I was assigned a single room with, a conservative Korean (hey, they really
were
all Asian there) surfer dude from Santa Cruz who seemed wound awfully tight for a guy who just wanted to hang 10 all day. We slept in twin beds, like “Lucy” and “Ricky,” five feet apart and would sometimes talk at night, but never deeply. I thought he was nice but homophobic. But I think he might have been more naïve than definitively anti-gay. In spite of my Madonna-heavy design aesthetic on my half of the room, he seemed oblivious to the fact that he was living with a homo, though he was very shy about being seen naked. I ran in to get the ringing phone one time to find he’d dashed out of the shower to get it. He was holding a towel over his ass and waving me away with the other hand, which is the international symbol for, “Do not enter.”
One night fairly early in our first quarter, we were in our beds in the pitch black and he announced, “Dewd, I heard there might be a
gay guy
in our dorm…right here, in the Shoreland. I can’t even believe it. Do you know who it could be?”
As nervous as I was about the prospect of being openly gay—I would soon find myself writing a comically scathing letter to a girl back home whom I’d heard had dropped the news that I was gay during a casual conversation with our peers—even
then
I knew how ridiculous it was that he thought only one of us in that dorm of hundreds might
possibly
be homosexual. If he was trying to flush me out, it was going to take a lot more than a midnight gay-panic attack.
Later on, after I’d been told he was the son of a high-ranking government official in South Korea who’d fled the country, and after he’d exited school due to a younger brother’s suicide (…Was
he
gay, I wondered? I’m not suggesting that was the reality, just reporting what I wondered…), I had the place all to myself and decorated it to the hilt. I had bisexual prankster Jeff’s candle, a Robert Mapplethorpe postcard of two shirtless men embracing, Norman Mailer’s book on Marilyn, a dizzying collection of Madonnabilia, and a bookshelf containing the works of Truman Capote, Edmund White and, of course, Gore Vidal.
My first year in Chicago, I wasn’t openly gay like John Travolta isn’t openly gay.
I found these talismans deeply reassuring in the unbelievably studious, competitive, asexual atmosphere of the U of C. That gay group that had lured me to apply to the school turned out to be a dud filled with people even misfits like me would look down on,, but at least one of my only visits to their meetings had gotten me to watch what instantly became my new favorite movie of all time,
Parting Glances
. Having Ciccone and Vidal and Mapplethorpe on full display made me feel like the most radical creature for miles around. Everyone else’s rooms were utilitarian with white
walls
complemented by dun
everything else
. People were getting into fights over equations and it seemed like nobody left the school’s Hyde Park location, which was moated by an all-black neighborhood that wasn’t impressed by a stuck-up, pseudo-Ivy League college in its core. I mean, I don’t think I ever went to the North Side, aka “Boystown”—the gay part of Chicago—until I was a sophomore.
Another guy whom I’d heard was either gay or bisexual was a guy from Oak Park of Middle Eastern descent called Omar. Omar looked like a sexy terrorist (by his own admission), one who wore designer clothes and smoked cigarettes with cinematic flair. I became friendly enough with him that he invited himself into my room, where he began sizing me up as a potential roommate since I was without one and would be reassigned someone random if I didn’t find a suitable match.
Puffing on his cigarette, the chicly attired Omar examined my pop cultural shrine, marking his notice of my Mapplethorpe postcard with a photographic flash of the whites of his eyes. He then picked up the book
The City and the Pillar
by Gore Vidal, one of the first serious works of literature to feature homosexuality. Holding it, he turned to me and husked, “Gore Vidal…do you like his
work,
or his
life
?”
We moved in together immediately.
