hand on #1’s shoulder and the two started moving in tandem. All of a sudden I never wanted to watch anything else ever, just this, just these two, becoming best friends forever, in front of all of us. I’d never actually seen a porno movie, but I was sure that this was what the first five minutes of one looked like.
I stood at the side of the dance floor, transfixed. And before my eyes things got real. The two young men were now moving as one body, pressed tightly against each other, brazenly
simulating the act that I believe the Bible refers to as “an abomination.” “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind,” Leviticus says. From where I was standing, though, there was no “lying with mankind” going on; it looked more like “one mankind plowing another mankind from behind, rewind.”
I was beside myself with yearning. How could I make this type of thing happen for myself? These gentlemen did it wordlessly, on the dance floor, while the most unromantic song played on the turntable. What are the chances? I’d always thought that I would meet my first lover in a record store when we both reached for the same Smiths bootleg album at the same time and proceeded to fight/flirt over it by quoting Morrissey lyrics. (“No, you just haven’t earned it yet, baby.”) But it seemed like in that scenario it would take too long to get to the part where you’re bumping and grinding half naked under a strobe light. I want to get to that part, like now.
The boys finished their dance and escorted each other to another room in the club to discuss literary theory and jerk each other off. How does one continue one’s night of innocent dancing after a display like that? Nothing, and I mean nothing, could measure up. I’d lost track of my WQFS mates, which comforted me a little because at least they probably hadn’t seen me salivating on the sidelines of an impromptu almost-live-gay-sex show. As my tawdry fugue state dissipated and I slowly came back to myself, I couldn’t help but wonder: Where was I? How did I get here? What was my name? Who are all these people? And what on earth is this god-awful song blaring from the speaker that this tiny Asian girl in black lingerie is dancing to?
Needless to say, I started going to raves a lot. I kept close tabs on Becky and Co.’s plans and piggybacked on them whenever possible. Meanwhile, over the Christmas holiday I figured I should probably continue my sheepish, thoroughly abashed coming out and tell a few more friends. I was still so afraid of saying the words out loud—I hadn’t said “gay” about myself since I’d told Dani the previous summer. And since I’d been at Guilford I appeared to be moving backward, stepping farther back into the closet. Things hadn’t been going according to plan—I’d assumed that once you started saying “I’m gay” that it would just start an unstoppable avalanche of “I’m gay”s until everyone knew, everything was fine, and folks started pre-empting you before you even had a chance to make your proud declaration.
