I’m Special (13 page)

It gets worse if you want a long-term monogamous relationship. Here's the line of thinking most gay men have about relationships: “Damn it, I want a boyfriend. I hate being single! I just want to move in with a sweet dude and get a dog and be that gay couple who throws dinner parties and shit. Oh, wait—I can't because I'm scared of intimacy and feel the need to throw them out of bed before they have a chance to Facebook friend request me!” The gays who are lucky enough to be in LTRs stick out among us like golden gods. We wonder how they did it and
pray
for an invite to their next dinner party.

It gets worse because of straight guys who aren't actually straight. When I was beginning my gay adventure, I was naïve enough to dabble in straight-boy dick because I assumed it'd be a fun and sexy challenge. Big mistake. It's never fun to be with someone who still isn't sure what gets them off. God forbid you ever develop feelings for them. You'll lose so much valuable time trying to get them to love you back. The last time I hooked up with a straight boy, he cried and made me promise not to tell anyone. It was then that I knew it was time to only be with boys who liked themselves enough to not sob after a BJ.

It gets worse if you're not living in LA, San Francisco, or New York. I've been fortunate enough to be able to live in my own progressive geographical bubble since I graduated from high school, but many other gay dudes aren't. Not every gay man can just make out in front of a falafel stand at one in the morning. The only reason I'm able to is because I spend an exorbitant amount of money on rent. Whenever I'm making out with a dude in public and get a little nervous, I just think to myself, “Fuck it, Ryan. You pay good money to make out with strangers wherever you want.”

It gets worse when you talk to a straight dude and see their wheels start to turn. Finally, they look at you and say, “You know, you're pretty cool for a gay guy.” You're supposed to take this as a compliment when, in reality, he just insulted you.

It gets worse when you walk into a gay bar and get stared down by guys who are a pinch cuter than you. Like, they're a little bit skinnier, a little bit more gorgeous, and now you want to just crawl into a ball of sweatpants and Internet porn instead of trying to convince someone you're worthy of a hookup.

It gets worse if you don't go to the gym. Gay men are expected to be born with two things: a giant penis and a six-pack. If we don't have one or both of those things, you can probably find us drunk at some piano bar, huddled around one another in gay average-body-and-penis solidarity.

There's no getting around it: Being gay is weird. Being gay is hard. It's not all fabulous and chic and blow jobs. Sometimes I feel like I have two jobs—there's Ryan, the writer, and Ryan, the homosexual. And guess what? Neither of them come with health insurance. There's immense pressure to adhere to the prevailing standard of gayness. There are “good gays” and “bad gays”—people who are really thriving at their job as a gay man and those who might get laid off soon. Who made these rules? The television—duh! Growing up with TV characters like Jack McFarland from
Will & Grace
and reality shows like
Queer Eye
for the Straight Guy
taught us how to be the kind of gay person who's accepted in society, and now we're dealing with the repercussions. We have girls coming up to us wanting to be our friend for novelty and saying things like, “Ugh, I need a gay best friend. Tell me I'm pretty. Tell me I'm fat. Let's make out!”

On top of being treated like this year's hottest accessory by women, we're also inundated with gay teens looking miserable and sobbing all over TV about how “great” it is to come out of the closet, and then we have celebrities telling us that it will all get better one day. And for some people, they're right. The bullied gay kid from Iowa will probably graduate from high school and move to a metropolitan city where he can be himself and form his own big gay family. Eventually he'll get a dog, a boyfriend, a favorite gay bar, and that will be that.

But some of this feels bogus. You can't just Scotch tape a ribbon to a pretty package and pass it off as homosexuality. The reality is that being gay is complicated. You can be here, you can be queer, but you can also have trouble dealing with it. Even the proudest gay men have a certain level of self-loathing about who they are.

Figuring out who you are as a gay man and what group you belong to is a major conundrum. Are you a skinny little thing who can be thrown around in the bedroom? Congrats—you're a twink! Are you big and hairy? You must be a bear! A bear in training is called a cub, which means that because of his age, he's not as big or hairy as a traditional bear. A leather daddy is an older, larger gentleman who . . . likes leather. And a furry is . . . something no one needs to know about.

Jesus. What happened to just being skinny or fat? We have a label for every sort of body type so we can quickly identify exactly what it is that we're into and then run off with it into a subculture. You have twinks fucking cubs fucking bears fucking daddies. It's exhausting to keep up. “I'm a vers/top pref into domination and water sports with uncut straight-acting submissive.” Um, what about “I'm a nice person looking for another nice person to grow old with so I don't die alone”? No? Too broad?

You'd think that with all these different types of gay men, I would've encountered a gay guy with a disability at some point, but I haven't. I know they exist, because I'll Google “queer crip” (not a gang, although it'd be amazing if it were) and find all these web forums full of gay men who are paralyzed in wheelchairs or have some other debilitating ailment that are looking for a connection. I feel strange looking at their photos like I'm supposed to have found my tribe, because I don't feel a kinship with them at all. It's that feeling that I'm not disabled enough to identify with other people who have handicaps but also not “normal” enough to pass in the able-bodied world. If I hang out with the gays who have physical handicaps, I'll fancy myself functional. However, if I hang out with the gays who don't have a disability, I'll feel like such a gimp. When I moved to San Francisco, I became uncomfortable being around other gay dudes for reasons beyond my disability. I was worried they would think I was doing a bad job at being gay. Since I wasn't having sex or working out or dancing in da club with my giant gay family, I must be a sad slice of tragic.

Nothing made me feel more like a failure than the fact that I wasn't having sex. I have this idea in my head that everyone is out there living some fabulous gay life except for me. I'm listening to shoegaze in bed while everyone else is getting multiple blow jobs at some amazing elitist gay party. Where's my invite? I don't know if I even want to go. I just want to feel included.

