Sonriso, Part 2

Red Flags and the Kindness of Strangers

This post is rated PG-13 for some language.

At worst I feel bad for a while
But then I just smile
I go ahead and smile

—“Smile,” Lily Allen

A few nights after that steamy evening with Derek, a chat window popped up unexpectedly one night. It was Drake, a guy I’d spent months chatting with and texting without any success of lining up our schedules for a single date. I’d heard through the grapevine that he was in a relationship, so this conversation was particularly unexpected.

“GMB!”

“Hey, Drake! How are you?”

“Pretty good. Life’s treated me well. I saw you online and thought I’d say hi.”

“Thanks. I like hearing from old friends, but you know it gets weird when they’re in a relationship. I’m self-conscious of what it’ll look like sometimes.”

“That’s one of the silliest things I’ve ever heard. I know we haven’t talked for a while, but a friend is a friend.”

“I’m glad you feel that way.”

“There’s not a ton of good guys out there, so we’ve gotta look out for each other.”

His sentiment brightened my day a bit, but I wondered if its surfacing was not entirely spontaneous.

“I heard you’re seeing Derek.”

“Yeah. He speaks pretty highly of you. He considers you his best friend.”

“We go back a few years, I guess.”

“He’s handsome and witty.”

I wasn’t really expecting what came next although I wasn’t entirely surprised.

“He is. You just need to be careful.”

Drake didn’t elaborate, but rather left me to wonder just what he was leaving for me to discover for myself—a topic we would discuss over coffee a couple of weeks later.

Cole had acted similarly since Derek and I began to date. They went to school together and knew each other from a distance. Only later did I learn that it was by Cole’s wishes. That said, their paths did cross. A few nights after my chat with Drake, Derek made a confession:

“I was at a party last night and ended up telling Cole everything.”

My heart skipped a beat. I’d kept something from the one person I could trust the most. It was something deeply personal that I was still processing. I was planning on telling him about that hand job sometime down the road (despite his joking remarks that he would disown me if I got any action before he did). In a way, though, I’d kept it from him as I withheld the details of the date.

Cole’s response was ambivalent. He was happy I was comfortable with myself in the moment and reassured that I wasn’t so comfortable afterward. Just what I needed at the time even if I wasn’t able to reach out for that kindness myself. At this particular time in my life, that seemed to be my luck.

Despite what I’d learned about Derek that week, I was gearing up for our next date, a day at the Sundance Film Festival with a few of his friends. I’d wanted to go since I was a freshman in college (as one of my instructors was in Napoleon Dynamite and offered to take us before it sold out). Thursday night, though, he dropped a quick text: “Saturday won’t work after all.”

He didn’t really offer an explanation other than “Things didn’t work out,” which left me a bit upset. I put on a smile and let it all go in the moment, though.

“It’s alright. Some other time.”

“Next week. I promise,” he said.

Later that night, a chat window popped up as I was finishing up a paper on some Brazilian short stories.

“I hope you’re having a good night. I’m Zane, BTW.”

Zane was another one of Derek’s friends. The one who’d invited him to Sundance. I bet this is going to be an interesting conversation, I thought to myself.

“Nice to meet you. Derek’s thinks you’re pretty much the coolest guy he knows. He really goes on a lot about you.”

“Oh really? LOL, because he’s an asshole.”

Although I’d half-expected something negative from him at that point, his comment really took me by surprise. He explained:

“Derek’s a fun guy to hang out with, but doesn’t have a lot of substance. He’s why gay men have a reputation for being drama queens.”

“I’ve started to see that more recently. It’s got to be true if one of his best friends goes to some length to track down a total stranger warn him.”

“He’s got a pattern. He goes for he wants and when he gets as much as he possibly can, he moves on. Don’t let it get that far is all I’m saying.”

“Okay. That’s good to know. Next week’s definitely the last.”

“Next week? Aren’t you coming on Saturday to Sundance?”

“He told me things didn’t work out for me to go.”

“See…Total asshole. The only reason I got the passes was so that I and my friends could meet you. I’d hardly call it a reputation, but I’d call it a good one still.”

