Day 02 - Your first love, in great detail
My friends were getting frustrated with me. The only other gay person I had connected with on any sort of romantic level had lived at least 1,000km away from me and our romance was limited to a 33.6k modem.
My friends were getting frustrated with me. The only other gay person I had connected with on any sort of romantic level had lived at least 1,000km away from me and our romance was limited to a 33.6k modem. That is the problem with being a gay teen in a small town in the 90s. The revolution had not quite exploded into mainstream and the gay youth in my area rarely came out before graduation. Now while I had not completely come out, I passively hid my sexuality from my classmates and family. The only people that had confirmation on my queerness were about a dozen close friends, and like I said, they were getting really frustrated with me.
I spent my days speculating on glances from classmates as secret pleas for love. "In Social Studies, he winks whenever he talks to me...We made eye contact and held it for a good five seconds before I broke away and blushed...He told the other guys to fuck off and leave me alone when they called me a fag..." I was not only hungry for love, but also very desperate.
Now there were other gay men around. There was one kid, a year younger than me, who was obviously gay but after a rather rude and unprovoked attack on MSN Messenger he became my nemesis rather than my first boyfriend. Another guy, a year older, had been confirmed by many to play for team homo and while I tried to track him down online, my attempts failed to forge any sort of friendship until after he graduated and moved away.
Then Jake came along. The first time I learned of Jake's existence had been from a conversation with his brother Luke. Luke and I were friends after I developed a crush on him and started chatting with him online. Luke was one of the first guys I ever opened up to about my sexuality as well as admitting to crushing on and he was kind enough to reject me gently while listening to my insecurities and desires. After some time, I met Jake online in a chat room and our conversations went from the casual to the friendly to the flirty and of course to the naughty. He asked me to call him sometime, a task that scared the glitter right out of me. No matter how many times I dialed the first six digits to his phone number, I would always disconnect the line before hitting the seventh.
One night while talking to my good friend Cara, I whined and complained about my inability to connect my phone to Jake's. Finally, she had enough of my attitude and interrupted me and told me, "I've had enough of this! I'm going to hang up and you are going to call Jake and we are not going to speak again until you've done so." And she hung up on me. There was a seriousness in her tone that I feared and since my panic had turned from calling Jake to facing Cara in the morning, I made the call.
The call was simple. Another medium for a conversation with someone I had already begun romanticizing over. I was faced with a new hurdle: an invitation to visit. I don't remember why, but I accepted and after he gave me an address and basic directions the call ended as quickly as it had begun. Immediately I began wondering what I had gotten myself into but since I was still worried about facing Cara in the morning, I cleaned myself up, lied to my mom about where I was going and began walking.
As I approached his house I could see him scurrying around his living room in a pair of navy track pants and white tank top. His hair was just as bleached blonde as it was in his profile picture. He seemed completely unaware that I was staring up at him from the shadows. Instead of climbing the dozen or so steps up to his doorway, I progressed further up the street until it looped up and behind his house. There was a long staircase that descended from the upper street down to his and I decided to climb back down and give it one more go. I realized that I could sit at this one portion and see directly into his kitchen and while it was only ten minutes, it felt like I sat there for over an hour.
Like most new things in my life, I needed a bit more time to warm up to the idea of... well what? Meeting my first gay friend? Love interest? Hook-up? I had no idea what would happen but suddenly I realized that's what romance was all about. It wasn't exciting unless it was slightly uncertain. So I climbed down those steps and then up the ones in front of his door and knocked. And when he approached the door I could see his face was a bit shiny from the sweat he had worked up from vacuuming.
Now that night he didn't say all the right things, nor did he sweep me completely off my feet but instead he made me feel interesting, desired and sexy. While I did refuse his advances to take the evening into the bedroom I did listen and learn about the man I had hoped to fall in love with. He had no shame about discussing the men he had dated, slept with, and broken up with. There was something attractive about a man who was confident and sure of who he was.
He was 23 and I was 17. To him I was just a cute, innocent and naive boy. To me, he was the man I thought I was falling in love with. After all, I had never been in love but these maddening feelings that stirred in my chest over the next few months had love written all over them. And after I defied him by proclaiming that I would not be just another boy he'd sleep with and toss aside his curiosity was raised and over time, took a genuine liking to me.
Now I can say with as much certainty as I can find that he never fell in love with me during our short time of 'hanging out' but I can say that the years that followed and friendship that spawned from that awkward evening tied him to me and me to him. Even a few years later, he came to me one alcohol-infused evening and confessed that he had feelings for me and that ending things with me years earlier had been a mistake. The tragic thing was I had grown up and become a more confident man and it was then that I realized that our relationship had only really blossomed under the friendship banner and if we ended up going back to something that never really worked we would probably lose it all.
From Jake I learned how quickly the heart can fall for another. I also discovered the difference between what I needed and what I wanted from a partner and when to walk away when the two never really come together. But mostly important I learned what it felt like to fall in love and how beautiful the feeling really is. However, it would take a number of years to really shake the desperate need to stalk love instead of letting it find it's own way in my heart.
