All My Exes: Part 5
A Season of Firsts
Writer and Producer: Evan Roberts
Story Editor: Kate Sullivan
Consulting Producer: David Boyer
Illustration: Andy Gottschalk
Table of Contents:
In high school, my ideas about 'falling in love' or being in a romantic relationship with a guy were purely theoretical.
My first year of college is when the rubber met the road.
Buckle up!
PART 5: First Time, The Devil & First Love
After I left home for college, it was a matter of weeks before I came face to face with another man’s penis.
A huge first.1
During a weekend visit to crash on a high school gal pal’s couch in New York City, I met FIRST TIME.
He was a regular visitor to her dorm suite of theater majors prone to spontaneous monologues and choreography.
But he was different.
Coy, observant, sincere.
Also known as kryptonite.
I was weak to his powers.
Feb 28, 1996
There is no respectable way to say one has had sex. So let’s just not say it since it’s quite obvious already.2
I’ll be ranking my journal entries on various sliding scales.
On the Catholic Guilt scale, this is an 8.
Our long distance affair consisted of hand-written letters, custom mix tapes, and hand-written letters that explained the reasoning behind each song on the mix tape.
There were so many letters, FIRST TIME likened our relationship to a “correspondence course.”
But in a matter of months, it ended because “I needed space.”3
I was 10,000% into him, but he was 300+ miles away.
The relationship was taking my focus away from my school assignments, and all the new people I was meeting.
Pause for Foreshadowing:
This was the beginning of a false binary that would impact future relationships.
There would often be a moment when I felt I had to choose between a boy and a personal goal.
I could have a relationship or I could pursue a dream version of my future self.
One or the other.
For most of my life, the boys lost.
A Season of Firsts, continued:
I smoked pot for the first time….
I shaved my head for the first time…4
A local queen put me in drag for the first time…5
…and in the spring I fell into my first Friendship with Benefits with a gorgeous horse-faced6 bisexual hippie from New Jersey.
I nicknamed him THE DEVIL at the time because I thought dating a bisexual was bad news for me.
But I couldn’t resist.
He was confident, relaxed and he paid attention to me. He did that boy thing where he made fun of me incessantly because he liked me.7 I was clueless about this flirting tactic.
I just thought he was a sexy jerk.
My situationship with THE DEVIL barely registers on the Ex-checklist, but he merits inclusion because he plays a pivotal role in another first: coming out.
A month after moving back home for the summer, I went out to see a movie (I Shot Andy Warhol) and returned home late at night to find an unfamiliar car parked in my parent’s driveway.
Inside, THE DEVIL was sitting on the couch with my mom watching TV.
Tongue, swallowed.
In no world had I ever imagined my mother sharing a couch with the organizer of my first threesome.
My mother was a hardcore Catholic back then: she got mail from Focus on the Family, a fundamentalist Christian organization; she taught me that ‘left is right, right is wrong’ when it comes to earring placement for men.
My dad voted for Reagan twice and owned a shotgun; he made one vaguely homophobic joke when I was in 7th grade that I never forgot.8
After a year of being very gay in college, I forced myself back in the closet to spare their feelings and our collective discomfort.
My vibe that summer was simmering rage, as I fully expected a “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin” response if and when I did come out.
Sorry, mom, but I was planning on being a sinner.
When THE DEVIL and I said goodbye at the end of the semester, he took my “Maybe I’ll see you this summer” very literally.
He drove six hours with his hippie gal pal Emily without even fingering a landline.
My mother had fed them dinner and hung out with them all night - even though I had never ever mentioned his name to her before.
They crashed on my bedroom floor for the weekend and I called in sick to my job at the beach arcade.
Emily drove her Buick down sun-dappled country back roads while THE DEVIL and I made out in the back seat.
No seat belts.
My father caught wind that something was up.
That morning, he sat me down on his bed before he went into work.
“Son, are you a homosexual?”
THE DEVIL and I recall how it happened (includes a duck quack over his real name):
THE DEVIL went back to New Jersey. He sent a postcard.
In his wake, he left my parents with a newborn Baby Gay Activist. I ranted that they could expect a boyfriend to cross their threshold at any minute.
“I’m going to get a boyfriend, and I’m going to bring him over for dinner, and you’re going to be nice to him!” -Baby Gay Activist
I needed to prove to them that this was not a phase.
I worked at an arcade near the beach where the clientele and general populace was aggressively heterosexual.
I was out to myself but not to the rest of the world, so that summer I felt like I was an undercover sociologist in straight America.
July 16, 1996
All the men have hairy backs and beer guts. And all the women have tan lines from another bathing suit competing with the bathing suit they have on.
From 1 to the Great American Novel, this is a 6.5.
Mostly I was just a lonely navel-gazing gay boy with a journal.9
July 17, 1996
Dear Journal
I feel so hexed. Will I ever find someone who won’t mind my fleshy skinny body? My gullible inarticulate head? My messy face?
A solid 9 on a scale from 1 to “Aw, Poor Little Gay Boy.”
Then….
One day after writing the above entry, my friends J, L and I drove up to a gay youth group10 meeting in Concord, New Hampshire.
I spotted FIRST LOVE from across the room and was instantly smitten.
He was… perfect?
The youth group facilitator started an ice breaker that went around the circle.
Tell us your name, your age, and the liquid you would want to drown in.
Someone said cum.
A baby dyke said milk.
FIRST LOVE said: “Gatorade.”
Soon, J, L, me and FIRST LOVE were hanging out on the regular:
Late night dinners at Bickford’s on the Traffic Circle in Portsmouth, NH.
Watching Absolutely Fabulous stoned in an attic apartment in Ogunquit, ME.11
Driving up and down the Eastern seaboard with what we thought were mushrooms that we found on the ground in a baggie near the Bickford’s entrance.
Blockbuster called to remind J that his Absolutely Fabulous tapes were 9 days overdue. “And tomorrow they’ll be ten days over due, so don’t bother calling.”
After five days of hanging out in groups and sensing a quiet mutual interest, FIRST LOVE and I had our first kiss while standing in my childhood family room.
It felt radical to be kissing a boy in my parents house, directly underneath the room where they were sleeping.
Jesus wept. Mary fainted. I was in love.