by Dan Savage
I hadn't had sex in four months the night I met Terry. So, in all honesty, I couldn't have cared less how mature he sounded, and there was no need for him to lie about his age. I was primarily concerned with how he looked, and he looked good. We were in a bar, so I knew he had to be at least twenty-one, but he looked like a kid. He had shoulder-length hair, a huge mouth, and beautiful lips. He was wearing a tight T-shirt and dancing with friends. Terry awakened the dormant pederast that lurks in my soul. Like a lot of people, male and female, I have no interest in messing around with actual teenagers, but grown men who could pass for teenagers? Matt Damon? Johnny Depp? Brad Pitt? The male beauty ideal at the end of the twentieth century is distinctly adolescent, and on this issue I march in lockstep with the larger culture. Cute? Boyish? Hairless? Bring 'im in and strap 'im down.
We were at Re-bar, a funky bar on the edge of downtown Seattle, on a Wednesday night. It was Re-bar's fifth anniversary party, and the place was packed. I was gossiping with Ginger, one of Re-bar's drag queens, while she worked coat check.
“Look at that cute boy with the hair and lips,” I said to Ginger, nodding at the cute boy with the long hair and pretty mouth on the dance floor.
When the cute boy with the long hair and pretty mouth came over to coat check to get something out of his coat pocket, Ginger seized the opportunity to embarrass and humiliate me.
“Isn't this the boy you were talking about?” Ginger brayed. “Say something to him.” I glared at her. “Talk,” she commanded.
“You have a pretty mouth.”
Oh. My. God. I sounded like the rapists in Deliverance.
“The better to eat you with,” said the boy with the long hair and pretty mouth as he turned and walked back over to his friends.
A little later, and a whole lot drunker, he was back. It seemed he was serious about that better-to-eat-you-with comment. We chatted for a few minutes, just long enough to establish that we were both single, both of us dug the music (he meant it, I was being polite), and neither of us smoked. Then we made our way to Re-bar's only bathroom with a lock on the door.
Terry and I didn't consummate our relationship in the toilet, although Ginger did shove a handful of condoms under the door. Instead, we headed back to my place for some hi-how-are-ya-wanna-fuck-gay-boy-bar-slut sex. Making out in the bathroom broke the ice and allowed us to verify that neither was lying about being a nonsmoker. And before I take anyone home, I always make sure I like the taste of his spit. Terry's spit tasted a lot like beer, and I like beer, so I invited him back to my place. My ex had just moved out, taking the furniture with him, and I don't remember much of what we did in an empty apartment, but I do remember thinking, Wow, this guy is a great kisser.
The next morning, I couldn't remember the name of the cute boy with the long hair and the amazing lips, so I had to peek at his driver's license while he was in the bathroom. That's when I learned his real age and full name. Terry looked like the perfect transitional boyfriend. I had the trajectory of the entire relationship mapped out: I'd enjoy the pleasures of pederasty without any of the legal trouble; Terry would learn how to tie some interesting knots; we'd have a falling out over something stupid, not speak for a couple of months, and then be friends.
But it didn't work out quite that way. Despite my best efforts to find fault with Terry early enough to smother my growing infatuation—he hadn't been to college, he didn't know what he wanted to be when he grew up, I was seven years older, he worked in a video store—we kept on seeing each other.
It helped that, right after we spent the night together, he came down with a bad cold, awakening my warm and nurturing side. I saw him every night that first week, bringing him Thai food and renting him videos. Slowly, gradually, over two days, I fell in love.
On paper, you couldn't design a worse match. He was a club kid. Not the murderous drug-pushing New York City variety, but the kinda club kid who follows DJs, reads British music magazines, and works a seventies look. I don't like music, don't dance, and wouldn't follow a DJ to water in a desert. A mutual friend, a DJ as it happens, who knew both of us before we met, said that when he heard the news, he laughed out loud.
“Never in a million years would I have put you two together,” Riz said. “Never you two, never, never.”
