my hilarious new collection of off-the-wall political and personal essays
Preface
I believe it was around, or even on, my eighth birthday—so, September 21st, 1963—when I awoke from a romantic dream about Robert Goulet (he was holding me in his arms and singing “If Ever I Would Leave You” while Julie Andrews, dressed as Mary Poppins, glared at me from her sexless void)—I awoke from that paradise of dark chin stubble and ringing baritone and thought,
“Oh, for Pete’s sake. Of course! That’s what they forgot to tell me.
“I’m gay.
“I’m a Queer. A Flamer. A Poofter, a Pansy, a Nelly, a Ponce.
“One of those.
“No need to pretend any more. I can own this thing! I totally identify with Jane Eyre, I love the men’s underwear section of the Eaton’s Christmas Catalogue, and if you want me to stop hogging all the attention, doll, you’d better nix the applause.
“When I put on cologne, I put on half a bottle of Shalimar. Seriously, what’s the point of holding back? And it gets me my own seat on the school bus.
“I like hanging out with the girls during quiet time. Girls are nicer, more helpful than boys, and they appreciate my baking. Care for another date square? Charmed!
I ♥ skin-tight and/or revealingly short clothing in, if not paisley, then either all-black or highlighter pink. Is this a crime in a world where refrigerators are harvest gold?
“No more shame about wearing those plaid shorts hiked up with the suspenders, either. Stop twirling your toe in the dirt, girl! After all, you invented male camel-toe. Embrace it!
“I’m constantly stressed about my unruly fly-away bangs, what self-respecting eight-year-old isn’t? Pass the Dippity-Do!
“I won’t deny that I tried on my sister’s prom dress while she was out bowling at Whitby Plaza, but surely this proves I’m secure in my masculinity! And I suspect she was crying because I looked better in it, but I’m much too kind to say so.
“That’s the other thing: I’m kind. When I made Tilly Pellis laugh while she was drinking chocolate milk and it came out her nose, who was there to shield her from the haters? Moi, that’s who.
“I get it, now. That’s why, when I go for a haircut, and Mario the barber presses into me as he snip snip snips away, I get that pleasurable ache in my belly that mingles with the scent of shaving cream and cigarette smoke and Barbicide—and I don’t mean to be pedantic, but why doesn’t that mean “the act of killing Barbie” ?
“Freedom! No more pretending that I have a doctor’s appointment once a week that gets me out of gym class when it’s actually my piano lesson. I’ll simply hang around the changing rooms until Coach Wessel steps out of the shower, hand him his towel, and explain that my dengue fever got cured!
“I’m done. I’m takin’ the train to Faggot Town, baby!”
I think that’s how it happened. And no raised eyebrows or tut-tuts about my age, either. When you’re born gay, which I was, it takes a supreme act of will not to know, even in 1963.
So relax. There were no dirty uncles diddling me or strangers with candy flashing me from the driver’s seat of their Chevy Corvette.
That came much later, when I was well into my twenties.
MOVING ALONG LIKE a piece of dislodged plaque in a sclerotic artery, you’re naturally burbling over with questions about my new book. Let’s start with the cover I designed (check out the image, it should be somewhere close) and please don’t go all “control freak” at me. John Updike used to design his own covers, so I’m in illustrious company.
First, see how I’ve juxtaposed—
What did you say?
Oh, it is not. Oh, c’mon, you’re embarrassing me. Oh, stop it.
Really? You think so?
Now let’s take an in-depth moment to close-read my cover design, divine the Northrup Frye-ish unity which it surely must present.
The cover shows, in the background, one of Sandro Botticelli’s illustrations to Dante’s “Inferno”. I believe this is the seventh circle of Hell, reserved for sodomites, liars, and the guy who first put pineapple and ham on a pizza.
That’s one out of the three, at least, that Sandro, as an Italian, would have had no affinity with, especially considering pineapples had just been invented (though, of course, ham is eternal).
(Hey, wait, I think I have a joke: “I thought sodomite was a sedimentary rock formation until I discovered Smirnoff!” OK, maybe not.)
Botticelli, a gay man in fifteenth-century Florence, had an anxious life. I know this, as one gay man knows another, down to his sweaty palms and curled toes, even across five centuries. Sure, there were lots of Florentine gay men and they were quite visibly and openly so—they say Leonardo was quite the dandy—but the winds could shift…
At any moment, out of great calm, the trees could groan, heave up their branches, and a Borgia or a Medici could decide that you were an abomination, with consequences ranging from aggravating to indescribable.
So here is Botticelli, painter of the iconic “Birth of Venus” and “Primavera”, a man of exquisite sensibility and genius, filled with ambivalence as he draws what he probably believes are the torments awaiting him, his own hideous eternal punishment.
