The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

I’m in the early hours of the morning, ponied up to a bar with a few friends, among them a strikingly beautiful, model-tall female we’ll call Shannon. We’re however many drinks in—that’s inconsequential, really, but alcohol is always motivating—and leaning into each another with droopy lids and grinning mouths. She smells good. I smell good. Our chemistries are working. I throw back the rest of my beer and slide the glass toward the bartender. She does the same. Then there’s that look. We shoot it to each other, almost simultaneously, knowing that the moment is coming. And then we’re kissing—no, we’re making out. I’m an out gay man, and I’m ferociously necking with a woman.
I’d feel more self-conscious copping to this habit of mine if I thought I were the only homosexual male in my set—educated, liberal, sexually exploratory—who indulged. That’s not to say that all gay men and straight women—however liberal—do it. In both groups you’ll find more who never would. After all, the idea of two people with very different sexual identities and attractions ending up tongue-tied is tinged with the absurd, even the pathetic. I don’t want to have sex with her, and she doesn’t want to have sex with me. So why are we engaged in the most overt sexual act a person can perform in public?
My lady-kissing started (or continued, I guess, but more on that later) after I came out. I got my first boyfriend as a 21-year-old senior at New York University, but only after I’d been in the relationship for a while did I gain the confidence to slow-roll my coming out to family and friends; and by 23—after falling deeply in love postcollege—I was a proud gay man to most everyone I knew. Given my upbringing in a small, conservative Arkansas town, you might think I’d be one of those stereotypical farm boys who, after coming to terms with his sexuality, embarks on a series of meaningless hookups. But I had a worldly, sex-positive mother who, from as early as I can remember, looked me and my brothers calmly in the eye and said, “Sex is a wonderful and beautiful thing.” Then she’d break out the Where Did I Come From? book, and we’d go through it page by page as she explained the hows and whys of that wonderful, beautiful thing. I perceived sex as more healthy (and possibly transcendent) than raunchy; I was more inquisitive about it than intimidated. All of which is to say that when I did come out, I didn’t throw on a mesh tank top and hot pants and take my new status as license to become sexually reckless with anyone, male or female.
At the most surface level, I kissed girls because, hey, it’s a good time. Kissing is a sensual experience, and I fancy myself as somewhat of a hedonist who’ll take his pleasures where he can get them. I appreciate physicality for its own sake, relish close contact with other bodies. But did kissing a girl ever make me want more? Did it arouse me? No. Gross. (Kidding—I’m not one of those gay men who’s disgusted by female anatomy.) Yet no matter how sexy the kiss, I just don’t get turned on. So, again, why bother? Why not just find a guy and optimize my pleasure? If only it were that simple.
Growing up in the South, there were activities in which I partook because they’re what Southern boys do: fishing, hunting, camping, riding four-wheelers, watching football, and drinking beer—all with a very close cadre of guys (and no, I didn’t lust after them). So far, those male friendships remain largely unmatched, and when I was on the brink of coming out, perhaps my biggest fear was losing them. It’s not that I thought my crew would write me off out of bigotry, but that they’d see me as this gay dude who’d only done boy stuff because he had to—that I’d be relegated to the cheerleading squad. Thankfully, that didn’t happen at all. I was anxious for everyone to know that I was the same old Seth, except for one little thing—and it turned out they knew it before I did. In the broader world, however, outside the cocoon of my closest confidants, I remained worried about being stripped of my masculinity. One way to display it was to hit traditional heterosexual markers. Yes, he may be gay, but I’ll be damned if he can’t get a beautiful female to find him so attractive that she’ll overlook his sexual predilection and stick her tongue in his mouth.
As the slip into the third person betrays, for me the spectacle was nothing without the audience. I’m not saying I rallied crowds to watch the gay get the girl, but being in the vicinity of others not only didn’t make me hesitate, it encouraged me. Once, Shannon and I went at it right in front of her boyfriend. In retrospect, he had every reason to want to throttle me for being such an asshole, but for some reason he didn’t flinch. Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel victorious when, in that moment, she chose me over him.
More fulfilling than making out with a girl in front of her boyfriend was doing it in front of certain gay men—one certain gay man, to be precise. Some prologue: If my first boyfriend, in my NYU days, helped me to peek my head out of the closet, it was Todd who pulled open the door, held out his hand, and yanked me into a glorious light that I thought we’d bask in forever. We’d met my senior year, when I was interning at Saturday Night Live and he was in another division at NBC as part of a “semester abroad” from his college in Santa Fe. He’d come out as a freshman, and I admired his conviction to live an open and happy life. Mild flirtation ensued, but he had a boyfriend, so I had to settle for infatuation. Post-graduation, after a summer at home in Arkansas, I moved to Colorado to spend a season as a bartending ski bum. Todd had returned to Santa Fe to finish his undergrad degree, and owing in part to our regional proximity, we struck up an affair (he’d broken up with his boyfriend). We talked all night every night, totally enamored in the getting-to-know-you phase, and I obsessively imagined our future together as Seth and Todd. I drove to Santa Fe twice, and we spent those weekends in isolated bliss. We never formally declared ourselves boyfriends, but by the spring, I’d fallen so deeply in love I was prepared to do anything for him, including move back to New York and come out fully, which I did.
Once back in the city, however, Todd told me he only wanted to be friends, and, stupidly, I pretended to try, holding on to a glimmer of hope that he’d eventually realize what a catch I was. I tried everything to get him back, including listening to him as he talked about boys who weren’t me and…making out with girls in front of him. It was my way of peacocking, of getting him to see me as someone who was worthy of being lusted after. No matter how drunk and cruisey I got at a gay bar, I would never have done it with a guy in front of him—I couldn’t risk Todd thinking I’d ceded even a modicum of love for him.