Welcome to The Group Chat, a new series wherein the senior team discusses something relevant to the plot. And by “the plot” I mean the collective mileau of culture and current events that we’re all swimming in at any given time. This month: while having a team meeting, we randomly started talking about guys we dated early on who wound up being gay and then like true content creators everyone was like “SHHHH we have to do this for The Group Chat — hold your thoughts! No more sharing!” And then, we did indeed talk about this phenomenon where everyone (but Heather lol) at one point had a gay boyfriend. HAVE YOU ALSO EXPERIENCED THIS?!?

xoxo,
Nico

Nico: I’m gonna kick us off! With a Gay Boyfriend who, after some light internet stalking, I have confirmed is definitely still gay to this day.

Back in the day (high school), I would on occasion get a ride to some dance club or other in Buffalo that allowed 16-year-old’s to get in, usually without a plan for a ride home. I’d find someone to crash with for the night and figure out the rest in the morning.

Carmen: And once again I have to say, for the public record, that you were the fucking coolest teenager I have ever met in my real, actual life. Because, how is that not a movie?

Nico: Truly, Carmen, if I ever had a kid it would be a nightmare for them because I would just be like “I know what you’re doing.”

Riese: For the record this is the type of Mom I had, which meant it was very difficult for me to attend as many raves as I wanted to.

Nico: Riese, I am sorry. Especially because I enjoyed going to raves as a teen.

So I was there, with x’s on my hands, and I’d dance, often with other people approximately my age. The fact that he was at a Madonna-themed dance night might have been a tip-off, but it wasn’t, to this young bisexual who already tended to favor dating people who were in some way gender non-conforming. But here was a boy from school who I didn’t really know well, who’d come out with his friend who I knew had a crush on me and who I’d flirted with before. They had a car. We danced. He asked what I was doing after. I didn’t have a place to go, so he took me back to his, along with his friend who was already staying over. We hooked up in his basement while his friend played piano, aggressively, in another room.

Heather: Oh wow, I’m the aggressive piano-playing friend in the other room. I never had a gay boyfriend but I had a lot of best friends hooking up with boys I hated while I acted out nearby!

Nico: LMAO. Afterward, we had a brief relationship that involved watching LOTS of America’s Next Top Model at his place (a show that both aged like milk and which many gays have self-reported watching religiously).

Carmen: It is me. I am gays.

Heather: My bisexual sister was also obsessed with this show.

Riese: Also obsessed.

Nico: I know, right? What did we internalize from that nonsense?

Nico: During commercial breaks he’d demonstrate model walks for me. By this time, he was telling me he was bi. We did some things, but never wound up having penetrative sex because he told me he wanted to have sex with me to GET OVER THIS GIRL HE HAD A CRUSH ON and I was basically like “No, that sounds like a you problem.” After we broke up, we stayed friends and he gave me updates on his forays into finding guys to make out and explore gay sex with. He found them on Myspace. Good times! I will never forget the little *send message* sound when I wrote “Proud of you!!” over AIM in response to him telling me about “practicing giving each other blow jobs” with another guy. However, these days, friend, I do have to voice that I don’t think there’s very much of a line between “practicing giving” a blow job and “giving” a blow job once there’s a dick in your mouth. Just saying.

Carmen: LMAO. Facts.

Riese: The role of my gay boyfriend in my life was so enormous and life-changing for so many reasons that I hardly know how to sum it up! But I did write about it in this essay, it’s the part of the essay headed with “1998,” and I think his personality is best described there.

Heather: 1998 was a perfect time to be a gay teen boy in my opinion due to the launch of Dawson’s Creek.

Riese: That’s true, like…. Jack and Jen’s best friendship, like… was deeply resonant to me later when that whole story started. Also Joey was always wearing sweaters from American Eagle, which was the only cool store at the mall where the mall bus would take us on weekends at my boarding school in the woods of Northern Michigan — so, anyhow, we were best friends. He was gay, and an actor and a senior. I thought I was straight, and I was a junior and new and awkward. My only friend when I first got to school was my roommate, June, whose hometown was about an hour from campus, and thus her friend Anthony, who was gay and VERY HOT, came to visit her early in the year and as we were walking around campus together, Hayden and this other gay boy, Ken, yelled at us from their open window to come hang with them, because they thought Anthony was hot. I went home and wrote in my diary for the first and not the last time that I wished I was a gay boy.