If I'd met Terry a year or two earlier, I wouldn't have put us together, either. I wouldn't have seen him again after that first night. But here's what sealed it for me, here's what made it love: early in our two-day courtship, when he was sick, I bought him a book he'd mentioned. When I gave it to him, he was so excited he got out of his sickbed and jumped up and down. The book? Gore Vidal's United States, a twenty-five-pound collection of forty years' worth of Vidal's essays. Most twenty-three-year-old fags don't have a clue who Gore Vidal is, and Terry not only knew who he was but cared enough to jump up and down.
We'd been together ever since, and things had taken on an air of permanence: joint checking accounts, mutual decisionmaking about major purchases, vacation destinations, dinner plans, and so on. Though he spent practically every night at my place after the night we met at Re-bar, Terry kept his own apartment for nearly two years. My last boyfriend and I had moved in together pretty quickly, and I didn't want to jinx things with my new boyfriend.
Two years into this relationship, I still called Terry my boyfriend, much to my mother's dismay.
“He's not your boyfriend!” my mother instructed me. “You're thirty-two years old! He's twenty-six! You're not boys! You live together! You're talking about having children! He's your partner, Danny, not your ‘boyfriend’!” The older she got, the more my mother spoke in exclamation points.
Terry might not have been my boyfriend, but I felt silly calling him anything else. “Partner” made me feel as if we were cowboys or lawyers or the Clintons. It's just so . . . genderless. Straight people find it comforting, I guess, for its very genderlessness. Not coincidentally, the place you most often see “partner” used in the shacked-up-deviants sense is The New York Times obits of highprofile homos. Straight people and press organs that want to acknowledge gay relationships while at the same time pushing the two-penises stuff as far out of their minds as possible love “ partner.” I hate it.
Other alternatives to “boyfriend” had their own problems. Calling Terry my lover made me feel like Pepe Le Pew, some skunk with a French accent, and I wouldn't call him my spouse because he wasn't. Until same-sex marriage was legal, something I expected to happen around the time my children's children's children were long dead, I could only call Terry my husband or spouse if I was willing to say those words with little quotation marks stuck on each end. This I was unwilling to do. Not that we hadn't thought of throwing ourselves a faux wedding, inviting friends and family, and extracting our fair share of gifts, but we couldn't bring ourselves to do it.
Terry didn't want to get “married” or have a “wedding” or say “I do” because, he said, he didn't want to act like straight people, which is an odd thing for a gay man about to adopt a child to say. Can you act much straighter than having babies? Before we could think seriously about getting a kid, Terry and I had to make a serious commitment to each other. We wouldn't have a pretend “wedding” or exchange “rings,” and we wouldn't be changing partners quite so casually as we once did. After the kid came, if I ever left Terry, or if he ever left me, it'd have to be for some very good reason. But there'd be no wedding, and I'd never have a “husband.” For me, my discomfort with gay weddings was articulated by a close friend, who observed that gay people getting married is like retarded people getting together to give each other PhDs. It doesn't make them smarter, and it doesn't make us married.
As we drove from our hotel to the adoption seminar, the “ boyfriend” issue came up. We hadn't been together all that long, by gay or straight standards, and Terry didn't want us to emphasize our relationship's relative youth for fear of harming our chances. But when the inevitable go-round-the-table-and-introduce-yourselves moment came, we'd hav
e to say something. We had already agreed to lie about how long we'd been together, tacking on at least one extra year. But stuck in traffic on one of Portland's bridges, we couldn't come to an agreement on an acceptable alternative to “boyfriend.” We resolved to avoid the issue by avoiding any relationshipdefining terms. We wouldn't say boyfriend or partner or lover or anything, we'd just introduce ourselves as Dan and Terry. If any of the straight people at the seminar weren't savvy enough to figure out that we were homos, well, someone else would have to clue them in.
While we searched for parking, we tried to remind ourselves why we wanted a kid, another question we were sure to be asked during the seminar. There were a lot of reasons, and we'd discussed them at great length with each other, with friends, and with family. But as Terry pulled into a parking space, we were both so nervous that we couldn't recall a single one.
