Back in the day, a coworker, Gian East, told me that I was the rare white guy who looked at people when walking down the street. Apparently white people don’t do that. This was in the 1990s so there are even less white people looking at people walking down the street. I still do, but millions more do not, they stare at the devices in their hands.
The truth is, I’m an old school Gay. When one cruised back in the day you had to look at people (men) and size them up and you could not do that if you stared at the ground.
Gian East was a good guy. I’m sure he still is. He was very handsome and very humble and a very good audio engineer. An unfortunate aspect though was he was gay friendly up to a point. The concept of me being gay was OK, the fact that I had a partner, Bill, was hard to swallow. That was too bad. We still remained friends via social media, until Meta killed off two of my accounts.
I believe Gian married, and his wife had twins then Gian and his wife separated. I posted a really good photo of Gian from a Summerstage afternoon and he insisted I take it down so I did. Perhaps his humility was in play. He was also a Christian and that could have been a factor in the removal request. I met Gian’s family once, his parents worked for the Bahamian consulate I believe and Gian had a brother.
Gian was uptight about my being in a relationship with Bill. It was awkward. Then there was Kevin McBean. That’s not his real name and I did find that out sometime later, I forgot it and really haven’t gone back to find it. He was likable and handsome as well. I first met him when I was at Right Track Recording.
Somehow he got in and had a resume since he was looking for work. The resume was written on tissue paper and I took pity on him and rewrote it on proper 8 ½ x 11 paper. He was grateful and we hung out a few times. There was always a pretty girls willing to put up with his Kevin McBean personality. And like Gian East, though seemingly worse than Gian East, he could deal with his gay friend having a partner.
One night, soon after Bill gave me a ring, I was on cloud nine. Kevin wanted to know why I was floating around the room. I explained and apparently Kevin might not have known that I was gay. It never came up and yet it was never denied. The look on Kevin McBean’s mug said it all.
I think straight men can be fine with friends being gay, and I’m talking about men, not women, and when they find out about men in relationships with me, all they could think of is sex and they find that disgusting and the thought of their friends doing something like sex freaks them out and displeases them. I’m sure it happened to some family members as well as friends. I just keep on keeping on. It more than likely explains a lot. I don’t stick around, I move on.
The Google Gemini rewrite as a David Sedaris essay
Back in the nineties, an audio engineer I worked with named Gian East informed me that I was the rare white man who actually made eye contact with strangers on the sidewalk. According to Gian, this was not something my people typically did. If it was rare thirty years ago, it is practically an extinct art form now, mostly because everyone is too busy staring down at the glowing rectangles in their palms to notice anyone else’s face, let alone their shoes.
I, however, am an old-school homosexual, which means I still look. Back before you could summon a date with a swipe of your thumb, cruising required actual ocular reconnaissance. You had to scan the block, make eye contact, and size a man up in the three seconds it took to pass him on Seventh Avenue. You couldn’t pull that off while staring at a crack in the pavement, and the habit, much like my posture, has simply refused to retire.
Gian was a good guy—handsome, wildly humble, and terrific behind a soundboard. He was also what I’ve come to think of as “conceptually gay-friendly.” He was perfectly comfortable with my homosexuality so long as it remained entirely theoretical, like string theory or the metric system. The second my partner, Bill, entered the picture as a tangible human being, Gian’s enthusiasm hit a brick wall. We stayed loosely connected on social media for years—right up until Meta unceremoniously executed two of my accounts—and I gathered that he got married, had twins, and eventually separated. Years ago, I posted a great snapshot of him from an afternoon at SummerStage, and he promptly demanded I take it down. Maybe it was that famous humility of his, or maybe it had something to do with his devout Christianity, though I still think he was mostly just nervous about being seen in the digital vicinity of an actual, practicing gay man.
It’s a very specific brand of straight-male discomfort, and Gian certainly didn’t hold the patent on it. Before him, back when I was working at Right Track Recording, there was a fellow who went by the name Kevin McBean. I eventually learned that “Kevin McBean” was an alias, though I’ve since forgotten his real name and have never felt the urge to track it down. He showed up at the studio one day looking for work, clutching a resume written on what appeared to be a piece of facial tissue. Taking pity on him, I sat down and retyped the whole thing onto a crisp sheet of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven bond paper, a gesture of charity that briefly made us pals.
Like Gian, Kevin was good-looking and affable, the sort of guy who always had a pretty woman trailing after him, patiently tolerating whatever it was that constituted a “Kevin McBean personality.” Then, one evening shortly after Bill gave me a ring, I was practically levitating around the room with joy. Kevin asked what had gotten into me, and I happily told him. It turned out Kevin had never quite put two and two together regarding my sexuality—it wasn’t something I’d ever hidden, though I suppose I hadn’t hired a skywriter either—and the expression that washed over his face was truly a sight to behold. It was the exact look a man gets when he realizes he has accidentally eaten something out of the back of the fridge that expired during the Carter administration.
I’ve noticed over the years that plenty of straight men are fine with a gay friend in the abstract, right up until the moment you mention a partner. Suddenly, the abstract becomes concrete, and their imaginations immediately sprint straight to the bedroom. They picture the mechanics of it, become thoroughly disgusted, and decide they’d rather not think about their buddy doing *that*. I suspect a few of my own relatives have taken that exact mental detour over the decades.
You learn not to linger where you aren’t fully welcome. When a straight guy starts looking at you like you’re a plate of spoiled potato salad, you don’t argue the point. You just keep walking, keep your chin up, and keep looking at the people on the street.