He found me and June the next day and told us we had to give Anthony his number, insisting June relay to Anthony that Hayden would both take him shopping for a new wardrobe and take him out to a nice dinner, whatever he wanted. But Hayden didn’t need to take Anthony shopping. When Hayden wanted something, he got it. And he got Anthony quick,. This is how we ended up on the same weekend trips home with June. One day, as his relationship with Anthony was already crumbling, they left us alone in June’s family’s house and we started joking around and talking and we just… clicked. Everything clicked. We had the same sense of humor and we immediately fell into an obsessive, all-consuming co-dependent relationship, all of our inside jokes and secret words and secret worlds. He gave me a makeover. He took me shopping for a new wardrobe. He broke up with Anthony. My friendship with June crumbled. Hayden and I started doing everything together, all the time, rearranged our schedules to always have every class in the same part of the school building. He was popular so now I was, too. Whenever I was out without him, I’d be asked “where’s your other half?” and vice versa. It felt nice, you know? I hadn’t felt whole in a long time and I did.

Riese: He had a lot of control over my life, but like, he was a teenage boy who had a lot of shit to work through — he’d grown up gay and closeted in Oklahoma, he was extremely religious, he’d been through a lot of trauma and had some complicated stuff with his family, and he had no tools to deal with any of it. My father had just died two years earlier and I had my own mental health problems. I was just so swept up in this connection I had with someone who was so different from me. I think we really needed each other. He was unlike anybody I’d ever known before, and he was so weird and charming and vulnerable and smart – and volatile, like there was always a new revelation, a new life plan, and a new way I was crucial to the execution of said plan. It was a constant emotional rollercoaster.

He decided we should lose our virginities to each other. Well, my virginity, his “girl virginity” (his term!), because he’d already been with men. We were so madly in love with each other that he thought I was his one shot at being straight, ‘cause he had so much internalized homophobia and wasn’t out to his family. (I loved his family, and had played the role of his “girlfriend” from the start of our friendship for them.) But that aside, we were alone in the woods in the winter and sexual tension just somehow started building. We were just so close in every way that it was like, well, let’s be close in EVERY WAY.

I didn’t think we’d become boyfriend-girlfriend after having sex, which happened for the first time over Spring Break, at his family’s ranch in Oklahoma, after sharing some generous glasses of Franzia White Zinfandel from a box. I think he got carried away with the idea, though, that he could be a boyfriend with a girlfriend. Unfortunately this did set the stage for me to be incredibly insecure in future relationships, because I spent so long in one with someone who was only attracted to me in incredibly specific circumstances, and who I think ultimately was mad at me for not “fixing” him. He’d withhold compliments from me because that’s how his Stepdad had raised him, like I can still hear him saying, don’t want my baby to get a big head, instead of a compliment.

He started college as I started my senior year. I was so scared we’d lose each other, being so far away, but after I began dating a boy that he’d felt competitive with in the theater program, he yelled at me for two hours on the phone and then stopped speaking to me for two months. I was devastated and felt like a piece of my body had been torn off. Eventually our friendship resumed, and that next chapter is yet another very long story, so I will end this part here! But we lived and we loved and he changed me forever. I don’t know where he is now, and every time I write about him, I wish that wasn’t so. Because once upon a time, we’d planned to spend our entire lives together — not as boyfriend/girlfriend, but as whatever else we were. We’d already picked out furniture for our adult Manhattan apartment and everything.

Carmen: Omg, this fucking gorgeous piece of writing. Devastating (which I mean in the highest possible regards, in case that felt unclear).

Kayla: I do admittedly want an indie rom-com set at a boarding school in Northern Michigan based on Riese and her gay boyfriend that ultimately ends up being more about friendship than about romance but ANYWAY.

Nico: RIESE. Kayla is so right. I need this to be an indie rom-com. I need this to be a novel! There are two things that resonated with me So Much here 1) envying gay men when I was younger and yeah, definitely feeling like it would be easier, better in some way to be one and 2) the intensity of teenage friendships and teenage love and then to add queerness to it, and to add all the dynamics of being closeted / not closeted, I feel that.

Riese: Yes! Honestly even at the time both of us were already like, “this is a great story.” I remember that Jennifer Aniston movie Object of My Affection came out that summer or maybe the next, and we were like, wait is this fucking play about us? But it wasn’t. I still think our story was more interesting.

Heather: It must have been a very heady experience to meet someone bursting with as many ideas as you when you were a teenager, Riese!

Riese: It was! We made lots of movies and music videos together!