Omar and I were never boyfriends or even just fuck buddies. Instead, we were each other’s sassy gay best friend. He was worldly, allegedly having been kidnapped in a foreign country as a baby by his father when his mother sought a divorce, and, unlike seemingly all of our classmates, he was more interested in talking about what anal sex might be like than if Einstein might be overrated. As a roommate, he was slightly less tidy than someone you’d now see on
Hoarders
, which is odd considering he always looked immaculate and stylish, often wearing a tight, timeless, black leather jacket. We talked about Andy Warhol and Bruce Weber and Alain Delon and of course gossiped about which fellow Shorelanders might be homos, too.
Omar kept close tabs on my nascent sex life, counting with me as I racked up sexual partners and tossing a little celebration when I’d hit 10. To be clear, I count absolutely everything when defining “sex.” If you have, or try to have, an orgasm with at least one other person in the room, that’s sex. Omar was under the impression that he was bisexual back then, my first bi bud since Jeff, so while I was shyly using my hands and mouth on equally nervous first-timers who shared my inexperience as well as my gender, Omar was spending way too much time having melodramatic cat-and-mouse chases with conservative girls who looked to Ayn Rand as their style idol. Between us, we had some great stories to share with each other.
At this time, Omar and I met a guy named Mick who, like me, came from Michigan and was born with the mass of a football player but without any interest in the game. Also like me, Mick was self-conscious about not being emaciated. I think he may have been body dysmorphic before I’d heard of that (we were just hearing about anorexia, which I desperately hoped I could catch) and he was definitely more sexually advanced than either Omar or I. He would disappear to Boystown and return with tales of the older, hairier men he would pick up in bars or at skeevy porn emporiums like the Bijou, and who he would encourage to fuck him with no regard for the physical integrity of his rectum. This was all very exciting to hear about instead of having to actually do, especially because I was convinced I was one French kiss away from getting AIDS and dying a week later.
Mick was also the first person I ever knew who got liposuction. I mean, this was within minutes of anyone even
hearing about
“lipo”; half of the people talking about it still called it “lippo”-suction. The concept that he would actually pay thousands of dollars to have his tiny love handles and belly sucked out simply blew my mind. Luckily, I was destitute, so my form of weight loss was barely being able to afford one meal a day. My weight plunged to catastrophic levels—it was all kinds of awesome. So I didn’t have to have any fat removed. Just as well, because Mick told me of his operation, “Matt—I was so bruised it turned my penis yellow!” Hot.
Mick, Omar, and I developed a hardcore addiction to, well, hardcore porn. As a kid, I’d already sampled XXX-rated magazines with my cousin, not only at football camp but also courtesy of my cousin Wally’s older brother, Vance, who had a period-appropriate “love van” filled with publications just about any contemporary community would have considered prurient, patently offensive, and devoid of serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Not to mention the fact that he had stray Polaroids of naked, worse-for-wear chicks he had been “balling.” Back then, Wally and I would run elaborate missions when I spent the night at his house—I’d watch the door and he would remove the screen from the basement window, climb out, dart over to his brother’s van, grab an armful of smut that smelled like pot and Vaseline, and sneak back. We’d then spend all night absorbing the filth. Wally was looking at the huge boobs whereas I was discreetly ogling the few cocks that made their way into those magazines. Hardcore was so much better than soft because it required a dude to be involved. I was in heaven.
Years later, in college, Mick presented me with my first-ever gay pornography and I was hooked. He had a stack of 50 or more glossy publications with names like
Skin Flicks
, all dripping (in some cases literally) with horse-hung college drop-outs who looked like they’d been wholesome 10 minutes ago and were now being photographed doing all the sexual things that in those days seemed kinky and that today can be found with one Google search for the word “gay.” It was too much, too soon—I promptly fell in love with guys like Bill Henson and Leo Ford and Lance—just
Lance
. I was lost in what I figured their lives must be like when they weren’t posing inside of each other. Probably just as hot, right? Probably there was no way they were just young guys without as many opportunities as I had who were prostituting themselves to get from one month to the next. (And let’s not dwell on the fact that the world was swept up in an AIDS panic but these guys screwed condom-free.) Now, gay men have relatively safe condomless sex as a defiant way of expressing their God-given right to own their sexuality. In the late ‘80s, we did it to express our utter stupidity and our refusal to believe we’d ever die.
