How I found the different type of gay when I least expected to: Mitchell’s story
Three days in, and New York has been continuously disappointing.
Each morning I wake in my hostel wondering how I can possibly fill the hours until I sleep again.
I soar to the heights of the Empire State Building and take the ferry to Staten Island just for something to do, not because I have any desire to see either.
I flew to this city via Iceland and, if I’m honest, the knowledge that I could have stayed there amongst the glaciers, violet lupine and lava fields, is enough to make me cry.
What sweet relief it is, then, when I meet a South American man, Paulo, who is staying in the same dorm as me. By night fall, when I’m ready for bed, he’s rearing to explore and his energy is infectious.
He’s also gay, which makes me feel comfortable.
In France I hung out with a male traveller who only wanted to talk about breasts.
“Let me take you to the High Line,” I say, suddenly buzzing and talking about this city as though I live here and know all its nooks and secret curves.
Paulo is impressed, and as the night progresses, we go into a bar and dance together. I feel intoxicated despite only having one drink.
This is me, dancing with a stranger: me, who no one has ever wanted to stand beside; me, who no one here is staring at in horror.
Maybe this is the allure of New York, this beautiful city that I can love after all.
Yes, I think I do like it here, even if this music isn’t what I’d normally listen to …
“Sauna,” Paulo says and in a second, the word snaps me into sobriety.
I’ve always had a weird relationship with alcohol: I could be pumped full of spirits but, if I’m already unhappy or uncomfortable, nothing will shake me from that state. Alcohol doesn’t take the edge off for me at all in these moments; it sharpens the curve into a razor and, right now, part of me is bleeding profusely.
Paulo has come equipped with the names and addresses of different saunas.
“You go,” I offer, though it’s hard to say even these two words because it means the night is over. I’ve got no idea how I’ll get back home, but I’d rather be out here, on these unknown streets than in a sauna — the very last place I want to spend a holiday.
I’m in my late twenties and have never been to a sauna, which makes me an oddity, really. I even feel a little embarrassed that this is the case, but that doesn’t outweigh my refusal to change it.
Paulo begs and begs me — what fun it will be!
Fun? What about what we had? Is that already forgotten?
That beautifully awkward dance we’ve just shared is not enough. I, myself, can never be enough.
Sometimes I can’t remember why I wanna live, but I think of all the freaks and I don’t want to miss this
I read these words, aged 17, in the photocopied pages of a zine. It would be years before I found out they were lyrics by the queercore band, Team Dresch, but by then it wouldn’t matter. They had shown me there were other people out there, lingering in the cool pools of shadows.
Freak. Once I might have run from such a word. Now I realise it fits me so well, like a trench coat that I could walk through the toughest, meanest city in knowing I was untouchable. No one wanted to touch me. There was a power in that — after all, who has more strength than a monster?
Let me be upfront with you: I am aware — very aware — that I’m one of those “obvious” gays. Either my voice or the way I walk will give it all away in a second, less that a second. I don’t pretend, don’t see the point in faking something that isn’t there. I’m not ashamed of being me.
Where I run into trouble is what I’m left with, this world that makes me so tired and confused. Maybe it’s because, as a child, The Wizard of Oz was my favourite movie, but I always imagined finding an Emerald City, not knowing that emerald is a weak gemstone that can break so easily.
As an adult, I moved to the city looking for a gay world I could enter with the ease of feet into slippers. But they were glass slippers, and my feet — swollen and suppurating — would soon shatter this contraption into shards I could never entirely sweep up.
Not everyone understood my despondency and aching deflation.
In a bar one night, a man offered some encouragement. “Go on, put yourself out there. You’re fresh meat.”
Soon after my dour disposition came to outweigh my voice and most people would consider me too depressing to be gay. I can practically quote Prozac Nation verbatim.
My big secret is that I live in a state of constant imagination, playing what if the way someone rushes to the casino for thrills. You know that man who you see waiting at the train station each morning? The one who’s reading a book about Banksy. What if he’s just waiting for the right moment to ask me to come and stencil poetry over this city with him. What if I can meet another type of gay man, not in the gym or sauna, but after colliding with one another in the corner of a musty library. He takes me home to lend a CD I’ve been searching for for years and his walls are lined with bookshelves. I learn he plays my favourite instrument: the harp.
The question is: where are these people hiding? I should take up bird-watching because I’m always searching for something that you don’t get to see too often.
Surely some of the fault was no doubt mine: whenever I met someone, I likely had the unrealistic expectation that — voila — they would morph into what I had always been looking for and could only find in fiction. Now, time is running out. I’m exhausted hearing “Let’s catch up soon” just because someone doesn’t have the courage to say you repulse me. Despite the dark books I’ve read and love, this isn’t what I wanted but, like my favourite authors, I seem incapable of writing happy endings — especially for my own story.
I am early. Of course I am. I’m so used to waiting that by now it’s become my habit.
From the third floor of the book store, I look down onto the city and try to spot the man who has come to meet me, try to shake off the guilt that he has taken a bus to get here; I was able to walk.
I know his proper name, but to me he will always be identifiable by his profile: lovesurrender. Surrender is the title of one of my favourite books, and I can’t imagine anything more beautiful than succumbing to this powerful force. And yet …
I’ve been through all of this so many times before. This sitting, smiling, nodding politely before the person vanishes, and if we ever see one another again, nothing but a ghost’s recognition flutters between us.
It’s not yet winter but the air bites us with piranha force until we find ourselves in another bookstore with a café. Here we go again, I think.
But as we speak, something changes, something subtle as the first leaf of autumn reddening the green. I learn he grew up in a war-torn country. Like me, his family is not a stranger to the greedy hands of suicide. He quotes me his bible, The Velvet Rage, and I share lines from Prozac Nation with him in return.
For a time, I wonder if this is all just a story, until I relax. What is life, if not one story we tell ourselves to make the hours that must follow bearable?
“Your favourite word?” I ask.
“Dove,” he replies.
“Mine’s gossamer,” I say.
Soft, softer: our words coalesce like candle wax, taking the shape of a Rodin sculpture.
It’s a solitary piece that will melt sometimes, break occasionally before the four hands smooth over it, and while it always stands alone in a park, unprotected from the elements, it’s a reminder that he is still there, will always be there near me: the different kind of gay.
This story was first published in Episode 1: Different on the podcast, Different Kind of Gay.