If enough time passes without intimacy, you start to become fearful of it. It's a vicious cycle. You stop having sex until the point where it becomes a frightening concept and then you stay away. Anal sex is an especially intimate act. As far as I'm concerned, my asshole is reserved for VIPs only. Otherwise, sex feels invasive and cheap. I hear about men who will bend over for anyone and anything—vegetable, animal, mineral—and I'm shocked. Part of me is slut-shaming them out of my own insecurities, and the other part is jealous that they don't attach meaning to every little thing like I do. It must be nice to be able to stop thinking for a second and just do.

That's why being gay is gay for me. I see so many other men falling into bed with each other, forming their gay groups and going to their gay brunches, and I'm here in analysis paralysis land, thinking too much to participate in any of it. I don't want to be promiscuous. I feel things too intensely, so it would just be bad for me, but I need to find a balance where I don't feel like I'm wasting my youth because of fear.

I liked to think that I was special for having a unique set of hardships (“I AM THE ONLY GAY GIMP TO EVER EXIST!”), but the fact is that every gay guy is reconciling how they should be in the eyes of society with how they really are. I'm a gay guy with cerebral palsy. So what? The line forms at the left with the gay guys who feel inadequate.

This was an important thing for me to realize. It's perhaps the best lesson I could have ever taught myself. Getting it would eventually be the one thing that released me from my neuroses and let me be truly happy.

I'm not special.

Finding Love (and Losing It) in a Sea of “Likes”

IF BEING GAY GAVE
me my first inkling that I wasn't special, then dating made me feel like a basic bitch without a prayer. Case in point: Recently a boy I had feelings for wrote me a handwritten letter. It was four pages long, written on crisp white paper that crinkled like dead leaves. I read every line hoping it'd contain some wild declaration of love, but instead I got the opposite. At the end of the third page, he wrote, “I'm sorry that I can't love you.”

Deep down I already knew this. We had spent the last few months hanging out together, and every time I would leave him, I'd have a feeling this was going to end in tears. I'm not a clairvoyant. I just know these kinds of things. We all do. People owe us nothing: they can blow through our lives, make us feel hopeful and loved, and then disappear with no explanation or apology. This is just the way it is now. There are so many new and exciting ways to get rejected: getting swiped to the left on Tinder, unfriended on Facebook, and ignored on OkCupid. Are we unlovable? No, but we place all our self-worth in getting a text back from our crush, and if it doesn't happen, we automatically assume we're going to die alone.

To counteract this constant fear of rejection, I do what everybody else does: I look for validation by outsourcing my self-esteem to the Internet and various apps. I take selfies until I land on a picture where I look semi-attractive. Then I apply a filter, which will graciously take my looks from a five or six to an eight. By posting the selfie, I ask the world, “Am I attractive? Could you understand if someone made the decision to love me?” I watch with bated breath as the “likes” pile up like little ants giving me their tacit approval. But a like isn't enough for me anymore. I need someone to type, “Looking good!” or “Wow, Mr. Handsome!” to feel fully satisfied.

After posting the selfie, I'll think of something amusing to tweet. Instagram selfies are meant to make you feel pretty, whereas Twitter is designed to validate your intelligence. That's why you follow hot models on Instagram and dowdy comedians on Twitter. It's a necessary separation of brain and brawn. After spending minutes crafting something brilliant, I'll send it out into the universe like a proud parent watching their child graduate. Seeing it get retweeted hits me with a burst of joy that leaves as quickly as it came.

As I'm going to bed, I'll make the final stop in my Validation Tour by going on gay sex apps like Grindr, SCRUFF, and GROWLr—which is like Grindr but for hairy chubby people. On Grindr and SCRUFF, I'm completely invisible, drowned out by a sea of six-packs and chiseled physiques, but on GROWLr I'm practically Ryan fucking Gosling. My body type is ideal for bears: soft in the middle and hairy but still lean in the way that most younger guys are. The second I log on I'm inundated with messages by men looking to meet up or swap photos. If I find one of the men to be attractive, I will unlock my private photos, which includes a picture of me in briefs. The guy will usually respond with a “SEXY” or a “WOOF” before unlocking his own private photos. I'll take a look at them and if I like what I see, I'll tell him so as I begin to masturbate. The guy will then push for a meet up, but I'll never do it. This is just free porn for me. I look at the naked photos of a man who lives only 1,263 feet away, and instead of meeting him in person, I jack off alone in bed. I have no interest in having an IRL interaction, because I know the second it's over, I'll hate myself.

One time I did meet up with a man off GROWLr. I had just downloaded the app and was feeling extra adventurous. I'd always hooked up with men who had string cheese bodies, so the prospect of being with someone who was big and thick excited me. After only being on the app for a moment, this man messaged me and said, “Hey, cutie . . .”

I looked at his profile picture. His face wasn't a dream but his body, which was practically naked, was flawless. I wrote back: “What's up?”

“Nothing. Just ran errands, walking back to my apartment.”

“Cool. Where you at?”

“Curson and Sunset.”

Clouded by horniness, I gave him my address and told him to come over. Within minutes, he was at my door. It was so strange. The whole process felt like ordering a pizza.

The man looked at me and smiled. “I don't usually move this quickly.” He had a softer voice than I had imagined. You think all big, burly men are going to have this throaty growl—hence the name, GROWLr—but sometimes they sound like delicate flowers. Trying to be aggressive and slutty, I grabbed his face and started making out with him. His tongue thrashed in my mouth and reminded me of a disgusting salamander, but I tried to ignore it. In that moment, I was committed to playing the part of someone who could handle empty sexual encounters.