Culture Slut: Why I Am Dreading Dating
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“Don’t know why there ain’t no sun up in the sky, stormy weather since my man and I ain’t together, feels like it’s raining all the time.”
I’ve been listening to this song on repeat for the last month because the one thing I never thought would happen finally did: my longest ever romantic relationship ended. I was with my boyfriend for five years, lived together and apart, went on holidays, spent Christmases with my family, the whole bit, suddenly ending just before I turned thirty. I've spent time processing the change (feel free to read that as lying in bed listening to sad songs and drinking ouzo for a whole month), and whilst I now feel ready to face the world, I am terrified about dating again.
I know that I don’t need to rush in to anything, that I don’t need another relationship to be validated as a queer person, that the hetero (or homo) patriarchy won’t bring me joy or self love, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t started having very light anxiety about finding love in the future before time runs out. I think this can be a topic that is easy to dismiss as ridiculous, that there is no age limit on finding love or happiness or any of that, but I think there actually are a lot of cultural reasons why gay men* can really feel this pressure. So much of the gay experience has changed in the last ten years, in terms of general public acceptance, but also just the way we can relate to each other online and find the community and compassion we all long for.
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I grew up in Brighton, long touted as one of the gay capitals of the UK, and have been frequenting gay bars since I was fourteen, finding personal joy in each and every one of them. But even as a teenager, amongst the Generation X and Millennial gays, the spectre of AIDS hangs over the scene. The souls of our forebears are just a little way above our heads and cannot yet be forgotten. We used to see an old queen propping up the bar, old and fat and ugly, and we would tell ourselves that that would never be us. But that queen is so much more than any of us could ever have realised, they were a symbol of hope, of survival, of physical resistance. The celebration of fat gay bodies, particularly within the bear community, came from a direct reaction against AIDS. If your flesh was bountiful that meant you were healthy, brimful of life, ready for all the pleasure life had left to offer. Queer people of my age still have very few older role models, examples of how to live and how to love, because so many of them were snatched away from us to soon. The treatment for HIV and AIDS has changed so much in the last twenty years and it will never be the way it was in the eighties and nineties, but the ghost of this generational trauma is still there. What if it happens again? What if something else takes it’s place? The demonisation of queer people during the epidemic was so strong during this period that innate feeling of being unlovable was baked in to so much of the queer teen experience (and beyond). Love, Simon and Troye Sivan aren’t going to heal a dynasty of gay self-hatred, but it could be a start.
“I’m not going to let the capitalist heteropatriarchy define what it is to be sexy, or even what it actually means to have sex for me.”
The other issues that needs to be addressed within the gay community is that of body image, toxic masculinity and racism. Whilst the No Fats, No Fems, No Asians crowd may not still outright say it on their profiles as much any more, they haven’t gone anywhere. Even things like Drag Race haven’t made it much easier for the fats and fems amongst us, because with each new cast the queens get younger and hotter, much of the focus being on them being gorgeous thin white women who are also hot white lean boys. I’m a traditionalist, I prefer my drag queens to be old, ugly and able to read you from the bar to end of the pier and back again without even spilling a drink. But then is that sexy? To most people probably not. But who gets to say how I want to be sexy? What is sexy? Who says I have to be sexy? I remember six years ago I dressed in a more masculine way (that was still very gay) because I thought it would make more attractive to other men. During my long relationship I became a lot more fluid in my dress sense because I had the confidence knowing that I would attract the people who would be worth attracting, and if that was none then I still had my loving partner.
So many queer characters have appeared on our screens in the last twenty years that have shown us that we can fall in love and be hot and live our lives (or have epic tragedies) just as well as our straight counterparts, from Brokeback Mountain to Call Me By Your Name, but what about the real girls like me? What about the faggots? The sissies? The ones who still get abuse on the street? Believe it or not, I have an answer.
Another Gay Movie is a crass romantic comedy from 2006, written and directed by Todd Stephens that riffed on the same themes as American Pie. It also had a sequel in 2008, called Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild!, and let me tell you, some elements of these movies were life changing for me, as ridiculous as that sounds. The first film follows four gay friends, a goofy dork, a hot jock, a nerd and a flamboyant fem as they try to lose their anal virginities in a variety of ways with different kinds of men. Its pretty standard fare that will really only speak to gays who grew up around that time, but not much else. The dorky guy keeps getting caught masturbating with his mother’s (played by LipSynka!) vegetables, and after much heartache the nerd and the jock end up together, but the character that spoke so much to me was Nico the fem, played by Jonah Blechmen. Much of Nico’s storyline is about getting rejected for being too feminine, but his resolution is discovering the world of gay saunas and more niche forms of sex, culminating in an uplifting musical number about golden showers.
”Some call our love taboo, but your words come shining through, you said ‘To thine own self be true!’ Underneath cascading streams I remember all my dreams, and now it clearly seems I’m born again!”
Realising that I didn’t have to be confined by the predominantly straight and conservative world’s narrow views on what sex even was was very empowering, especially to a person like me who never fit in to the binary to begin with. My sex life improved exponentially after this and I still recommend trying out sex clubs, saunas, cruising, and other sex positive spaces to every queer person I meet.
The sequel was generally lower in quality, particularly in regards to the other characters, but again, Nico’s storyline was transcendent. The four friends go on a gay Spring Break holiday to a resort where there is a competition to see who can sleep with the most people and be crowned as Miss Gay Gone Wild. The dorky guy falls for a virgin, the couple struggles with monogamy and there's a trio of demon twinks to deliver bitchy lines in speedos with Justin Bieber haircuts, but then there’s Nico. Nico. Nico intends to participate in the competition but frequently finds that no one will sleep with him, again because he’s too femme, to weird, not masculine or hot enough. Throughout the film he keeps being visited by a merman played by infamous noughties gay porn star Brent Corrigan and Nico completely falls for him. After finally asking if he can kiss him, and Brent says no, because they can never be together because he lives under the sea. He tells him that one day he will find someone who loves him for him, and in a moment that has no business being so heart wrenching in this goofy gay sex comedy, Nico, with tears rolling down his face, says “It’s an awful lonely wait.”
In the film’s finale, when a demon twink gets crowned Miss Gay Gone Wild, Nico stands up and rails against the self serving narcissism of all the gay men involved, about how the way they worship masculinity and fit bodies is awful, that everyone deserves love and sex and to feel beautiful. His speech is heard by all the “undesirables” staying at the resort, the men and women with larger bodies, the gender non-conformers, the disabled, the people of colour, the old queens, the misfits, and they all come to the prize giving and have a massive transgressive orgy, including RuPaul and Lady Bunny.
These might be a few silly moments in cheap raunchy comedy, but I honestly have never seen a film deal in such an in depth way with the sex lives of feminine gay men. Historically, gay romantic leads are always handsome and masculine, or masculine and shy, or shy and handsome, the screaming queen gets renegaded to funny friend, also known as the Jack McFarland effect (from hit show Will & Grace) so that they might have a more universal appeal. Seeing this focus on someone other than that established hero was so refreshing that even now it gives me hope for my romantic futures.
I’m not going to put away my dresses, or butch up to seem more attractive. I’m not going to fear getting older, or having a body that doesn’t look the way it did ten years ago. I’m not going to let the capitalist heteropatriarchy define what it is to be sexy, or even what it actually means to have sex for me. I’m not going to let myself get hung up on finding a partner, or not finding one, or having too much sex, or too little, I’m going to explore my own radical queer joy first and foremost. And I can tell you now that that probably involves eating a pizza, drinking more ouzo and re-watching these movies.
Words and Images: Misha MN
