The Mandates (4 page)

6

ARRANGING YOUR CD SELECTION FOR THAT FIRST DATE

(Or: Limiting the “Liza” Factor)

Monitor the portfolio diversity in your CD selection today!

Remember that CD selection is one of those key areas, like the medicine cabinet, where actions speak louder than words as potential dates sum you up. To be brief but clear: don't have the complete collections of more than three absolutely fabulous female singers.

How many times can he count the name Liza as he scans down the list?
Liza Live at Radio City, Liza Live at Carnegie
Hall, Liza Live with Mama, Liza Live without Mama, Liza's
12 th Comeback Concert.
The same goes for Bette, Barbra, Cher, Patti, Diana, and those sixties retro divas Dusty and Nancy.

As you are rearranging your CD collection, remind yourself to be vigilant when referencing these divas! Stop your mouth from betraying you with tired catchphrases from these women's songs that may somehow have snuck into your everyday vocabulary. If your speech contains phrases from diva songs, such as “love hangover,” “stir it up,” “don't rain on my parade,” “maybe this time,” “it's all for you,” “oops, I did it again,” “if I could turn back time,” and “you don't have to say you love me, just be close at hand,” you must excise them with haste.

What key personality characteristics are associated with each diva? If the man you want to shag has more than three albums by any of these major divas, the following chart gives you a simple way to type a date by his music.

7

AVOIDING MATRON MEDICINE CHEST SYNDROME

You are a thirty-one-year-old man living alone in your own apartment on the outskirts of Chicago. Yet your medicine chest has enough moisturizers, night creams, day creams, midday creams, tonics, salves, lotions, potions, Retin-A, and Botox to keep a boatload of Park Avenue matrons moist and molded for a month.

What's wrong this picture?

Nothing, if your goal is getting a perfume-sprayer job at Saks. Or, if you are fast on your feet and have an empty locked drawer, you can have the best of both worlds. You can harbor your cosmetics like a fugitive, quickly throwing them into the drawer when the doorbell rings for that first date.

As Lance, a twenty-seven-year-old self-described “flannel shirts and jeans kind of guy” from Seattle, put it, “It can be a little disconcerting to meet some hot, butch-looking guy, go to his apartment, enter his bathroom, and discover colored jars of stuff on the counter labeled “dramatically different moisturizer,” “Beauty Lab's soothing and firming fine line serum,” “Bienfait Totale,” and “honeybee kissable lip balm.”

As Seinfeld would say, “Not that there's anything wrong with that.” But don't waste your time trying to pull off a “superstud natural man” persona when your bathroom toiletries selection looks like an Aveda salon.

In general, do you want to date your grandmother or a man with her nighttime beauty regime? No, I didn't think so. So why would he?

Here's what should be in your medicine chest:

One can of “drugstore bought” shaving cream. (If you must have a brand name, Gillette is okay.)

Crest toothpaste (the bleach you just bought from your dentist should be hidden away).

One toothbrush (leave all the others you bought “just in case” for overnight guests stashed away under the sink).

One wood-handled, manly, painful porcupine-bristle hairbrush.

One can of nondesigner gel or hair cream (but just one, and no spray or mousse).

An old-fashioned, leather, masculine toiletry kit with nail clipper, just like Dad had.

One cologne, which can be your choice, but only display one. Do not display every colored cologne bottle you ever received on top of the commode, unless you are auditioning for the role of “older gay neighbor” on
That '70s Show.

One bar of Irish Spring soap (no Camay or Dove).

One economy-size moisturizer (shows manly concern for value over vanity). You don't want to end up looking like crinkled, aging icon Robert Redford. There has to be a middle ground.

Any product with a Clinique, Estée Lauder, Aramis, Calvin, or other designer brand name should be tucked safely away. Any Kiehl's products should be removed from the bathroom altogether. The “banned” list includes eye cream in the refrigerator, anything from France, and the “Auntie Mame” puffy-eye pack in the freezer.

