normal behavior
This Sunday Bob and I are planning for another sidewalk sale in front of our Brooklyn apartment to get rid of the rest of the stuff we can't take with us to our new place. We had one other sale back in August. There was a surprisingly steady flow of shoppers throughout the day and at times it was such a mad house that we were lucky we could scrounge up help from several friends and neighbors to manage the crowds. Several passers by even thought it was a new flea market. They wanted to know if we would be there with new stuff every week.
This, of course, also gives you some idea of how much junk we had packed away in our Brooklyn place after the 11 years. Bob and I are both pack rats by nature and we had been out of control for a long time. Every closet and nook had been filled. There was no longer any space under the bed, or the sinks, or the couch. The large room that was once our art studio was packed so completely with so much junk, ceiling to floor, that we could barely make a path. It was like a suburban garage that no longer had room for the car. If we bought a new couch, the old one went in there; new shelves, the old ones got crammed in sideways. Never going to use that weight bench? Good, we can drape an old carpet across it and hang a love seat on the wall above it. I'm not exaggerating.
The purge has been a necessary but difficult one. It has taken months. We needed to let go of this garbage and we've done it pretty well. Last August's sidewalk sale was our good start and by the end of it we had made a butt load of money and had gotten rid of a lot of excess weight.
The sale also turned out to be a strange opportunity to meet some real characters from the neighborhood, many of whom we had never even seen before, like the short lesbian artist with the giant Dalmatian that was as tall as she was, and the nice young couple that dragged home a room-size carpet and a wobbly china cabinet several blocks across Flatbush Avenue. There was the woman with the strange tick that made her fling her arm out in front of her every few minutes. And the neighbor who just loves our Atlantic/4th Avenue end of Park Slope (what we dismissed affectionately as "Park Slump" the entire time we've lived there) who, when he heard that we were moving to the Village, remarked sincerely, "Comparable neighborhood." (Don't get me started. Find me something comparable to the Strand, the Quad, and Norman's Sound within walking distance of the Atlantic/Pacific subway stop. Hell, find me a bodega with 1% milk or fresh produce other than Caribbean root vegetables.) And of course there were several gay couples who hung out at the sale, wanting to know everything about our life and our apartment.
One of these gay couples had actually come to check out the larger pieces of furniture that we had listed in our ad on Craig's List. I asked Josh, a young straight friend from work who was helping us out with the sale, if he would please take this couple upstairs to the apartment to look at the furniture we were selling and keep an eye on them until I could come up. Now Josh is indeed straight and also cute. He could easily be one of my models --swarthy, hairy, friendly, nice eyes-- and this was not lost on the gay couple who also spotted one of my calendars on the table in our apartment.
"Oh, is this for sale, too?" one of them inquired.
"Um, I don't know," Josh told me later he had replied, "that's a calendar of photos by one of the guys who owns this apartment."
"Oh," the other member of the couple smirked, "are you in it?"
After the couple left, Josh pulled me aside downstairs and told me about their comments about the calendar. He said that after that exchange, one of the guys cornered Josh and asked him, point blank, if he wanted to have his balls licked. That's right; he looked my straight young friend from work directly in the eyes and asked, "Do you want your balls liked?"
"I wish I had been cool enough," Josh recounted to me, "to say something like 'yeah by my girl friend' or something so I didn't look flustered. But he took me so much by surprise that all I could say was something lame like 'no, no...thanks.'"
I felt a little protective, and wanted to track the couple down and ask them where the hell they came off.... but Josh is 26 and appeared to have fended well enough for himself. He paused in his story long enough for me to make another quick sale of some trinket or other and then turned to me and asked, "That's just not normal behavior, is it?"
I was about to make some mildly defensive comment like, "well, what is normal?" When I realized what Josh was asking. What he really wanted to know was whether this was common behavior. Is this the way a lot of gay guys come onto one another? Is it really that easy for you guys? Do you just tell someone you find attractive point blank what you want to do and it works? Do you know how hard we straight men have to work to get a fucking phone number!?
He didn't say that explicitly but it was all through his question, "That's just not normal behavior, is it?"
I replied, laughing nervously, something to the effect, "Some gay men are pretty forward with one another and you would be amazed at what goes on."
It got me wondering, however, if we gay guys do have it easier, when it comes to "getting some." I have no dating experience with women, but from what I hear from them some are pretty hard to get and some are pretty easy, whether or not they believe it about themselves. But if I had to venture a guess, I would say gay men are, shall we say, a little freer around sex than straight women and it was interesting to see the flash of recognition on this straight man's face.