A Kind of Progress
The seminar was held at the other end of Portland from the Mallory, in Lloyd Center, an enormous and unsurprisingly soulless shopping mall. We parked near the Toys “R” Toxic and walked in. Lloyd Center was all plate glass, primary colors, canned music, and the usual-suspect collection of Gaps, Cinnabons, and chain department stores. For a weekday, the mall was crowded. In the food court, clumps of wary seniors eyed packs of surly teens. The only unique thing about Lloyd Center was the ice-skating rink plopped down in the middle of the atrium. At first, the rink seemed absurd, but then what wasn't absurd about this environment? Why not an ice rink?
Lloyd Center, like all malls, was designed to prevent the making of beelines. We were late and in a hurry, but we were forced to wander around looking for the conference rooms. We headed up an escalator, consulted a color-coded map that only added to our confusion, crossed a sky ramp, stopped in the food court for coffee, cut through one of Lloyd Center's two Baby Gaps, doubled back through the J. C. Penney's, and wound up back in front of Toys “R” Toxic. As mall design goes, Lloyd Center's was more devious than most, which was appropriate considering that Tonya Harding—a more devious figure skater than most—sometimes practiced on Lloyd Center's rink.
We looked at another map, and were forced to wander past the temptations of Cinnabon again and again, searching for the conference rooms. It was fitting that we'd come to a shopping mall to begin the “adoption process.” Children in the United States being the ultimate consumer item.
As it turned out, Lloyd Center's conference rooms weren't in Lloyd Center proper (very devious), but hidden behind an unmarked glass wall at the back of a cafeteria on the second floor of an attached office tower linked to the mall by yet another sky ramp. The office tower was not on any of the color-coded maps, so the three times we returned to the color-coded map next to the Cinnabon were a waste of time and willpower. The fight at the hotel, coupled with the hard time we had finding Lloyd Center's conference rooms, made us about ten minutes late, and we were the last couple to arrive.
We were also the youngest, the malest, and the gayest.
As we walked in, six couples sitting around the large conference table in the large beige room looked up at us. Tinted windows overlooked a parking lot, and with only two empty seats left at the table, it was abundantly clear that everyone was waiting on us. Someone from the agency handed us a notebook and gestured to the open seats. Unless they took advantage of our late arrival to warn the other couples that homos would be taking a place at the table with them today, our arrival must have come as a shock. If Terry and I had arrived first and some other gay couple had shown up at the last minute, I would have been shocked; this wasn't somewhere I would expect to find other gay men, so I couldn't imagine the straight folks weren't surprised when we walked through the door. But it was smiles and nods all around as we took our seats.
The conference room had the tense feel of a classroom before a standardized test. Everyone sat, willing themselves to stay calm and only succeeding in making themselves more nervous. The rest of the couples appeared to be between their late thirties and late forties, except for a couple across the table from us who looked late-twenties-to-early-thirties. Everyone was well dressed, well groomed, and well fed. Everyone was also white. The look was professional, upscale, and suburban, the guys in Dockers and the girls in tasteful blouses with skirts or pants. No one was guilty of too-big jewelry or too-big hair. Terry and I, in our jeans and T-shirts, baseball hats and running shoes, looked about as out of place in this room as we would at a coronation.
Sitting at the table, nervously pretending to review the agenda in our notebook, I found myself wondering who at the table disapproved.
The straight couples in this room had more important things on their minds than our homosexuality, of course. Homos can fall into the bad habit of seeing homophobes under every bed, so attached are we, at times, to our own oppression. Still, we were deep behind enemy lines. Making or adopting babies isn't something “they” expect to see “us” doing. I was willing to give everyone in the room the benefit of the doubt. It could very well have been that no one here disapproved of two gay men adopting a child. All these adoptive-parents-to-be could be as progressive as the agency they hoped to adopt from. Maybe the looks I saw six husbands shoot six wives were in my head.