Kayla: I never had a full-on gay boyfriend, but I had a brief fling with a guy during my first semester of college who I had a HUGE crush on and who allegedly also had a huge crush on me, which he told our mutual friends after I changed my profile picture to a VERY 2010 era tumblr-style graphic of me photoshopped against a backdrop of space with a bunch of random cats around me, which he said was COOL.

Nico: Kayla, this profile picture! I can practically smell what 2010 smelled like based on your description. (It smelled like mold and cigarettes and bacon probably.)

Kayla: Okay PAUSE, let me see if I can go find it/see how accurately I described it from memory…

***two minutes later***

Nico: AAAHHHHHHHHHHHH

Riese: OH MY GOD KAYLA

Heather: Sweet heavenly perfection!

Kayla: Fast-forward to the present, and we’re still friends and both EXTREMELY HOMOSEXUAL. But we went through all of college as friends who were in the closet and didn’t know it. TBH we should have known it based on how awkward and subtextually queer our brief fling was. There was one night where we basically stayed up all night in my dorm room bed talking about MISSY ELLIOTT.

Anyway, he ended things with me back then by showing up at my dorm room with mozzarella sticks and telling me he was still in love with his ex-girlfriend, and my first thoughts were: 1. His ex-girlfriend looks like Annie Clark and 2. I wish he’d offer me some mozzarella sticks. So, you know, just verrryyyy normal straight thoughts. My fiance now refers to him as “Mozzarella Mike” and when I was moving out of NYC to be with her, he showed up at my goodbye karaoke party with a BAG FULL of mozzarella sticks.

Riese: A class act until the end.

Carmen: I have actually had a lot of gay boyfriends, both boyfriends in the literal sense and boy friends with the space between — I’m a girl who’s always had a queer family that’s had a lot of gay men in it, an only child who’s found herself in a family of brothers.

The thing about my high school boyfriend is that, well ok yes he was gay. But also! We went on incredibly gay dates together? I was a theatre kid for sure, but even by theatre kid standards… if your “dates” involve going to see Rocky Horror Picture Show together? That is homosexual activity, my love. Did you celebrate his college acceptance by seeing a touring production of Rent — to which you both knew every word by heart — and then he cried when Angel died?? Darling! DARLING. You are in a gay relationship. We’d paint nails together (he always picked black) and go to midnight movies together when there was nothing else to do and honestly, all jokes aside, I can not imagine a better first serious relationship for me and what I needed.

Nico: That is Homosexual Activity indeed. Not Carmen going to Rocky Horror and saying she’s straight.

Carmen: 100% straight. Quite literally, no homo.

Heather: Darling!!

Riese: I also saw Rent for the first time with Hayden! That soundtrack was like, always on, it was so elemental to our relationship and also how I got into Rent in the first place. Then, it was touring in Detroit and my Mom brought us and my other friend down for the weekend to see it.

Carmen: OMG yes the Detroit tour, that’s what we saw! (Though probably the one you saw was maybe the one from when I was in middle school, since you’re a few years older then me? It doesn’t matter really, I went to them all 😳 — but imagine if we were, like cosmically, there the same night!!)

Anyway, we were inseparable best friends. The first call when I got home from school and stayed on the phone until mom came home, sat next to each other on bus rides sharing headphones, stay up until the middle of the night on AIM — we were best friends in such a way that there was no other description for the love we felt for each other except to start dating, you know? It was the only way to describe how we loved each other in any way that made sense.

Riese: Yes mhm I know this feeling.

Nico: Yes, and that makes my heart ache.

Carmen: But I think, looking back on it now, what we were really doing for each other was… we were creating a language for our queerness. Maybe we wouldn’t have said it that way at the time, when we were flirting, and playing games to see who could make the other blush first, who could give each other a hickey first, who could do more than that first.

Riese: (I also relate to the first hickeys game)

Carmen: (Hhhmhnm.) We were just two gay ass Black kids trying to find a home for the things that made us most different, and we found that in each other. And I don’t know, it’s hard for me not to find beauty in that now. To see something genuinely beautiful in what we meant for each other.

Nico: It IS beautiful.

Carmen: We fell out of contact with each other once he graduated a year ahead of me, but we somehow fell back together in college when he swiped right on my then-best friend (we’re still best friends, I’m just trying to differentiate so you can fully grasp the messiness that my high school gay boyfriend ended up spending a summer dating my college gay bestie). We had a time, let me tell you!! A time was had by all.

Heather: Carmen this is so lovely, so very you!

Nico: A time, indeed!

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