An Uber driver asked is this it? and 6 gay guys were like yea without looking up. The deserted industrial sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles didn’t look like the kind of place that was it. I was introduced to Jason by a mutual friend within minutes of passing through the chain link gate and into the warehouse party. 6’5” with a mustache and dark eyebrows, he wore a cowboy hat and a ripped t-shirt. He told me that he worked as an architect, which I’ve long said is the job of my dream husband. I thought that he was a solid backup prospect but wanted to take a few laps to survey other options first. Thirty minutes later, I put my hand on his stomach as I parted the crowd.
Shortly after 2am, I found him outside on the patio, talking to a friend who eventually left us alone. Jason was twenty-six, one year older than I was. We were both fans of Tao Lin and Gregg Araki. He was eager to tell guys who complimented his shirt that it was from one of his favorite designers. We made out against the corrugate metal siding of the building, on the dancefloor, on a couch in the corner, cowboy hat placed next to us. Back outside, I borrowed his cigarette without asking and he looked at me carefully. He confirmed that I didn’t have a boyfriend. Do you want me to be your boyfriend? I asked, as a joke, and he laughed. We agreed to go back to mine but stopped by his loft so that he could grab what he needed for an early morning beach volleyball game. His copy of Ulysses was centered on the coffee table. He stuck around for breakfast and told me that my apartment reminded him of a Crosby, Stills, and Nash song: Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.
Two days later we sat across from one another at Musso and Frank in Hollywood for almost four hours. Listening to the things he said, the way he seemed to think, I felt he was the kind of person I could sit across the dinner table from for the rest of my life.
Four weeks of long dinners, regular goodnight texts, and a couple of pictures together after that we had exchanged forty-three Spotify links and were on the third stop of a gay-guy-birthday-night-out at a party called Vice in a vaguely business-park-like venue in Koreatown. One of his close friends greeted me enthusiastically and asked him is this your boyfriend?! He said this is Wilson and smiled. The next morning, after he asked if I wanted to go camping sometime and mentioned that his mom had invited me over for pancakes, I mentioned that our relationship seemed boyfriend-shaped. We talked about one point of tension: we hadn’t been having sex, which he said was because having sex with people he had strong feelings for made him nervous. I understood this; having exchanged so many words, sex would come with the pressure of real relational stakes, a departure from scripted and well-rehearsed anonymous sex. We seemed to agree that this could be addressed with a little intentionality, and that it was worth working through because of the rare intellectual and emotional intimacy we shared.
The next day Jason called to say that he needed some space to think about our relationship. We agreed to keep texting.
My friend Sam and I had dinner at a Moroccan restaurant up the street from my house with a live belly-dancer. Sam said I had the face and body of an evil gay guy but the soul of a normal gay guy, and that in this way I had, to some extent, catfished Jason, explaining the cold feet.
That Wednesday morning I took half a tab of LSD and lay in bed thinking about Jason for what felt like five to ten minutes before coming to the obvious conclusion that he was just a different person with his own feelings and that kind of has literally nothing to do with me. This sentiment had fallen on completely deaf ears when my friend Charlotte first posited the idea over the phone the day prior. After that I read a book about bears and went on a long hike, where I took twenty to thirty photos of myself shirtless and sent four to a select council of friends for feedback on which I looked most evil in. I posted the winning contender on my Instagram story and texted it to Jason and also sent him a video of two ravens building a nest on a cell phone tower: architects. Forty-three gay guys liked my Instagram story and seventeen sent me direct messages about it. Later that night Jason replied to my Instagram story and said this is a really great look for you. I imagined the message to be dripping with sarcasm and listened to Delete by Ninajirachi (who describes posting an Instagram story for a single person as a mega-digital-meta-mating-ritual) and drove to my parent’s house in Santa Barbara thinking about how maybe I was actually evil and wondering if I liked that feeling or not. By the time I arrived, Jason had clarified: I wasn’t being facetious, I just think you’re cute. I remembered that he is a different person and had generally always been sincere in our interactions thus far.
