Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys Read online

  The next week I’ll see James—remember James?—out of the corner of my eye while I’m making out with a stranger in a bar. When James and I glance at each other I close my eyes because it is rude to look at one person while you’re kissing someone else.

  Later I’m in my car giving head to this guy named Sam when he tells me he sees a cop car. He’s in the passenger seat, I’m in the driver’s, a parking lot at one in the morning. When I jerk my head up, I see flashing red lights in the rearview mirror, pulling up behind us. The only reason we don’t get arrested is because Sam’s a firefighter, and there’s some kind of fraternal code.

  Soon it’s fall. At the senior homecoming dance, Anna is sticking her tongue out at the yearbook photographer: her arms thrown around my neck, eyes smeared in green and purple, and her hair towered into a ridiculous tiara. She’s sparkly and Las Vegas in voluminous white and the shutter snaps and she slouches into me, eyes closed, and lets her hands fall to my hips. “Even though you’re a mean person who doesn’t like nice things or Africa,” she says, “you are nice when it matters, which is what I know.”

  Anna prides herself in never saying quite what she means. She believes that a truer version of the truth can most honestly be located in an elegant obfuscation.

  The dance is winding down, and I’m the only boy whose date’s hands start bleeding spontaneously. This happens to Anna now and then, and no one can decide whether it’s because she’s a saint or an elaborate faker. I suspect a combination of the two. Maybe she just needs some moisturizer. Either way, that night, while we sit on the bleachers, blood starts to trickle from Anna’s fingers. She knows it is supposed to be from her palms but come on, she says, close enough. Under the streamers in the dim, dusty light of the gym she holds out her bleeding hands to me and says, “Jesus fuck, not again.” You think I’m making this up, but it’s the truth.

  Years later I’ll look at the picture from that night—me and Anna at the dance—and I’ll see something that I missed. The ghost of an image on top of the one I remember. It’s nothing much, just the suggestion of a frown laid over her clownish, carefree grimace. A harsh twist of the eyebrow; a hovering suspicion. Double exposure. But has she guessed my secret or her own? And what do the bleeding hands have to do with any of it?

  It is pretty early when I drop her off at home after the dance. I watch her run up the lawn in her fucked-up Cinderella gear. “I love you,” I call out the window. Or do I forget?

  “I love you,” she shouts back. I don’t question whether she actually means it.

  Then I’ll go out. It is a Saturday night. Take Piney Branch to Military to Nebraska, then on down Connecticut and into the city, where I’ll toss my tie and too-small jacket under the dashboard and unbutton my shirt halfway down my chest.

  A long, moping year goes by; it’s another summer, and I’m eighteen. Anna and I spend the night at Lisa Roth’s house. Lisa’s parents are in the Bahamas and she makes us what she calls Long Island iced teas. Really, they’re just powdered tea and vodka. It’s August. Lisa, Anna, and I will be heading for college within the month, but we pretend that things haven’t changed much. Things have changed. Things will change.

  That night, Anna, Lisa, and I snap pictures on a disposable camera. We stumble around thinking we’re much drunker than we really are, because we’re secretly not so used to drinking and we don’t know any better. Anna, Lisa, me, music blaring, sunglasses indoors, the two of them biting my ear and making faces for the camera. They try to dress me up like a girl, but I just look like an asshole. Hours later, Anna and I will kiss for the first time on Mr. and Mrs. Roth’s bed.

  I kiss Lisa first is actually what happens. Her and me and Anna on her parents’ bed together. We have collapsed, laughing, and then there is quiet. I am looking at Lisa. She looks at me. This is her fault, I am thinking. This was her intention from the beginning of the night. And then a kiss. It may be a joke. But when it’s over, Anna is crying so I kiss her too and here is where it all comes apart. There is no picture of this.

  In August, Anna is crying, so I kiss her.

  I kiss Anna because the day I met her we were twelve and she shot me with a toy pistol, right in the chest. “Murder,” she said before tossing her hair with a smirk and running away. Flip-flops and leg warmers disappearing down an empty hallway. That night I kiss Anna with the knowledge that we will never be finished.

  The next morning, I wake up as she’s getting dressed, and I watch her. A toss of blonde hair before she pulls her shirt over her head, and when she turns to face me, she’s just blazing with this ravenous, limitless brilliance. When our eyes meet, I’m afraid for a second that I might turn to stone. But I don’t, and Anna turns again and leaves the room.

  Those late nights in the summer, that year, I can feel the city bursting inside of me. Walking alone down 17th Street it’s the lights and the pavement and some crappy beat tripping from an apartment window, the peak of the Washington Monument just visible but miles away and I am supercharged. Strolling past the bars, the eyes of those guys are on me. Chlorine sizzles.

  “People say fish have really short memories,” Anna had told me, one night at the roller rink after we were tired out. “Like, three seconds. People say, ‘Who cares if you flush your fish down the toilet, it’ll forget all about it after three seconds.’ But a starfish remembers where its arm once was. It remembers it so well that it grows back. And let’s not even start on jellyfish.”

  “How can a starfish remember anything?” I asked her. “I’m pretty sure they don’t even have brains.”

