Gay dating in the styx (part 3)

The beauty of following this page through StatCounter is that I can tell which posts get read more than others, and let me tell you, people love my misery. So, in honor of Valentine's Day, I've decided to make my horrible date stories a regular occurrence. Here are parts One and Two. And if this scares off any potential suitors, have no fear. I have plenty of material to keep me busy before I get anywhere near the New York stories. And as you'll see in this one, I'm not always the hapless victim. Sometimes I'm just as bad as the date in question.

One other note: I was asked why I say "in the styx" rather than the grammatically correct "in the sticks." It's just a play on words I've always used meaning "on the path to hell," as in the mythological river or listening to "Mr. Roboto," and is not used exclusively to denote any particular area or geography.

In my early years of coming out for the second time, near the end of my college career, I had no idea how to go about getting dates. I wasn't out to any friends who would go with me to clubs, and I certainly didn't want to go alone. So like any confused boy, I turned to the Internet. I knew nothing of the major dating sites like gay.com, so through a Lycos search--there was an age before Google, ya know--I found some bizarre little chat room. My entire time there, I saw only one other person in the Houston portion of that room: Eric.

Eric and I initially talked only over the phone, and I was too inexperienced to tell the warning signs, namely that we couldn't maintain a conversation. The pauses were interminable. Once I literally sat on the phone for about 10 minutes without either of us saying a word only to find out later that Eric had fallen asleep while on the phone with me.

Apparently, I was desperate enough for attention at this point to find this scintillating enough for an in-person meeting. He was less out than I was, so the only place we could possibly meet was my apartment. Upon first glance, I knew he wasn't my type, but I prolonged it for several dates, not knowing how to do any better. Eric, however, informed me that he was falling in love, so thus began the birth of passive aggressive Mike, my true initiation to the gay community.

Justified or not, Eric's increasing clinginess frightened me. My attempts to cut things off the traditional gay way--just not returning phone calls, which came frighteningly natural to me--only intensified those calls and frightened me more. I became a bit paranoid. So I took the passive aggressiveness to embarrassingly unprecedented levels.

A helpful friend, someone we might now call an enabler, and I went as far as to create false identities on ICQ (Remember ICQ? The AOL IM of its time? Does it even still exist?) in order to feed him horrid information about me in an effort to get him to break it off with me. Somehow, this scheme that Lucy Ricardo would have said was taking things too far went off without a hitch, and he never called again. When I finally started to go to clubs, I often found myself looking over my shoulder the first few months. Never mind the logic that would indicate clubs would be the last place a heavily closeted person would be seen.

I should also mention that another dear friend also tried to talk sense into me and get me to handle things in a more direct manner and has since been a great source of encouragement as I try to suppress this passive aggressive side. And I mostly have, but not before building up some seriously bad karma. As I'll go into next time, it came back to haunt me sooner than I expected.