The Scene: 

Soft introduction music plays…

"Are you embarrassed easily? I am. But it’s nothing to worry about; it’s all part of growing up and being British. This course is designed to eliminate embarrassment, to enable you to talk freely about rude objects, to look at awkward and embarrassing things and to point at people’s privates. The course has been designed by Dr Karl Gruber of the Institute of Going a Bit Red in Helsinki."

-Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Every Friday evening now for almost a year, I’ve made it a point to drive down to D.C. and hang with my gay friends down there.  We have a regular happy hour/dinner end of week gathering.  It keeps me sane.  I’m single, I live all by myself up here in Baltimore, and if I don’t actively seek out companionship I just go nuts.  I wasn’t cut out to be a loner. 

This week I decided I wasn’t drinking.  My body really isn’t used to regular drinking nights, and alcohol was never my favorite form of relaxation.  So I just drank Cokes.  One of my friends later blamed that for how embarrassed I became at the…erm…low altitude of the dinner conversation.  But I don’t think so.  You have to expect when you’re with a pack of gay guys in a gay bar in a gay neighborhood in a city with a large gay population, that the conversation is going to get a tad sexual.  I strongly doubt that’s really any different from the tone of most conversations in straight pickup bars either, but I wouldn’t know about that.  Last night however, thanks to a few folks at the dinner table the conversation got really really raunchy.  So I did what I usually do when I’m not enjoying myself.  I tuned out.  Ironically, I suppose that was a tad rude of me.  I really felt sorry for our waiter.

I blame my Baptist upbringing for the modesty to the point of paralyzing inhibition I’ve been stuck with ever since puberty.  But it may also just be in my blood.  I wish I could be more of a gay peacock.  I was a cute little dickens when I was younger and I’ll go to my grave regretting I didn’t make more of that.  And I get embarrassed.  So much so that I’ve been asked outright on occasion if I really am gay.  I think people mistake my embarrassment for disgust.  But if I am anything it’s sexually frustrated, not turned off by the idea of sex between guys. 

But I’ll cheerfully admit to being grossed out by some of the kinks people get into.  Some heterosexuals get into those same kinks too and I don’t confuse my libido’s sexual tastes for a moral sensibility.  As long as people consent to whatever it is they’re doing and as long as it’s done with some degree of care and sympathy it neither picks my pockets nor breaks my leg what they’re doing with each other.  I don’t expect people to accommodate my embarrassments.  Matter of fact I’m usually grateful when they don’t.  But not last night.  I wish I didn’t get embarrassed so easily, but I do not regret being a romantic in the least, which is the polar opposite of raunch, and there were other people in that dinning room besides us.

The night that started out with my making my first ever iTunes buy from my iPhone.  Before heading downtown I was at a friend’s house when I heard Dionne Warwick singing This Girl’s In Love With You on his Pandora station…

You see this girl, 
This girl’s in love with you 
Yes I’m in love 
Who looks at you the way I do 
When you smile I can tell 
We know each other very well

Somehow I’d never gotten around to buying that one…probably because I never saw it on the singles rack back when I was a teenager.  But I sat there listening to it at my friend Jon’s house and next thing I know I’m calling up the iTunes store on my iPhone.  My inner teeny-bopper has been grooving to it all day today.  Probably as a tonic to last night’s raunch.

My hands are shakin’ 
Don’t let my heart keep breaking 
‘Cause I need your love, 
I want your love 
Say you’re in love 
And you’ll be my guy…

Am I really gay?  As I was sinking deeper and deeper into my chair last night in embarrassment, one of the guys, who had been briefly married, started talking graphically about a certain way straight guys can make their ladies happy and That was when I started getting grossed out.  No offense to my heterosexual readers here…I know some of you would probably get grossed out by a graphic conversation about the same sex version of that kind of sex, and that doesn’t make you homophobic.  It’s just your libido grimacing.  One person’s sweet delight is another’s gross-out and that’s just the way it goes.  That part of us just has its own way of looking at the world and all you can do is just try to deal with it honorably. 

I was embarrassed, not disgusted.  But I think I have a plan.  From now on I’ll save my drinking for when the conversation starts looking like the letters page of Screw magazine.  Then I’ll walk up to the bar for a shot or two.  They say people in a bar generally look better when you’re drunk.  Probably they make better sense too.