  We were sitting on the bench on the edge of the wooden rink; the night was almost over. We rolled our feet back and forth, feeling our wheels catch on years of spilled Pepsi.

  “Starfish have photographic memories,” said Anna.

  The summer I am eighteen, I am all best intentions. Every kiss is spinning with the odds of love. Anna, Lisa, James, Sam, the rest. With every kiss, I think, This might be it. And like on Wheel of Fortune, “Big money, big money, big money.” But Lisa will be sleeping for a while still, and Anna has finally burst into something both more and less real. Like she opened the yearbook, flipped to her page, and was surprised to see no starfish but, instead, a true and distant sun.

  James and Sam and all of them I blow off one by one for no offense other than the fact that they take me seriously. It strikes me as pathetic. Luckily, there are plenty of guys on 17th Street who don’t have names yet. For now, that’s enough.

  That summer the beer they buy me is cold and I can feel my heart expanding and expanding. Anna and I will meet again, now and then, in the edges of photographs. Smile, flash, blink; a flicker of infinity. The shutter will snap. This is how we used to look.

  V

  Fathers and Daughters, Mothers and Sons

  “I hope my sons are gay so that they will bring home lovely young men who will redecorate my kitchen.”

  —from “Darling, I Like You That Way,” by Ayelet Waldman

  IN PRAISE OF WOMEN

  Andrew Solomon

  I have always liked girls more than boys for pretty much everything except sex. When I was in elementary school, my best friends were girls, and I always wanted to sit at their table in our tacitly gender-segregated lunchroom, a wish that did not earn me stripes in the heterosexist world to which I was supposed to be getting acclimated. This propensity has never changed. When I was growing up, the person in the world whom I most loved was my mother, and I carried from that relationship the expectation that women would be my comrades. I have very close male friends, but more of my friends are women, and the friends to whom I am closest are women. I like reading novels by women; indeed, I often like novels that are intended for women and wrote my dissertation on Virginia Woolf and George Eliot in part because I loved the company of those two great women. It’s not that I don’t like men. I’m very close to my father and brother and to various male friends, and I love reading Tolstoy, and I have been deeply in love with men, and have
been very happily partnered with a man for many years. But when I am away from female company for a while, I miss the woman’s touch, and eye, and self. At a younger time, when my sexual relationships were more transient than I would have liked, my friendships with women were winningly permanent.

  There are two ways to be gay. Some gay men separate themselves entirely from women; they choose men not only for the bedroom but also for social enterprise, and live in a male world untouched by any femininity except, perhaps, their own. They find women distasteful or confusing or even hateful. They themselves may not be masculine in the conventional sense of the word; they can be butch or flamingly queeny, tops or bottoms, Brokeback Mountain cowboys or faux-finish painters, but they are guy’s guys, citizens of a unisex world. Other gay men strongly identify with women, often feeling that their own thought processes are akin to those of the fair sex or simply that the kind of thought that makes them feel seen and whole is the woman’s gaze. Such gay men feel most comfortable with women, and women are their best friends. They have an emotional life that has some of a woman’s flux and acknowledged melancholy. They may sleep with men, but they also love women deeply and truly. Such men need not be feminine, but they understand women’s hearts and follow the complex logic of women’s minds. It’s Tom of Finland versus Henry James. My allegiance is to category two.

  The Cambridge scholar Simon Baron-Cohen has proposed that autism is a form of what he calls “extreme masculinization” of the human brain, and has defined as super-masculine highly developed analytical skills, an interest in patterns and logic, and an insensitivity to unspoken (and often, even to spoken) communication—the later-life version of frogs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails, or a scientist’s vocabulary as coming from Mars. By implication, a woman’s brain is all about intuition, empathy, and picking up on social cues, what was once known as sugar and spice and everything nice, and is sometimes marked as coming from Venus. There is a counter-autistic way of being gay that is about having a more emotional brain, trading on intuition, being awake to psychological nuance and a bit vague about math. Of course many men who are like that are not at all gay, and many of them marry women and live happily ever after. Among gay men of this stripe, however, the gap between erotic and emotional identification can be profound. Perhaps that is why some gay men live so deeply in their friendships, and especially in their friendships with women.

  Before I delineated all this, I felt more deeply torn between genders. I would classify myself as mildly bisexual, which means that I have tended to fall in love with women and have sex with men. I didn’t mind having sex with women, and I was fond of men’s company, but it took many years for me to bring my gender preferences into line and form a fully committed relationship with a single person and, by extension, a single gender. For years I waffled back and forth, torn between the different ways I loved. The gender I finally chose for romantic love was male, and with John, my partner, I have found that blending of emotional and physical intimacy, but it was not easy. It was probably made more difficult because I share the popular bias against too much femininity in men. Those same qualities that so attract me in women often put me off in men. I like my genders to be reasonably distinct, and it was with force and clarity that I chose to spend my life with a man; my imagination failed me when I contemplated neutered compromise. There it is: I didn’t go to the trouble of coming out of the closet to be with someone who didn’t entirely float my boat. I decided to find the boon of female companionship outside my romantic life, and so my best friends are women.

