Coming, Part IV - Stimulation

“Wait, what?” I stopped. At my office desk, in front of my computer, my work came to a halt. I pressed my head into my open palm; I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Chu, the guy who had flirted his way into a month’s worth of online conversations before meeting up and then inadvertently hooking up—he was now coming clean that he was not gay at all?

“I think that, before we started making out, before we went into your bedroom… do you remember when we were talking?”

I struggled to keep my patience. “Yes…”

“Well, I remember you brought up a lot of things that were of concern to you.”

I flashed back to the moments before our hookup. We were in my living room, talking across from each other, building tension through body language, eye contact, and the space between us. Somehow, we began talking about the idea of moving too fast, and I brought up a few scenarios that my overly-analytical mind warned me to be cautious against: What if he just needed a homosexual outlet from his chaste Arkansan seclusion? What if he wasn’t really attracted and just needed an easy way to get off for the summer that we’d be working near each other? At the time, though those questions surfaced, he assured me that—despite the nonsensical part about knowing each other for just about a month and having met for just a few hours—he actually did like me, especially after finding out that I was a pretty decent guy not just online, but also in real life. And that’s when we started making out.

“Yes, I remember…”

“When well you asked if I was using you as an outlet because I had none in Arkansas, it got me to thinking...”

Had I opened my stupid mouth again?.

“…and I think that I’m not using you as an outlet in place of my Arkansas experience; I think I’m using you as an outlet because I have a hard time with women.”

I remained silent, waiting for him to explain. He didn’t. I prompted him for more.

“Well,” he continued, “when I was in seventh grade…”

MAJOR PAUSE. When you were in seventh grade? You’ve been thinking about this since you’ve been in the seventh grade, you’ve roped me into this years later, and now you’re saying you’re straight? UNPAUSE.

“…I started getting really shy around girls. I’d be friends with them, but I wanted to be more with them. But my self-esteem was awful—it still is. I couldn’t approach them in the way that the other guys could. I liked them, but I was so worried about what they’d think and how I looked and how I behaved that I couldn’t get myself to act on my attraction. So I think that’s when I turned to guys. I began looking at the other guys and how well the girls reacted to them. I began to get jealous, admiring the other guys for the things they could be and the things they could do and eventually the things they could get that I couldn’t. And so I began looking at them as reflections of who I wanted to be. My self-esteem issues kept me away from the girls and deflected me to the guys.”

I tried processing what he said, which was tough given that he had just shattered the only potential for actual dating that I had had in almost half a year—if not more. “Okay…”

“So,” he pressed on, “I think that reaction has been embedded so much within me that I’ve just gotten scared of approaching girls. And so I go with the next best thing—which is—well, guys…”

I didn’t know how to react. On one hand, he was obviously aroused when we were making out on Friday night. How do you fake that as a straight man? Random, accidental friction could not have been enough to bring about that strong of a reaction. And on top of that, how do you pull me along on a string for a month and go as far as hooking up when you have all of these doubts in your mind? In conversation, he even asked a mutual friend about what kinds of things he could say or do to impress me—that type of pre-meditated flirting is not at all indicative of doubt.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to bring you into this. I just obviously don’t have this completely sorted out for myself.”

“It’s okay,” I forced myself to say. It obviously was not completely okay as much as it just had to be okay. “It’s just… you know… it’s just a lot to think about.”

“Yeah.”

My gut feeling was not to believe him. No, I thought, this had to be some deep-rooted psychological reply steeped in heterosexism; at the same time, who was I to impose my own theories on his own obviously confusing sexual journey? I was in no place to tell him he was wrong or not; if anything, I could throw him into much more of a maelstrom than he perhaps needed at the moment.

But I wasn’t done. I couldn’t be. So I had to throw a litmus test at him.

“Can I ask you a really blunt question?”

“Yes, please,” he said, wanting to make sure he entertained what I had to say so that he could feel better about throwing this on me.

“Well, if we are to understand sexuality as heterosexuality, homosexuality, and other sexualities—we have to talk about sex. And if we’re talking about sex, Chu, then—can I ask what turns you on?”

“What turns me on?”

“Yeah: dick, vagina, what…?”

“Do you want to know the truth?”

“Yeah.”

“Boobs and ass.”

I took that in. It wasn’t what I expected until he asked if I wanted to know the truth. “Okay, well, so what’s gotten you off with guys since the seventh grade?”

“Well, when I’m with guys, I enjoy the stimulation. But I don’t like stimulating. It doesn’t turn me on.”

“Okay,” I acknowledged. I didn’t want to question him further. I had to accept this, maybe because I could empathize: maybe if I were blindfolded and a girl was providing adequate stimulation, then maybe… maybe it’d work. Maybe the self-esteem is such a huge issue for him—as it has been for me—that it’s had this huge of an impact on dictating his actions and interactions with the world. Maybe, when I boiled the types of people in the world down to the sex they were having and enjoying, maybe he was best defined by his feelings and thoughts rather than his actions.