To see a list of the days click here.
My friends were getting frustrated with me. The only other gay person I had connected with on any sort of romantic level had lived at least 1,000km away from me and our romance was limited to a 33.6k modem. That is the problem with being a gay teen in a small town in the 90s. The revolution had not quite exploded into mainstream and the gay youth in my area rarely came out before graduation. Now while I had not completely come out, I passively hid my sexuality from my classmates and family. The only people that had confirmation on my queerness were about a dozen close friends, and like I said, they were getting really frustrated with me.
I spent my days speculating on glances from classmates as secret pleas for love. "In Social Studies, he winks whenever he talks to me...We made eye contact and held it for a good five seconds before I broke away and blushed...He told the other guys to fuck off and leave me alone when they called me a fag..." I was not only hungry for love, but also very desperate.
Now there were other gay men around. There was one kid, a year younger than me, who was obviously gay but after a rather rude and unprovoked attack on MSN Messenger he became my nemesis rather than my first boyfriend. Another guy, a year older, had been confirmed by many to play for team homo and while I tried to track him down online, my attempts failed to forge any sort of friendship until after he graduated and moved away.
Then Jake came along. The first time I learned of Jake's existence had been from a conversation with his brother Luke. Luke and I were friends after I developed a crush on him and started chatting with him online. Luke was one of the first guys I ever opened up to about my sexuality as well as admitting to crushing on and he was kind enough to reject me gently while listening to my insecurities and desires. After some time, I met Jake online in a chat room and our conversations went from the casual to the friendly to the flirty and of course to the naughty. He asked me to call him sometime, a task that scared the glitter right out of me. No matter how many times I dialed the first six digits to his phone number, I would always disconnect the line before hitting the seventh.
One night while talking to my good friend Cara, I whined and complained about my inability to connect my phone to Jake's. Finally, she had enough of my attitude and interrupted me and told me, "I've had enough of this! I'm going to hang up and you are going to call Jake and we are not going to speak again until you've done so." And she hung up on me. There was a seriousness in her tone that I feared and since my panic had turned from calling Jake to facing Cara in the morning, I made the call.
The call was simple. Another medium for a conversation with someone I had already begun romanticizing over. I was faced with a new hurdle: an invitation to visit. I don't remember why, but I accepted and after he gave me an address and basic directions the call ended as quickly as it had begun. Immediately I began wondering what I had gotten myself into but since I was still worried about facing Cara in the morning, I cleaned myself up, lied to my mom about where I was going and began walking.
As I approached his house I could see him scurrying around his living room in a pair of navy track pants and white tank top. His hair was just as bleached blonde as it was in his profile picture. He seemed completely unaware that I was staring up at him from the shadows. Instead of climbing the dozen or so steps up to his doorway, I progressed further up the street until it looped up and behind his house. There was a long staircase that descended from the upper street down to his and I decided to climb back down and give it one more go. I realized that I could sit at this one portion and see directly into his kitchen and while it was only ten minutes, it felt like I sat there for over an hour.
Like most new things in my life, I needed a bit more time to warm up to the idea of... well what? Meeting my first gay friend? Love interest? Hook-up? I had no idea what would happen but suddenly I realized that's what romance was all about. It wasn't exciting unless it was slightly uncertain. So I climbed down those steps and then up the ones in front of his door and knocked. And when he approached the door I could see his face was a bit shiny from the sweat he had worked up from vacuuming.
Now that night he didn't say all the right things, nor did he sweep me completely off my feet but instead he made me feel interesting, desired and sexy. While I did refuse his advances to take the evening into the bedroom I did listen and learn about the man I had hoped to fall in love with. He had no shame about discussing the men he had dated, slept with, and broken up with. There was something attractive about a man who was confident and sure of who he was.
He was 23 and I was 17. To him I was just a cute, innocent and naive boy. To me, he was the man I thought I was falling in love with. After all, I had never been in love but these maddening feelings that stirred in my chest over the next few months had love written all over them. And after I defied him by proclaiming that I would not be just another boy he'd sleep with and toss aside his curiosity was raised and over time, took a genuine liking to me.
Now I can say with as much certainty as I can find that he never fell in love with me during our short time of 'hanging out' but I can say that the years that followed and friendship that spawned from that awkward evening tied him to me and me to him. Even a few years later, he came to me one alcohol-infused evening and confessed that he had feelings for me and that ending things with me years earlier had been a mistake. The tragic thing was I had grown up and become a more confident man and it was then that I realized that our relationship had only really blossomed under the friendship banner and if we ended up going back to something that never really worked we would probably lose it all.
From Jake I learned how quickly the heart can fall for another. I also discovered the difference between what I needed and what I wanted from a partner and when to walk away when the two never really come together. But mostly important I learned what it felt like to fall in love and how beautiful the feeling really is. However, it would take a number of years to really shake the desperate need to stalk love instead of letting it find it's own way in my heart.
To see a list of the days click here.