Now…this is wierd…

On the train back from Montreal (I love taking the train) two college age male hockey players sat in the seats across the aisle next to me. As they settled into their close seats, one turned to the other and announced, “No Homo”. To which his seatmate replied, “Yeah man, I know”.

They then stripped down to their tee-shirts, leaned into each other to watch a movie on the tiny screen of a laptop, shared one set of ear buds to listen and then ate a meal together picking at each others food.

When I saw the title on Peterson’s post I mistook it for the gay version of Negro Please…  But no…it’s a couple of straight guys telling each other that they’re not gay.  So they can…sit together?

I have the flirt instincts of a brick, so even when someone is coming on to me I seldom notice when I should.  And my gaydar is no better.  It took my straight brother to tell me that the two of us were being sized up by a gay guy in a coffee house in Arroyo Grande once.  I just didn’t notice, and my eyes were everywhere inside that place.  When he told me I was floored.  Who?  What??  So I suppose it’s hard for me to sympathize with nervous young heterosexuals these days.  But…Get Over It!  You’re not God’s gift to everyone who lays eyes on you.

It’s true…I hate to break it to you.  I’m fifty-two and young and hard-bodied as you might be, I’m probably not interested.  In fact, you’re probably not even on my radar.  I’ll almost certainly forget I even saw you five minutes after we pass each other on the street.  I don’t think my sex drive, even at my age (or especially at my age) is particularly low…I could spend days on end contentedly in the sack with the right guy…and when a certain kinda guy throws a smile in my direction, swear to God I’ll have that smile in my thoughts for weeks afterward.  But I don’t even notice most guys I encounter throughout the day and, trust me, I’m really not that different in that regard from most other gay guys.  I spend all day long with various male co-workers and I couldn’t even tell you what most of them were wearing at work yesterday, and even after years of working alongside them I still get some of their names wrong from time to time.  No…it takes a certain special something to grab my leash and give it a yank and chances are, you’re not it. 

And there’s something else you have to face up to: you’re not perfectly safe from most heterosexuals either.  The guy in the seat next to you may not be a Kinsey 6 like me, or even a five, but that means there’s still a 20 percent or less chance that they’ll get a stray thought about you while you’re sharing earbuds (and presumably ear wax…).  So what you really need to do, instead of saying "No Homo" is exchange Kinsey ratings.  Then the conversation could go something like this…

"I’m a zero."

"Yeah man, I know.  Me too."

Isn’t that much better?  And it would be a bit less offensive to the gay folk sitting nearby, most of whom already know that while beauty is only skin deep, stupid goes right to the bone.