I’ve often marveled at the idea that certain heterosexuals can have, that they can claim it’s easy to be gay because you should know your own sex quite well. I’m not sure how scientific that might be, but I’m sure some think that way. As they park their cars in the driveway of their caves, I wonder what is it about my sex and why should I feel so unreasonably detached? I can’t for the life of me figure them out. There are so many tricks that men play, that women play. There is a collective game in which we are all participants, that focuses on learning what makes the other one tick, regardless of genitalia.
They’re must be some kind of language that is secret and Greek to me, that I should not know how to operate within the confines of my so-called community. I deign to fall under the femme category because I indeed smell and use no product in my hair and can also read. I don’t smell all the time but when I do, it is reminiscent of the Blue Line at around three thirty in the morning. I don’t fall under the masculine category, by far. My neurotic hang-ups and dainty gestures might strip me off almost entirely of my own gender card, or the conditions that we’ve been made to understand what a man is supposed to be by advertising and population decrease that hasn’t existed as a problem, I’m sure, since industrialization, or at least before the advent of radio. What of this mass-filled world we live in makes it so hard yet so easy to tolerate or accept homosexuality as just another form of the human condition?
And then I think that perhaps these questions and the energy put forth in asking them might be same-sex repellent. Not everyone, regardless of sexuality, needs to ask these questions or wants to for that matter. It might be a buzzkill to go all philosophical and what a turnoff, but where can I find a man who isn’t afraid or bored at the prospect of pondering such vast options that the universe sets forth on our collective digital psyche? I suppose in independent film, which is another boner shrinker. Is pretension the part of the brain where desire lives then dies at the prospect of being met with a like mind? I might be destined to make people feel awkward with my ludicrously obscure reference points but unfortunately I, too, hate that in people? I’m also sure of the fact that other pretentious people hate pretension. The mere notion of this whole essay stems from a deep-rooted (and undeserved by far) elitism and entitlement that many a PBR drinker have gone through. I’m not a hipster, but I do have hips. So maybe this isn’t necessarily a question of how to regard your prospective suitors categorized by gender, but perhaps by a broader demographic.
The thing is, I am tired of the image I bring across. I don’t know how people see me. Perhaps as some good-for-nothing vagrant whose only claim to fame were some ridiculous outfits worn during puberty or a lackluster novelty that wore off the way of the hoodie or, in the nearest of futures, twitter. Although I don’t know, I’m sure I’m looked at, being made mock of and perceived as having a huge ambiguous ego, of which I’m not deserved of having (nor do I own, in all actuality).
But Motown can’t solve everything. Someday, that man, whoever he may be and for that matter if he even exists, and I will be together in a converted warehouse decorated with the latest thing, hot from the presses of a local art scene no one has any interest in besides a few sweaty, well-read white people. This is America, I mustn’t forget that. Even though I live in Chicago, a worldly and cosmopolitan city, Fox News would regard it as part of that fake America and that there shouldn’t be people who share the same interests in modernity as I do. Chicago is a notoriously no-fuss capitol of the Midwest. Indeed I am blue, for the fact that this Midwestern gem should be succumbed to living alongside paupers. Granted I’m poor as a rag, but these are uncultured peasants who regard domestic beer as the height of their absent sophistication. I make no apologies for this statement. If Ann Coulter can get away with unapologetically reprimanding those like me, the urban and the young and the liberated and the accepting and the willing, why the fuck can I not vent my disappointment in the rest of America? I may live in a city, but damn it, it is a city in America. The flesh is willing but the mind is jumbled up with falsely patriotic symbols akin to manifest destiny or anti-socialism. What American protesting anything the current administration does in bastardized grammar can actually name a socialist or a socialist country or that can define the principles of said radicalism?
The decade of the sixties is one example of something seen strictly as American. Because time only happens here, a country that has no recollection of any global matters save from the sun exploding or some soccer player, his stick insect of a wife and his immigrant children who left wherever the hell it was they came from to come over here and not pronounce their R’s. It’s okay for these bastards to come round and live over here; they’re white. Back to the sixties, that legacy should be kept in the history books and those with actual power should just leave it behind and move on. You know how people say America used to be such a great country and they wish it was the way it was before? America absolutely sucked before. It was an incredibly racist, ethnocentric, homophobic, sexist country where freedom was allowed provided you were of the right color and socioeconomic class. If you ask me, America is the same exact country it has always been. All great democracies survive under that great façade of the promised land. The only thing I can promise you is that nothing is as nice as it looks on television.
So, to all of the prospective men that I may not have the pleasure to meet and who I have completely put off after reading the uncoordinated ramblings of the desperately drunk and single, I implore you to at least try to have a decent conversation when out. Or at least to finish said conversation. Too many times I’ve had a great time with a boy who ultimately turned his head, saw someone more-attractive-than-thou and easy and goes in for the kill. It’s presented almost as if I should understand: “I need to get laid tonight, so I’m glad we had that conversation about the rising prices of foodstuffs that are basic and essential to the poorly constructed diet of those in impoverished nations, but this guy has his shirt off.”
I guess there are peasants everywhere and they are waiting to give you intellectual and political blue balls.