That Sunday, I was driving back from a barbecue in Pasadena and stopped by Jason’s loft, where he was hosting his friend Noah’s art show/birthday party. Initially, when he had invited me, I had told him I might not be able to stop by because I have a lot of reading, to seem chill. I arrived with flowers, for Noah. Reunited under the supervision of eight or nine gay guys I didn’t know, Jason and I discussed the printing techniques employed so that the saturated images of trans girls at parties mimicked paste-up posters, peeling at the edges. I told him that I had enjoyed my time in Santa Barbara and he told me that his weekend ski trip had been exhausting. I stayed at the art show for half an hour. We didn’t kiss goodbye.
Over the next week my emotional life became increasingly defined by our texts, which were at first reassuring in their tone and content but became gradually less frequent and enthusiastic. I would come to a set of firm conclusions about the inevitable termination of our brief relationship and then receive messages about our mutual favorite artist, Lorde, or a thoughtful reaction to a podcast he listened to on my suggestion, and remember that he’s just a different person and that literally nothing had happened and that it was best not to tell yourself stories like this.
I was cultivating an open mind and a secure presence for our first one-on-one meeting since Jason’s period of reflection began, which was moved from Tuesday, when he was tired, to Saturday, due to scheduling challenges. On Wednesday, unusually, he did not text me after 4:30pm. Sitting at my desk, I felt that Jason had embedded himself in my flesh and was crawling around under my skin. I clenched my fists, curled my toes, tried stretching to work him out. On Thursday a friend mentioned having run into Jason the night before leaving an ice-cream shop on Hillhurst with a guy. The mindfulness war gained an additional front. Where I had previously been battling Jason’s increasingly unwelcome presence in my mind and under my skin, we were now also at war in the stomach.
In the eight weekly sessions of Enhanced Stress and Resilience Training provided by the H.R. team of my previous employer, we learned about shooting the second arrow, which is recognizing when you are responding to something in the world and when you are responding to something in your mind. You are not supposed to shoot the second arrow, for example, by assuming that two gay guys can’t be getting ice cream together as friends and feeling sick to your stomach.
Plus, he was allowed to be on a date as we had not made any commitments to one another, and we had not been seeing each other long. I counted the meaningless dates I had been on that were motivated largely by a different, more significant relationship: sometimes to get over someone, sometimes to convince myself of my unaffectedness, sometimes as a reminder of my desirability. This is something I sometimes think of as the cycle of gay violence in Los Angeles.
On Friday, my therapist said that it is normal to be anxious when important relationships feel ambiguous. I remembered a lecture I had attended earlier in the week on the reproductive strategies of baboons. Baboons, too, invest heavily in social relationships with one another, and the strength of these relationships shape the fitness and survival of their offspring. Primatologists quantify approach-withdrawal interactions to study how male baboons alter investment in relationships when female baboons are in different stages of their reproductive cycles. Attuning myself to approach-withdrawal interactions while rereading Jason’s and my texts, I was embodying a tradition perhaps shared by all the descendants of our last common ancestor with the baboons, some thirty-million years ago. My therapist said I could work on accepting relational ambiguity, and recognize that in this case rumination would not clarify the ambiguity. I arranged my schedule such that I would be occupied until Jason and I hung out on Saturday at which point the ambiguity could be addressed.
Three hours before we were meant to meet up he called to say that he was feeling sick and needed to rest. I stopped myself from asking if he was planning to break up with me and we agreed to hang out Tuesday and I told him I hoped he felt better soon. I cancelled the dinner reservation I had made and got in my car to drive to Santa Barbara and screamed as loud as I could on the freeway and felt bad that my dog in the backseat had to hear that and stopped in Thousand Oaks to purchase a thirty-five pound kettlebell from Sports Authority because I’ll be able to secure a more reliable romantic partner if I gain more muscle.
Over beers at Elsie’s in downtown Santa Barbara that night I reviewed the facts of the case with a friend who said that things would certainly get better once we hung out, and with a friend who said that my urge to sleep with someone else to balance the scales was not going to form the basis of a healthy relationship, and with my older cousin who told me about her crush and agreed that having a crush just makes you insane and that it’s actually kind of fun to feel something.