But maybe he’s just overanalyzing himself. Maybe he’s just digging himself into a bigger hole by rationalizing his apparently deviant actions. He was telling himself that this wasn’t like him, and who else could tell him who he was aside from himself? Not me.

The problem is that I understand it all. I see both sides. The only thing I don’t get though: the making out—the scratching of scruff, the redness that remains only after male or male tongue twisting. How did you come to enjoy that stimulation, Chu? Doesn’t that count as stimulation? Stimulation that I doubt replicates the guy-girl experience whether you close your eyes or not? How did you rationalize that one?

The next day, Chu changed his all-important Facebook interest from undefined to very definitely, “Interested in Women.” And I—hundreds of miles way—still could only wonder, “What if?”

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Coming, Part II

A half hour from midnight, I peered into the back seat of my Toyota Camry and thought that if anything could be more of a turn-off to a hyper-organized, almost-OCD workaholic like Chu, it’d be this: a portable dump of file folders, broken backpacks, old Playbills and magazines (with the occasional scattering of uncapped pens and—more dangerously—markers). I could not let that be my first impression. I scrammed into my bedroom and stole a sheet to cover the whole thing up.

Ten minutes later, I pulled alongside our local Holiday Inn and called him down. In the next minute of waiting time, I set the scene I wanted him to see: I looked away—out my window—instead of waiting to see him at my passenger side door (so that I didn’t look too eager); I programmed my iPod to a playlist of a mellow Sufjan Stevens selection (his Facebook page claimed he was a fan); and I checked my back seat one more time for anything that remotely gave away my messiness (just in case the sheet shifted). All was ready.

As I was looking in the other direction, he arrived at my passenger door. I acted sufficiently surprised that he was there. I unlocked the door, he sat down, and we pulled away from the hotel..

On his part: Small talk. Hesitant eye contact. Nervous laughter. At the time, I didn’t know whether to attribute the awkwardness to him, to me, or to the overall furtive aura of our rendezvous; it even could’ve been the reasonable shakiness of a first live date from an online friend. Heck, the probable truth was that this was a case involving all of the above. All I knew, as I searched for a place to get midnight ice cream, was that we needed to get out of the car, get something to eat, and shake the shakiness off. ASAP.

And then we got caught by a train at a railroad crossing. Stuck in my car. For a good—oh—ten minutes.

And in those ten minutes, he spilled.

“So… is this a date?”

I froze. What was I supposed to say? I laughed out loud, while my mind screamed, “WHO SAYS THAT?!”

I continued with my shrugging, and he continued: Over the past month and a half of conversations, he found himself getting more and more attracted to me. He clearly had been thinking about it: he knew he’d be working in my area this summer; our professional goals were very much aligned; and the conversations we had in the past—although they were online—flowed quick-wittedly. It was a good match to at least explore. His intentions for this random late night ice cream trip: to gauge whether or not the chemistry he perceived online carried over into reality.

With this out of the way, the balloon of tension and unease deflated. His bout of transparency pointed out what should’ve been obvious: our earlier awkwardness was because we had never acknowledged an attraction between us. The lack of definition in whatever it was we were doing—talking online without direction, then meeting up in real life without explicit purpose—left us to inferences. Yes, it was fun to flirt on the internet without relenting to pressure or worrying about risk, but when our LOLs became audible, when there were physical consequences that couldn’t be clicked away, the need for honesty became not only necessary, but also palpable. His confession—as abrupt and forward as it was—was what we needed to get anywhere.

The railroad crossing gate lifted, and with some of the weight removed from the whys of our late night meeting, we had a more comfortable ride to my nearest 24-hour Starbucks (decidedly the closest thing to ice cream). There, I neatly evaded answering his earlier question of whether or not this was a date, deflecting discussion instead to my newly-acquired knowledge of his interest. His willingness to be open opened the door to my own: How long have you been thinking about this? What experience do you have meeting relative strangers on the internet? How do I know you just need an outlet for your homosexuality—something you clearly don’t have in rural Arkansas?


After our drinks were ready, we couldn’t find a seat at Starbucks, so we brought our conversation to the next most convenient place: my apartment. And there, on a loveseat across a table from me, he returned to his question: “Is this a date?”

“Well… I paid for you drink.” As much as I had learned about the evil of forcing inferences, I couldn’t help—out of nervousness or fear or lack of clarity of thought—but be indirect.

He probed further. He was very clear about being interested in me, but what did I think about him?

And I had to admit: I enjoyed this—the back and forth banter, the surreptitiousness of whatever it was we were doing, the interest of someone who actually was pretty much on the same page as me as far as work ethic and goals.

There was a smile of satisfaction.

“So… would I be crossing the line if I kissed you?”

As I did earlier, I laughed and shrugged. But this time, I was able to utter out a small, secretly-confident, “No.”