All of a sudden, like a pair of randy bovines barging into William Ashley Fine China, onto our disco floor strut the very pushy-forward-type gay men of our 21st century, camping it up in their own private Busby Berkeley routine, with no idea who Botticelli might be or why they’d want to know; who, if you told them about the seventh circle of Hell, would think,
“Seriously? Wow. What a bummer. It sounds like it’s gonna be a drag, blowing all those demon dicks for eternity. I guess. Well, what can you do and in the meantime—PARTEEEE!!!”
This is by way of admitting that gay men—and of course I speak freely and with permission on behalf of every last one of them—ruin everything we stand beside, and if you tell us this one late afternoon out of anger or frustration we will look chastened for a moment, then wounded.
But after five seconds or so—having made the heroic effort to sustain an emotion that long—we’ll break into a wicked smile, tell you a whimsical joke, or kiss you on the earlobe; you’ll catch a whiff of hurried, early-morning sex or feel intoxicated by our Eau Sauvage and start to melt a little, thinking—
“Who needs some aerated Venus-with-a-shenis on a seashell anyway, and my gawd that hair! It just screams ‘plays soprano recorder in the early music consort’! Venus may be many things, but vegan that girl is NOT—!”
You see? I’ve proven my thesis by ruining something, and I wasn’t even trying.
SO WHAT IS MY BOOK “ABOUT”?
YOU MAY BE WONDERING ABOUT the title. Allow me to pull back the Oz-curtain to reveal the startling truth, the highly-strung back end, and I just wish that didn’t sound the way it sounds, of the gay scene.
It’s a Friday night, and you’re preparing to lie face down on the living room floor in a GHB-induced coma, ready for your “date”—all that remains to do is to set that up.
You will gather from this carefree, last-minute attitude that gay dating is a very contingent, Will-I, Won’t-I, Is it raining? Can’t go out, I’ll melt like candy! kind of affair.
If I’m online and some hapless newbie messages me to ask if we can meet in two days’ time, I splutter with laughter because, seriously—how do I know I’ll be horny in two days’ time? Maybe I’ll be in a Buddhist monastery. Or at my Pulitzer Prize ceremony. (Lily Pulitzer.)
I don’t even know if I’ll fit into any of my clothes or like any of my friends in two days’ time!
Instead, once I’ve located a real player, someone who’s been around the block, but kept their lifetime of experience perfectly self-contained and unexamined, lest it sprout even the first frail tendril of wisdom, the text conversation invariably goes (edited for brevity):
Real Player: Hey wanna hook up?
Isolated Author: Sure, address?
RP: 123 My Street, that’s in Riverdale.
IA: OK, I’ll just hop in the shower, get dressed, get a cab, and be with you in say 30 minutes?
RP: THIRTY MINUTES???!!!! Sorry, dude, looking for now LOL!
In other words, any time lapse between your last text message and arriving at their place is unacceptable. You have to be instantly there.
They are looking for NOW, baby, do you not capisce this? Understanden Sie nicht the urgentesse?
The only solution that I’ve been able to work out which would satisfy their surreal demand for, basically, teleportation, would be to kill myself, then get reincarnated as the infant son of some girl roommate of his, at which point I grow up in the same house for eighteen years until I’m legal.
Which would be almost the perfect strategy for a person with patience, staying power, and focus, except I am not that person.
And even if I were that person, what the other guy is saying with this is, effectively, anyone will do who is immediately available. Your hours in the gym were wasted, girl. He doesn’t care about your giant biceps or your thighs like thunder. You are not his fantasy.
His fantasy is of someone who can form out of the gloopy ectoplasm the instant he’s horny and wants to get off. Then, having materialized in his bed, this undifferentiated ecto-lover does something nasty to him involving double-A batteries and a black rubber sheet, then vanishes, leaving a breath mint on the bedside table.
And believe me, you’ll need one, because in a ballroom filled with one thousand gay men, nine hundred and ninety-nine of them’s fantasy will be, “get gangbanged by bikers, and you have to do all the inviting.”
The other cockroach in the KY is my insistence on clinging to my worthless but still undeniably fabulous life. I would never kill myself. I’m too much of a Nosy Parker about what might happen tomorrow and wondering if it could possibly be as bad as today.
In case you were wondering but are too shy to ask: Of course it could! That’s why I’m a considered merely a cock-eyed optimist.
OK? I’ll just let you put all that in a Tupperware container for safekeeping. Don’t try to figure it out, though. I didn’t say gay men made sense. I said gay men were fabulous. It takes a whole lot of energy to be fabulous and we figured “making sense” was pretty much discredited as an MO anyway…
excerpt from “Sorry Looking for NOW LOL” by David Roddis. ©2023-24, by David Roddis / The Future Progressive. All Rights Reserved.
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