  John and I are contemplating having children, and while I will love any child I have, I have a particular dream of a little girl to balance the maleness of our household. When I think of godparents for this child, I imagine godmothers before I get to godfathers; a child with two fathers might want knowledge we don’t provide. For me, the hardest part of planning a gay family is the absence of a mother in our putative child’s life. It’s not that anyone else would be more loving than John and I, but female softness was the sun and stars to me when I was little, and I am sorry not to be able to deliver it to our children. John feels the same way. One of our sorrows, close as I am, and as John is, to my father is that neither of us ever met the other’s mother. It has been a great joy developing friendships with each other’s longtime female friends; among the best things we have in common is our love for women, which helps attach us to each other, a deeper mutual interest than travel or architecture. Because it is mutual, neither of us is threatened by it; I have had partners who didn’t like the women in my life for the strength of their convictions and their power in my psyche. It was problematic: I loved men enough to give up on according primacy to an individual female, but not enough to give up on women. There is some human equilibrium dictated by social tradition, in which you marry the opposite sex and have friends of the same sex. It seems like a cheat to hook up with your own sex, and make friends only with your own sex, too. It is walking away from half the world.

  I have Orlando fantasies of slipping back and forth between the genders. I wouldn’t mind being a woman every second Wednesday, for example. I used to like to imagine being a woman instead of being a gay man. I never contemplated the surgery simply because the procedure seemed too traumatic and too imperfect. If through some relatively painless process I could have become a woman with a fully functioning reproductive system and fully sensitized sex organs and so on, I would have had seriously to contemplate the possibility in my troubled adolescence. I wouldn’t do it now; I’ve come too far down the road of my life as myself and it would disrupt things to make such a change. I’ve achieved love, and though a domestic life involves constant adjustments, my particular situation would not be improved by my swapping to another gender. I like being a man and I think I’m good at it. But I might like, might have liked, being a woman, too.

  Older now and settled, I wonder sometimes what it is about women that is so touching. It seems impossible to generalize without lapsing into cliché, but the pattern is strong enough that I can’t believe that I just happen always to have had female best friends. Is it simply a perpetual re-creation of the mother-son bond? I don’t think it is, though the relationship with my mother may have been the necessary precondition of these friendships. Though the friendships with girls go back to childhood, the loss of my mother to cancer when I was in my twenties was one of the spurs to keeping up these alliances with particular vigilance, because at some level they salve an irretrievable loss.

  I have built my career on figuring out what makes people tick. I remember the many long afternoons I spent with my mother in contemplation of these mysteries. I would come home from school and say that someone had been mean to me, or nice, and we’d talk about what kind of person that person was, and about why he or she might have acted that way. It seemed to me a fine way of ordering the universe, this delicate appreciation of human nuance, and the more methodical principles with which men seemed to address the chaos of life were always a bit anathema to me. Women help me to look in, always inward, and while I am a fan of outer space and once hoped to be an astronaut, I am more myself when focused on interiority. I prefer for myself seduction as a technique to ravagement. And I prefer people who seduce to people who ravage. I love gentleness. I believe in female advice—about clothes, about other friends, about love itself. Outside of the private world I share only with John, there are no decisions I make in which women do not play a role.

  I also find women beautiful—beautiful ones, that is. That too may be the aftershock of having a beautiful mother. While men’s hard bodies excite me, there is something to gentle curves and to that attenuated female slenderness and to faces that aren’t always threatening to erupt into beardedness that is curiously appealing to me. There is a sensuality in the littleness of women’s bones. But this drifts far too easily into moons and menstrual cycles and tides, and from there to hysteria and penis envy, and on into such a vast compendium of neo-Victorian clichés, preferring the kin
dness of women to the honor of men and so on, that I become queasy. It seems that I, as a man, should remove my intrusive and slightly objectifying gaze from these innocent victims of ingrained social attitude. Sometimes I think that as a gay man I’m exempt; but sometimes I suppose that because I neither have female sexual organs nor spend time exploring those of other people, I should keep my views of women to myself, and simply express generic fondness.

  A photo came in the mail today of one of my goddaughters and her mother, who is an old girlfriend of mine, and the image of their two smiles gazing out at me fills me with happiness and calm and a particular sadness, too. I see the passage of time in the faces of women in a way that I don’t in the faces of men. I have godsons too, and they have fathers, and I love them just as much, in my own slightly different way, but there is a certain ache that I reserve for the girls.

  FAMILY ALBUMS

  Philip Himberg

  “And have you inserted your penis into anyone’s mouth or rectum in the last six months?”

  “Yes,” I replied, riveted to a tiny red ant that crept across the vast expanse of the Formica tabletop.

  “Approximately how many times?” the boy asked.

  “Well, it’s been…I don’t know. How many weeks since my last visit here? Twenty-five? Twenty-six weeks? Let’s say thirty-two times.”

  “Did you use a condom?”

  “No.” The ant made a right turn and disappeared into the corner of a pink bakery box. filled with Valentine cookies. The boy. flipped a page over and inhaled through clenched teeth. “Okay. Has anyone inserted his penis into your mouth or rectum in the last six months?” he asked.