The Scene: A table in an upscale restaurant located in a trendy vacation resort.   Two old friends are sitting across from each other.   One openly gay since he was seventeen, the other a Happily Married Man having long since overcome the unwanted same-sex attractions of his youth.   They are discussing Openly Gay Friend’s problems finding someone to love and settle down with. Happily Married Man is finding it hard to believe that Openly Gay Friend has been single and struggling all these years.

Happily Married Man: Don’t you have any gay friends?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh yes.   About half my friends are gay.   I have a regular Happy Hour crowd I try to go out with every Friday.   It gets me out of the house.

Happily Married Man: How long have you known them?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh, most of them since the mid-eighties…

Happily Married Man: Wow…I can’t believe they haven’t tried to hook you up. Didn’t they ever even try?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh get me started…there was this one time…

Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!

Openly Gay Friend: They’re nice people. I think they just don’t get me…they just don’t get romantic types. They think I should just go get laid and that’ll make me feel better. They don’t get how random loveless sex might make someone like me feel a whole lot worse afterward, not better.

Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!

Openly Gay Friend: I want you to understand something…that isn’t just a gay thing. If I was straight and my happy hour group was a bunch of other straight guys I’d be getting the same advice. Just go get laid and you’ll be fine.   The cure for every lonely heart is to just get laid.   The popular culture pays a bunch of lip service to the idea of love and romance, but it’s all about just having sex in the straight scene too.

Happily Married Man: Sex is overrated…

Openly Gay Friend: I’m not saying that…

Happily Married Man: It’s just a bodily function.

Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…

Happily Married Man (emphatically): When you’re on your death bed it won’t be the times you had sex you’ll be remembering, but all the people you loved.

Openly Gay Friend: Yes…absolutely! That is so very true. But I would want my last memory to be the times I spent laying down with the one I loved. That one special body and soul relationship…that’s what you would be remembering. At least I would…if I’d ever had that. (looks wistfully at Happily Married Man, then looks away) But your life is what it is…

Happily Married Man (rolling his eyes): Stop whining….

Openly Gay Friend: I’m not whining…

Happily Married Man: You’re whining. You have to work with what you’ve got to work with and accept that. Stop thinking about what ifs. Sex is overrated…

Openly Gay Friend: Well yes, I agree completely that it isn’t all there is to life, but it’s still important…

Happily Married Man: It’s like a fart.

Openly Gay Friend: I’m sorry?

Happily Married Man: This may sound strange but think about it. It stinks for a little while, and then it’s gone.

(Openly Gay Friend looks blankly back at Happily Married Man)

Happily Married Man: Sex is like that.

Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…it helps if you’re having sex with a person you’re sexually attracted to.   (ironically) Then it’s actually a lot of fun…more engaging…more satisfying…(looks Happily Married Man in the eyes) and it makes a whole lot more sense that way.   You kinda understand then why everyone else is so into it.

Happily Married Man: You’re a piece of work…you know that?   Well it’s getting late and I have to go home now.   I’m a happily married man.

Openly Gay Friend (unhappily): So I see.   And I’m still single and unhappy.   And for gay men of our generation it will always be a time before Stonewall won’t it?

Happily Married Man: Stonewall?

(This was mostly a real conversation.   Some lines were edited for brevity, and Openly Gay Friend didn’t actually say his last two lines to Happily Married Man because just then his head was spinning.   But now he wishes he had.)