4 Oct
I Inadvertently Date a Gay Guy
Before my wife came out to join me in L.A., in lived the bachelor’s life. I had begun a screenwriting fellowship at Amblin Entertainment, on the Universal lot. and had become fast friends with the nine other people in the program. At various times I hung out with all of them. But Steve and I fell into a semi-regular routine. Dinner and a movie. We were trying to figure out the secrets of screenwriting.
Steve was a supremely nice guy. Polite and thoughtful. Boyish. He often wore a baseball cap. He wrote about comic book super heroes. In my naivete, he didn’t fit my stereotype of a gay man. He wasn’t effeminate. He wasn’t flamboyant. He didn’t make innuendos. In fact, it was easy for me to put his sexual orientation aside.
Over dinner, sharing a bottle of wine, if the conversation turned to relationships, he did share his difficulties in finding anyone to love. He was friendly with an ex, but he didn’t like the bar scene. He hated the bar scene. And in truth, I think he wasn’t attracted to the effeminate types.
We must have done the dinner and a movie a half dozen times, when one night we ended up back at my apartment. I played him a mournful Chet Baker CD and popped the cork on another bottle of wine, and was deep in my storytelling mode, lounging in chair, as Steve stretched out on the couch, baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, letting the music carry him somewhere.
Perhaps it was my imagination, but in that moment it occurred to me that maybe Steve was attracted to me–after all, being heterosexual doesn’t exclude someone from the admiration of gay men. Maybe he was waiting for me to make a move on him. I suddenly realized that an outside observer might conclude that he and I were dating. Had been dating for several weeks. The CD ended, and Steve sat up, rubbed his face to wake up, drained his wine glass. He gave me a look. What was it? Wistfulness? Then, with the usual parting exchanges, he left.
After my wife came out to LA and met Steve she told me: He seems really nice, but it’s like he’s got something against me. It’s almost like he’s jealous, she concluded.