When I told my friend Gen about the situation on my drive back to Los Angeles the next day, she said that she didn’t like the way this guy was making me feel and I wondered for the first time if this was not a problem with me acting crazy but maybe actually just with him totally being a loser who no longer respected me enough to tell me how he felt. As soon as I got home I texted a friend from the gym and had sex with him an hour later and told myself I had corrected an energetic imbalance in the universe. To avoid thinking about Jason while I walked home, I dedicated myself to making a list in my head of people from Instagram I could probably sleep with in the next two weeks.
On Monday Jason did not send a looking forward to seeing you tomorrow text, so when he followed up Tuesday about dinner at 6ish I said that works. At the last minute I replaced my black polo shirt with a black t-shirt. I rehearsed casual greetings and made a mental list of lighthearted conversation topics on the walk over to Jones. We greeted each other casually and each ordered a martini. I asked several earnest follow-up questions about his weightlifting routine, and dinner passed with relative ease.
After dinner, Jason gave me a ride back to my apartment. When he pulled up, I said youcancomeupifyouwantbutIknowyouaretiredsonopressureseeyoulater in a single breath while opening the car door, suddenly eager to have completed my extremely chill performance. He said he wanted to talk.
We sat in his car and he told me that he had been unable to stop thinking about me and unable to sleep, and that the anxiety he felt about our attachment and the word boyfriend had led him to the conclusion that he was not ready for a relationship. I told him I knew he was going to say that, and that it was kinda lame but allgoodseeyouaround, and went to get out of the car, again. He stopped me – that’s it? – so we talked it through a little more, he cried a little, and I told him that I thought he was being stupid and embarrassing and that I didn’t want to talk for a while. My anger seemed relieving to him. We kissed and I held up my middle finger as I walked back into my apartment and then I texted him that I was glad we met and that I wished him the best and that actually he could reach out if he wanted to talk more. He sent me a pensive song by Brian Eno and said that he was so happy we met and Goodnight Wilson <3.
I didn’t sleep at all that night, wishing I knew how to cry.
On the drive from the gym to campus the next day I told my friend Jeff over the phone that I usually interpreted obsessive thinking about a romantic partner as a positive sign that I actually care. He said that he didn’t think it had to be that way and that if two people with secure attachment styles and self-confidence started going on dates and liked each other, they could probably experience mostly positive and calm feelings during their courtship. I had never thought about this. The three previous times that thinking about a guy I was seeing began to increase my heart rate, I had interpreted this as a sign from god or powerful intuition and not an overactive nervous system.
I was plunged into visceral sadness three times that day. First, when someone in my lab meeting said the word architect; second, when someone at Barney’s Beanery West Hollywood sang a karaoke song I thought he’d like; and, finally, when driving my friend home down Santa Monica Boulevard, remembering all the times Jason and I had kissed in his car while waiting for lights to turn green on that same drive.
That night I had a dream about having an incredible pet lizard unlike any I had ever seen before. After marveling at its beauty and docility, I became vaguely disappointed and embarrassed when I realized the lizard was actually a robot that collapsed into a game boy-like cartridge to be inserted into the cage when I was ready to put him back.
Thursday I was left to my own devices to pack for a trip and file my taxes, and I paced around wishing I had not broached the relationship conversation like that three Sundays ago. In Supercut Lorde says in my head I do everything right. I tried to use my anger to swim as fast as possible on the rooftop pool of the West Hollywood Recreation Center. I texted a guy I had dated a year ago who lived on the route home from the pool to see if he was around, only to find out that he had moved to Echo Park. I stopped by Trader Joe’s to stock up on protein bars.