We've already got the taste, style and wit "leg up" on them; do we have to have the "leg up" on scoring as well? I know that this is a way more complex topic than that; but I'm just saying....
This, of course, also gives you some idea of how much junk we had packed away in our Brooklyn place after the 11 years. Bob and I are both pack rats by nature and we had been out of control for a long time. Every closet and nook had been filled. There was no longer any space under the bed, or the sinks, or the couch. The large room that was once our art studio was packed so completely with so much junk, ceiling to floor, that we could barely make a path. It was like a suburban garage that no longer had room for the car. If we bought a new couch, the old one went in there; new shelves, the old ones got crammed in sideways. Never going to use that weight bench? Good, we can drape an old carpet across it and hang a love seat on the wall above it. I'm not exaggerating.
The purge has been a necessary but difficult one. It has taken months. We needed to let go of this garbage and we've done it pretty well. Last August's sidewalk sale was our good start and by the end of it we had made a butt load of money and had gotten rid of a lot of excess weight.
The sale also turned out to be a strange opportunity to meet some real characters from the neighborhood, many of whom we had never even seen before, like the short lesbian artist with the giant Dalmatian that was as tall as she was, and the nice young couple that dragged home a room-size carpet and a wobbly china cabinet several blocks across Flatbush Avenue. There was the woman with the strange tick that made her fling her arm out in front of her every few minutes. And the neighbor who just loves our Atlantic/4th Avenue end of Park Slope (what we dismissed affectionately as "Park Slump" the entire time we've lived there) who, when he heard that we were moving to the Village, remarked sincerely, "Comparable neighborhood." (Don't get me started. Find me something comparable to the Strand, the Quad, and Norman's Sound within walking distance of the Atlantic/Pacific subway stop. Hell, find me a bodega with 1% milk or fresh produce other than Caribbean root vegetables.) And of course there were several gay couples who hung out at the sale, wanting to know everything about our life and our apartment.
One of these gay couples had actually come to check out the larger pieces of furniture that we had listed in our ad on Craig's List. I asked Josh, a young straight friend from work who was helping us out with the sale, if he would please take this couple upstairs to the apartment to look at the furniture we were selling and keep an eye on them until I could come up. Now Josh is indeed straight and also cute. He could easily be one of my models --swarthy, hairy, friendly, nice eyes-- and this was not lost on the gay couple who also spotted one of my calendars on the table in our apartment.
"Oh, is this for sale, too?" one of them inquired.
"Um, I don't know," Josh told me later he had replied, "that's a calendar of photos by one of the guys who owns this apartment."
"Oh," the other member of the couple smirked, "are you in it?"
After the couple left, Josh pulled me aside downstairs and told me about their comments about the calendar. He said that after that exchange, one of the guys cornered Josh and asked him, point blank, if he wanted to have his balls licked. That's right; he looked my straight young friend from work directly in the eyes and asked, "Do you want your balls liked?"
"I wish I had been cool enough," Josh recounted to me, "to say something like 'yeah by my girl friend' or something so I didn't look flustered. But he took me so much by surprise that all I could say was something lame like 'no, no...thanks.'"
I felt a little protective, and wanted to track the couple down and ask them where the hell they came off.... but Josh is 26 and appeared to have fended well enough for himself. He paused in his story long enough for me to make another quick sale of some trinket or other and then turned to me and asked, "That's just not normal behavior, is it?"
I was about to make some mildly defensive comment like, "well, what is normal?" When I realized what Josh was asking. What he really wanted to know was whether this was common behavior. Is this the way a lot of gay guys come onto one another? Is it really that easy for you guys? Do you just tell someone you find attractive point blank what you want to do and it works? Do you know how hard we straight men have to work to get a fucking phone number!?
He didn't say that explicitly but it was all through his question, "That's just not normal behavior, is it?"
I replied, laughing nervously, something to the effect, "Some gay men are pretty forward with one another and you would be amazed at what goes on."
It got me wondering, however, if we gay guys do have it easier, when it comes to "getting some." I have no dating experience with women, but from what I hear from them some are pretty hard to get and some are pretty easy, whether or not they believe it about themselves. But if I had to venture a guess, I would say gay men are, shall we say, a little freer around sex than straight women and it was interesting to see the flash of recognition on this straight man's face.
We've already got the taste, style and wit "leg up" on them; do we have to have the "leg up" on scoring as well? I know that this is a way more complex topic than that; but I'm just saying....