Becoming addicted to gay porn was not so different from being addicted to celebrity—they don’t call them porn
stars
for nothin’. For three guys like me, Omar, and Mick, different from each other but similar in our need for a crash course in the kind of human sexuality our public schooling had fastidiously avoided addressing, these pornstars were our professors just as much as our professors were.
One time, Omar and I rented and watched Jeff Stryker’s now-classic, Vietnam-themed
Stryker Force
. Just as had happened when I was a kid looking at porn with my cousin, neither of us jerked off, we just sat there glued to the images with concealed hard-ons. All we were missing was some dude with a laser pointer to instruct us.
“In this scene, you’ll want to remember that the bottom has been douched and pre-stretched, which is why Jeff’s gigantic member can be stuffed right into him with no warm-up. Now
you
try!”
Along with porn, Mick brought me other enlightenment, most notably a story about his best friend back in Michigan who was having sex with his family doctor in exchange for money. I found the idea of such an illicit arrangement in the heart of a state I considered to be so repressed a real revelation. I was so vanilla back then—even now I’m really no more than vanilla with some sprinkles—that I was genuinely titillated by the image of a guy selling his body to a medical professional and then spending the money at Chess King or on pot, as if prostitution were the equivalent of a paper route. This titillation I felt I quickly made itself useful.
Desperate to get into Professor Richard Stern’s prestigious fiction-writing class, I found out last-minute that I’d need to submit an original short story in order to be considered. I had almost no time to cook something up, so I used the reaction I’d had to Mick’s friend’s story to cook up a story I hoped would knock the teacher’s socks off. In my story, the doctor had become a dentist and as a way of coping with my shock at Mick’s stoner nonchalance when he related his friend’s experience, I gave my narrator a cold, obnoxious, po-mo voice. He was a hustler with a heart of gold, but only in the King Midas sense. Broken, he was lashing out with every word he spoke.
Because the story revolved around ideas of gay vs. straight sexuality, and because my narrator was both anonymous (he identified himself only as “X”) and blunt, I called it “Straight Story”.
I was beyond shocked when Stern loved my shocking story. I was welcomed into his class and he gushed over the freshness of what I’d written when I read it aloud in character, although he did refer to it with the backhanded compliment as “a boy’s story,” emphasizing that it was green. The rest of the class seemed confused. No one else had written about sex, let alone about eating ass in a dental chair. One adult woman raised her hand to make a comment and said two things that scared and thrilled me: One, she congratulated me on being so honest, as if I’d just read my autobiography. I definitely had aspects of my own life in there, but it was clear she thought I was a hustler. And two, she referred to “X” as a “sociopath.” I guess I didn’t know my own strength.
The short story became a novella, which became my senior thesis, which became a novel—by then entitled
Boy Culture
—which became my first published novel, which became a movie, which became my personal blog.
Mick’s sexual gossip provided an inspiration that has affected and infected my life in ways that boggle my mind. My affection for porn had, too.
As far-reaching as his second-hand story had been, Mick himself didn’t feature in my life too long. He was more reckless than we were, more filled with wanderlust. The last I knew, he’d gone overseas and had a series of death-defying affairs before winding up the kept boy of a wealthy Ohio business tycoon. I had a few letters from him and then he disappeared, along with my romanticized view of gay pornography and my poverty-diet-induced slim figure. And Omar’s bisexuality.
Omar, who’d rooted me out thanks to my décor, stuck around a lot longer. In spite of some gaps of many years in between our meetings, we’re still in touch.
I’ll always remember him quizzing me if it was Gore Vidal’s work or his life that I admired as a way of asking me if I were gay. Oddly, the same question would have made sense if he’d asked me it of Jeff Stryker.