Back in my apartment, I finished packing and repeated to myself that I was having an extremely bad day and that I shouldn’t have said anything. Resorting to metaphysical guidance out of desperation, I followed a guided holotropic breathing meditation on YouTube, depriving my body of oxygen through shallow breaths in and out followed by 90 second breath holds. I almost cried twice in the process and when the video ended, I curled into a ball on my side and buried my face into a pillow. In the space behind my eyelids I saw a blueish purple two-dimensional graphic —Jason’s face— which repeatedly appeared and then dissipated into the distance before being replaced by another version of his face, with varying degrees of resolution. I realized that instead of focusing my thoughts on what had gone wrong or what I could have done differently, I should focus on compassion, wishing him peace and maybe less anxiety about potential attachment, and thinking about the things I admire about him, which mostly stemmed from his generally optimistic and deeply engaged relationship to the world. I stopped feeling angry after this, and instead mostly felt sad.
I took a 10mg edible and brushed my teeth in the bathroom at LAX that evening. As the plane lifted off I thought about not being in a relationship, and looked down at the city and saw all of the places along the coast where I had kissed different guys last summer. Yes, I was with Jason in Malibu just over that hill when he made us sandwiches with cherry jam and I got a ticket for having my dog off-leash at the beach and he texted later that he was still glowing from our day yesterday. But also, I had skinny dipped there with Quinn, and there with Marco, and Lucas had also driven me to Malibu and brought me an orange Gatorade, because I told him I secretly liked those. Shawn and I kissed in the ocean there and I swam at sunset with John and his Australian lover James there. I remembered that it was almost summer, which is not a season for boyfriends, and that I planned to be away for 8 months of fieldwork next year, and that I sometimes think about doing a postdoc in London, and that so much could happen and that actually maybe I don’t want to be in a serious relationship either, bro.
Reflecting on Jason, I felt I had scared off a deer I approached too quickly because I’d thought it was a horse. It is important to find a horse if you are looking for an animal that can be easily harnessed and hitched to a cart, but I have no cart in need of pulling at this time, and this was an exceptionally handsome, charming, well-read deer with whom I was maybe just interested in sustained proximity. I resolved to make a more cautious approach, and made a calendar item near the end of the month to reach out to Jason.
Eight hours into my trip to Puerto Rico I had received messages from more than seventy-five people on my reactivated Grindr account and found myself sitting at the bar of a relatively empty pizza restaurant. Adriel, who had diamond earrings and a tattoo of two angels on his neck, made me drinks and agreed to take me to the beach in the morning.
The next day Adriel showed me Puerto Rican Indie Kid music in the car and took me down a hidden path to an empty beach. He told me that he had gone out the night before with a coworker but saw too many ops and left. I asked why he had so many ops, and he said it was a combination of people he had fucked and ghosted, and people he didn’t want to fuck who were mad about it. It seemed the cycle of gay violence may extend to US territories as well. He told me about his New York City-based boyfriend when I asked about the person on his phone background. They’d recently had a fight because Adriel had lied about being done with OnlyFans work when in fact he wasn’t, and then the boyfriend had come to Puerto Rico without telling him and kissed someone else in front of him at a big party. We talked about being a demon twink. When I told him about Jason, he said that if you don’t break up and get back together at least 50 times it’s not real love, and that when we inevitably get back together, Adriel will come to LA, and Jason and I can Eiffel Tower him. He took pictures of me on the beach for a revenge Instagram post.
Adriel and I had tacos, and I made it back to the Airbnb with 30 minutes to get ready for the wedding I had come to Puerto Rico to attend. During the ceremony, the officiant offered a list of central tenets in marriage, including things like listening and respect, before adding mutual fidelity, and then, because the wedding was conducted in both English and Spanish, he repeated the list and I heard the words again: fidelidad mutua. He said that in marriage, me, myself, and I are coming along for the car ride, but it’s best to leave them in the backseat and let us and we drive. This seemed to be damning evidence against my resolution to pursue a less boyfriendy relationship with Jason at the end of the month wherein we would text less frequently, both do our own thing, and hang out when it made sense. But it’s not like I was even thinking about marriage, bro.
I almost cried during the dance between the groom and his mother, thinking about how special it would be to dance with my mom like that. Though I tried not to, I thought of course about what a fun wedding Jason and I would have if we got married, and wondered what it would be like to dance with him in matching tuxedos.