And as he came over to my couch, I thought about the junk in my car, our awkwardness at the railroad tracks, and the Java Chip Frappucino in my breath. And when he leaned closer, it made sense that I didn’t need to make sense of any of those things at all. He wanted me. He wanted the me that he got to know and not the circumstances surrounding it all.

A half hour after midnight, within hours of meeting Chu for the first time, there it was—our first kiss.

To be continued…

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Coming, Part I

On paper, Chu seems to be a good catch. Formerly a fraternity president at a large city university, he decided to move to the Deep South post-graduation in order to work with children in some of the poorest towns in America. His coming out story is the stuff of movies: he came out just before he was elected as the leader of his brotherhood, subsequently inspiring eight other brothers to also step forward more openly with their sexuality. Blurring lines between being stereotypically gay and being a stereotypical frat boy, he’s been catching up on college ball while accompanied by a cat he owns, loves, and spoils with its own room in his house. According to those who’ve worked with him, he is organizationally crazy; he’s so on top of things that—and this is no exaggeration—he’s about a year and a half ahead of where he should be as far as work he’s accomplished. He’s close with his family, has ambitions to rule the world (or at least pursue graduate work at Harvard), and seems also, from what I hear, to be the life of the party at social events.

So when someone with such a strong personal resume enters your life in the most random and unexpected of ways, it’s a little jolting.

The first time we met was actually more than a month after we first spoke. Or really—in our case—instant messaged. In February, he found me on The Facebook, his excuse being that I worked last year for a non-profit’s summer venture, and he was in the final interview stages with the same program. He said he wanted an insider’s guide on the job I had, as my profile made it clear that I had moved upward in the organization. I was more than willing to help someone who was proactive enough to reach out.

It turns out, however, that he was interested in a little more than my job.

Our online conversation about my non-profit organization turned into a month of chatting back and forth—good conversations that provided a much-needed diversion to long, stressful days in the office, punctuated by friendly cracks and jibes that could’ve been construed as coy had I the knowledge that he was gay. It wasn’t until three weeks into our G-chat dialogues that the all-too definitive g-word surfaced in conversation, and I was able to put two and two together and realize that maybe he was flirting with me. Which, in my current drought of male-to-male gay relations, I didn’t mind.

Just as I realized he was coming on, I found out that he was coming to my city for a conference.

And so, intrigued by this work-turned-online friend-turned- flirt, I decided to give him a try. After all, we had talked for a month—hadn’t it been past time to put a face and voice to the screenname?

Unfortunately, by the time the weekend of his visit arrived, we had forgotten the most important key to actually meeting up—an exchange of our phone numbers. Oops. The meet-up did not seem to be in the cards.

On the weekend of his arrival, my friend Jen gave me a call after my Friday happy hour routine and said that a dinner event she had been organizing wasn’t going so well—only 2/5 participants had shown up to the restaurant on time. She thought she’d invite me to fill in the gaps and inject some additional conversation to the meal—and because I could get there in a jiffy; the restaurant was five minutes away. I thought: eh, why not? I enjoy meeting new people anyway. I asked if I knew either of the two folks, and she replied that I probably didn’t—a girl named Beth from Hawaii and a guy named Chu from Arkansas…

Now, if his name had been Joe or Jeff or Matt or Chris, then I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But Chu? Really? The cards were such a tease. A meet-up was apparently going to happen, whether we had set it up or not.

Despite the fact that this was anything but a first date, I somehow felt this first impression to be important. I decided to change into first date-appropriate clothes—casual, but flattering. A splash of cologne. Carefully molded hair. Ready to go.

I arrived at the dinner event and immediately found Jen, and with her, Beth and Chu. The problem of how to first greet someone you’ve been talking to for a while—the awkward handshake or hug dilemma—solved itself, as the group was busy digging its fingers into a bucket of crawfish. Over the course of dinner (and for me, two Shiner Bocks), I learned about Chu in a different way: by seeing him interact in a group setting. He’s a storyteller. The type that throws out humor and drama that either flies or fails. He’s friendly, social, and—despite being in a group setting—managed to pay some extra attention to me, referencing previous conversations we had had. Though this may have alienated the rest of the party for a few moments, for me, it showed me that he was attentive—a listener.

At the end of dinner, Jen had to take Beth and Chu back to their hotel, and closure took the form of “see you all later”; as it turns out, all of us—myself included—would be attending another conference in two weeks. Part of me wished Chu and I had one-on-one time, but I figure that the chance meeting Jen arranged was more interaction than we would’ve gotten otherwise.

Five minutes later, I turned on my computer and checked Gmail. Within a minute, a GChat beep: Chu. We talked for a bit, and though it was 11:30pm, he asked if I wanted to get some ice cream. And underneath that request, the subtext: You. Me. Midnight.

I decided to take him up on his offer.

To be continued….

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