Then I remembered some info the agency sent us when we first called, which included self-authored profiles of couples in the middle of the adoption process. More than half described themselves as Christian. Not all Christians hate homos, of course, and some Christians are themselves homos. But still, in America in the late nineties, it's safe to assume that most people who go out of their way to let you know they're Christians don't care for homos. So, come to think of it, odds seemed pretty good that someone at the table believed that my boyfriend and I were going to hell, and had no right to take a baby down with us.
As we waited for the seminar to begin, no one talked. No one made eye contact, either, which allowed me to look at each couple sitting around the table. Who hated us? Who could it be? Somebody there must have, but who? The guy sitting next to me who looked a lot like my father? The woman wearing huge glasses in the pink sweater? The couple who looked like they listened to NPR 24/7?
Maybe I was being paranoid—okay, I was definitely being paranoid—but what choice did we have? With overt displays of antigay attitudes frowned on in polite society, it is harder to tell when and where we're not wanted. Folks who don't like homos don't feel they can vent their prejudice as freely as they once did. Even when we're somewhere we are definitely not wanted, like the army, the folks who don't want us there go out of their way to be polite about it.
When Colin Powell, for instance, went on television to voice his support for the military's ban on openly gay soldiers, he began his remarks by saying that gay Americans were just as brave, patriotic, and true-blue as any other Americans. He liked gay people fine, he just wanted us the hell out of his army. We were bad for morale, the general said. Except, of course, when straight people want to go out dancing. Straights crowd into gay bars and dance clubs on Friday and Saturday nights, and no one's morale seems to suffer. Now, I personally have never wanted to join the army. Giving guns to straight boys, sending them far, far away, and ordering them to shoot at each other: why would anyone want to mess that up? That's a perfect system, in my opinion, and if something ain't broke, don't mess with it.
But, of course, I know other gays and lesbians want to be sailors, soldiers, and jar-head bad-asses, and so I recognize the ban on gays in the military as an injustice. And while I hope that someday the ban is overturned, I'm not going to lose sleep in the meantime. What was most interesting about the whole gays-in-the-military fiasco, however, was how Powell and everyone else felt obliged to dress their positions up in hey-I'm-not-a-bigot drag. They felt compelled to pay us compliments (brave! patriotic! true-blue!) even as they strove to perpetuate an injustice against us. Appear to be nice while keeping a foot on our necks. This is progress, I suppose.
Since hatred styles itself as tolerance these days, how are we supp
osed to tell the difference? What do you do when disapproval, indifference, tolerance, and acceptance all look exactly the same? Social tolerance has become the norm for most straight people, which is nice, but at the same time appearing tolerant has become the norm for everyone else. How are we supposed to tell the nice straight people and the bigoted straight people apart if everyone has the same look on their face?
Unfortunately, we can't, at least not until they run for office. And, again, this may be progress, but it's a kind of progress that induces paranoia on the part of the tolerated. When you can't tell the difference between people who hate you and people who don't, it's easy to feel you have no choice but to assume the worst. In some circumstances, the socially intolerant will kill us (R.I.P., Matthew Shepard). It seemed unlikely that we were gonna be murdered here in Lloyd Center's conference rooms (on the ice rink maybe) and, as I lived to type the tale, obviously we weren't murdered. Carrying this “Gee, does anyone in this room want to kill me?” tension around with us wherever we go takes its toll.
I find myself unsettled in this way more and more frequently. A few years after the military thing, I joined the Republican party. I lived in a heavily Democratic gay neighborhood, and thought it would interesting to see what the Republicans in my neighborhood looked like. Also, I didn't want to accidentally sleep with any of them. So I attended the Republican precinct caucuses during the '96 presidential campaign. There were even fewer Republicans in my precinct than I suspected; I was the only one at the caucus. The lonely Republican party official explained that if I cared to sign up, I would automatically be my district's Republican Precinct Committee Officer, and a delegate to the upcoming county and state conventions. When I found out delegates could make motions to amend the party platform, I cared to sign up.