Returning to the Airbnb around midnight, I arranged a threesome with a couple who lived nearby. On the 20-minute walk to their apartment through the mostly empty streets of San Juan, a large pit bull emerged from behind a car and approached me quickly, growling and baring its teeth. I decided to face the dog while walking backwards at a consistent pace. The dog approached me rapidly before backing off when I yelled or clapped, coming after me three times, until I got to the end of the block, at which point the dog retreated for good.
As I continued my walk I recognized my elevated heart rate from the periods of Jason-related 3–4am sleeplessness I had been experiencing.
In bed with the couple, I found myself most moved watching them kiss, and by the meaning their interactions with one another seemed to carry, and the parts when they were speaking to each other in Spanish I could not follow. Afterwards, the three of us were laughing in their pleasantly lit 3am apartment while they taught me how to say poppers in Spanish. They both followed me on Instagram and one of them sent me a DM saying they had so much fun and thought I looked like Shawn Mendes.
I am always wondering about the forces that shape us, especially in extra malleable moments, split open by infatuation and then heartbreak, reassembling myself with urgency. My baboon neural network increases my heart rate, keeps me awake, thinks I should text him. One app on my cell phone recommends keywords for what I’m into so I can craft a sexual script with a stranger before our meeting. I walk past a full-length mirror on my way to brush my teeth, and on the way back to my bed. I look at the pictures of him and him and him, of me, the shape of our mustaches, the cut of our jeans. I read the comments and the list of story-watchers. Another app tells me how many more times I should repeat the Romanian dead lift, tearing my muscle fibers such that they are eager to absorb the protein powder, chicken breast, can of tuna, and become something new. The guys from the party are generous with their ketamine spray on the dance floor; they know about the discomfort a crush can cause, and how to avoid this kind of pain next time.
Sometimes I make eye contact with someone and see something I recognize. I look away and then back and he looks back too, and then we are kissing about it, no longer alone, in a room full of shirtless men and loud electronic music, in the front seat of his car in the driveway, across a picnic table on the patio of the Irish Times, on a lifeguard tower in the dark. There can seem to be endless possibility for novelty, pleasure, connection. Seeking this connection in an environment so saturated with options and so averse to commitment can be a provocation to cultivate a particular kind of independence and self-respect, a strengthening of the core such that I find myself smiling while walking home from the threesome alone.
Sometimes guys in their 30s advise that it is safer and less painful to just lean into the whole gay thing and avoid letting things get too serious and that’s actually what’s cool about being gay is that we don’t have to follow all these norms so I shouldn’t really mind if he has a boyfriend but the afternoon nap together was probably not a good idea and plus now we have PrEP so I should just enjoy being hot and 25, keep a few people on the roster at any given time, go home after the sex is over, and stop letting myself imagine that the wannabe Dimes Square cokehead from the warehouse party might become a really wonderful boyfriend or maybe the love of my life.
Sometimes, in the bedroom of someone I arrange to meet on the internet, I look at his face and his eyes are sort of empty, looking through me, past me, for someone else, or maybe for a younger version of himself. Encountering these lonely faces, it can seem that the red lasers and smoke machines are working to obfuscate that the room is full of men burdened with the same kind of deep insecurity from childhood, seeking validation in the desirability of their bodies and neglecting their souls (that is, becoming evil).
I consulted with friends about my revenge Instagram post in the airport. Cassandra said she liked the softer expression between the two selfie options. I asked Jeff if the softer one was better. He said as a gay man would you rather be hard or soft? I posted the harder picture and arranged three dates over the next two weeks with guys who reached out regarding my post.
On the plane home I took another edible and reread James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and got to the part where Jacques, the older man, encourages David, young and fearful of his intense connection to Giovanni, to lean into love instead of running from it.
“Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last? Since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, hélas! In the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty – they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better –forever– if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe. He paused, watching me and then looked down to his cognac. “You play it safe long enough,” he said, in a different tone, “and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.”
I remembered a time four years ago when my ex-boyfriend and I were kissing on a wedding dance floor and I was feeling embarrassed, trying to pull away, and an older gay man came up to me and whispered Love him! Love him! and I just thought that was a really intense thing to say.
*** Some names and identifying details have been changed.