8

KEEPING THE MISTER IN MYSTERY

There is incest in the gay community, and more than just what you hear discussed in twelve-step group meetings at the Gay Community Center. I am talking about the kind of social incest that results from years of seeing the same faces over and over, dating a few of them, and slandering the rest. In a jungle like this, you need to be guided through the murky crowd by an inner voice of strength. I like to call this Accessing Your Higher PR Person.

Here are some warning signs that you have less mystery than an episode of
Diagnosis Murder:

You say things like “I need to meet a new man” at least once a week to the same three friends, all of whom you have dated at some point in the past five years.

You meet a new guy by chance when you're running in the park. He invites you to a party. You are thrilled because finally you'll get to meet some new faces. You'll get to reinvent yourself, be the guy you have wanted to morph into, but have been held back by those pesky friends who think they know you. You go to the party looking fierce, walk in the door, and hear four shouts of “Hey, girlfriend, look at you,” followed by a whispered “He must have bought those shoes today because he wasn't wearing them at lunch.”

You overhear a group of lesbians talking about your group of friends, shaking their heads and pondering how
you guys
manage such complicated interpersonal and incestuous relationships.

At this point, pray to the great Greta Garbo to have her spirit grace you with all the mystery of a movie star. For example, if you are Jodie Foster or Tom Cruise, do you go out in public without your own Pat Kingsley, famed personal publicist to the stars?

Absolutely not.

So, just because a personal publicist's fees might be out of your monthly budget range, you still need to think like a publicist when it comes to dating, because gay circles are small. You'll want your name in the news occasionally, but out of the news frequently.

If you are seen at the same bar with the same rowdy queens, drinking and hooting and throwing things at cute boys, do you think gay men watching you will somehow understand that you are not really like that? Do you imagine that they'll see through this shallow veneer to your deep inner well?

Forget it. This isn't
Fantasy Island.
It doesn't work that way. You have a greater chance of being hit by a stray bullet at the nightly Disney parade than you do of changing your social reputation once you've been typecast by gay men.

Avoid being typed as much as you can by changing your schedule around, mixing up your crowd, and varying the places where you hang your party hat. Retain some air of mystery. Don't be the man everyone has slept with, as popular as that might make you think you are, as you slink your “touchy-feely” way through the bar, saying hi to this one and that one. Don't spread too much gossip. You can't throw mud without somehow getting some on yourself. Don't meet every man in town. Leave some for later.

Thirty-nine-year-old New York architect Bruce feels strongly about maintaining mystery on a first date. “I kind of give that Jackie O vibe—aloof yet seductive,” says Bruce. “Oddly enough, the more I'm interested in a new man, the more aloof I am. Initially, don't give them too much, literally and figuratively, if you want to keep dating.”

This is not to say Bruce isn't friendly, fun, and engaging. He just keeps some distance, and guys don't feel after a couple of dates that they know everything about him.

I am not saying you should lie or make things up, but what's wrong with keeping some parts of your life mysteriously hidden, as long as those things are not destructive? If you forgo mystery and send him your résumé, a press release on your life, or act as socially ubiquitous as a summer firefly, just wait for the yawn that will come once he thinks he knows all about you.

When you finally do meet
him,
the man you have been waiting for, you want as little social baggage as possible. When, after that amazing first two weeks you spend together, he tells his friends that he has met the guy of his dreams—i.e., you—the last thing you want him hearing is “You're dating that mean old queen? She dished me to filth once at Darren's beach-hat party” or “You're dating him? Did you know he dated Curtis right when he was breaking with Jonathan, and then dumped him for Randy?”

There's only one alternative to radically modifying your own behavior to maintain an air of mystery: keep a bodacious diary on everyone else's naughty habits for blackmail purposes. But you better be sure you have some mighty good dirt if you choose this option. Staying home a night or two a week might be simpler.