6 Comments:
Poor straight men... so much to learn.
Boobear
I am a woman who is GLAD I am a woman! I have never, for one second, wanted to be anything other than a woman. Having said that, I'll tell you why: (My love for the male form, men's ability to put it all out on the table, and delectable chest hair aside......) Because being a man and being heterosexual would put me in the position of having to deal with women in order to have any sort of relationship other than simple friendships.
I can count all of my women FRIENDS on zero hands... because there have neer been any. Every single true friend I've ever had has been a man. Every woman I've ever started a friendship with in any fashion has eventually stabbed me in the back and quite a few years ago I just stopped trying with them. I truly feel for hetero men... women, from my point of view, are mostly selfish and pretentious, and can lie without blinking an eyelash.
Men are easy to be friends with... you can say what you mean without worrying about a man "reading into" every word out of your mouth. Men will generally say what they mean and expect women to do the same. Unfortunately, I don't think most women would even know how to be specific and thorough, much less explain themselves with words that DON'T invlove feelings in some way.
I can't imagine trying to "woo" a woman to the point of actually having sex. I can't even imagine keep a relationship with one going long enough to have it develop into anything serious.
Several of my clients (OK, more like 90% of my clients) are gay men. I have never had even one of them behave in the way some women do. We're SUPPOSED to be the fairer sex... the gentle ones... the ones who heal wounds with kisses and mend 13 year old broken hearts............ Apparently, some women didn't get that memo.
Wow! I knew my post didn't cover everything when I wrote it!
Thanks for putting in your two cents, or Two Dollars and twenty-two cents, Madame President. I will be watching to see if any opposing views come in from any of my blog lurkers, female or male.
I have to say, I was lucky to grow up with the sisters and mother that I have: all smart practical humorous women who didn't draw the line as heavily between male and female, and therefore taught me and my brother to do the same. I grew up thinking everyone thought the way that they do.
OK! Now that I've slept 3 hours and am a little clearer, let me add this: I know there are true, genuine, loving, compassionate women in this world. I've been fortunate enough to meet a few.
I also think you are VERY fortunate to have women in your life who nutured those beliefs that you wrote about!
I am bitter towards my own sex and that's unfortunate for me... It comes from being lied to, from a very young age, by the 4 women in my life whom I trusted most. After several "friends" betrayed me in high school, leaving an already bitter taste in my mouth, I learned at the age of 21 that my family members who preached to me about honesty and integrity were living lies every single day. In a moment of weakness, one of them revealed the truth to me and the secrets in our family, I learned, cover everything from simple bad parenting to betrayal to infidelity and everything in between and beyond.
Then, at the same time, I leared about the men in my family who stood beside these women and defended them. These men put their lives, their marriages, and in one instance, even a career with an almost 8 figure salary in jeopardy to stand beside the women who were thinking only of themselves.
That was only a few years ago and I am still hardened to women in general. I see people I love get run over and hurt by women who think they are superior in some way. I deal with women everyday as clients and have heard more gossip and nastiness than one person should ever be witness to.
Hopefully, my life experiences from this point on will allow me to be in the company of those women I spoke of at first... someone who is gentle and strong, someone who can love with honesty and teach with integrity... and, above all, someone who can, if only for a moment, shine brightly enough to drown all the dark corners of bitterness with a blinding light.
I am the way I am because of the experiences I had and I vowed years ago to NEVER be one of those people who causes pain to their children or those around them... I may meet someone who can drown those corners... until then, I will do my damndest to BE that person for others.
(OK, Jay! I'm finished venting... Sorry for cloggin' the blog with my rants. Cheers! L)
If some guy I just met in some completely innocuous situation said to me what that gay dude said to your little sale helper, I would have been completely creeped out or, more likely, scared. There is a power issue at stake between men and women that doesn't exist in the same way as it does between gay men. This is why men can't just walk up to a woman and say, "I wanna stick it in." Because there is always the chance that he might just do whatever he wants, whether she wants to or not.
There are a lot of women now, especially women in their 30's and 40's, who are not looking for relationships and who are up for no-strings whatnot. And they're usually pretty straight forward about that, but in the context of a chat-up at a bar, a flirtatious conversation at a bar.
You are so right, Dots! When you put it that way, I can't help but say "eeyoooo...." And maybe my helper was also feeling a little of the creepy, scary aggressiveness that a lot of women have to deal with on the street.... Maybe THAT's what he meant by "not normal behavior."
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