“Wait… Why was I not invited then?”

“You’ll have to ask him. If you ask me, though, I think he’s insecure about us possibly liking you better… and for good reason.”

The time had come to contemplate my next move.

End, Part 2.

Adventures in Internet Dating, Part 9

Epilogue

For months, I pieced together the other half of Drake Hatch’s identity. As I felt out the gay world, some names became synonymous with philanthropy and others with political activism. Wherever I went, Drake Hatch was known for being a player—a dating machine that everyone tended to fall for even though he was so guarded.

Preposterous as it might sound, the fact that I had tied myself to him emotionally and psychologically at that point seriously put my identity—the one I thought I’d figured out—in question.

It was a question of fate and destiny. I’d tied my identity so much to his past I worried my future would soon evolve into his life. Do I have the potential to become a ‘player?’ Some sort of heart breaker? Is there any way to keep that from happening?

I knew very well that I was in charge of who I became and what I did, but he showed me a potential that I was not prepared to see in myself. Not a month later, a guy completely unaware of what had been going on in my head following these two dates joked, drawing on our parallel pasts and a busy dating life, “At this rate, GMB’s going to be the new Drake Hatch.”

If others saw that potential as well, I had to be doubly-conscious of the decisions I was making and the way I treated the guys I dated. I wasn’t going to disappear. I was going to share too much instead of too little about my past. I was going to be more open with my feelings. I was going to live to a standard of complete honesty.

In the coming months, I continued meeting people online because of the good I’d seen in people. Not all guys were trying to find somebody to use or some cheap one-night thrill. Many of us were genuinely looking for something more. There were guys (like Kevin and the first Drake) that showed enough concern so as to watch out for me even though they hardly knew me. And each of them had some continuing impact on my life whether that be as a result of the world we live in or a web of fate woven before us.

In the gay world, it’s very hard to disappear—to not be somehow tied to another person for a very long time. We would continue to run into each other, often under unexpected circumstances, and come up in conversation among gay circles. The lesson to learn was one of accountability. The experiences we have with one another travel quickly and reputations are hatched even faster (in part because of the internet).

The time had come to forge my own reputation to make my own destiny. Would it be constructed from my fear of becoming the next Drake Hatch or out of confidence in who I really was and who I wanted to become?

End of Series.

Adventures in Internet Dating, Part 4

Connections

The other messages were far more promising. Drake, Kevin, and the other Drake were closer to my age and all of their profiles clearly stated “Mormon” under religion. They weren’t afraid of alluding to their background or to their missions.

The first Drake proved himself really down to earth:

Hey there. Your picture popped up on new members and then I realized you were in Utah. I thought I’d say hi. Watch out for the creepers on here, though.

Considering the experience just moments earlier, it was really comforting to read something so pointed, confirming my suspicions not only that there were sketchy characters on the site but also upstanding hero types. I immediately got the impression that he was a guy who’d watch out for me. He was handsome and had an amazing smile with the slightest, most endearing of gaps in his teeth.

I sent back a brief introduction and soon our correspondence developed into significant conversations about our families, about growing up in the church, and about dating. He’d been at this for a while, but knew where I was coming from as he indicated following a lengthy instant message conversation:

You really are brand new. You haven’t had sex. You’ve never even touched a guy. That’s something to respect. You haven’t had time to figure everything out. I’ve met guys in all sorts of situations and you’re really cautious. It’s okay. You’ve got to feel your way through.

His sensibility was frankly a turn on. He wasn’t about to pressure me into anything. I even felt comfortable later with giving him my number a few days later. I thought it might go somewhere.

“You do realize this is the first time I’ve ever given a stranger on Connexion my number, right?”
“I wouldn’t call myself a stranger. You know everything you can for knowing me this long and online.”

That was true. I’d made my first real-world connection with a guy online. It was something simple and early on in our conversations. It was something simple. His brother went to the same university and although I never met him, the fact that I knew his brother’s boss (as we discovered a few lines later) was enough to authenticate the experience in a way.

I was speaking to a real person already connected to me somehow. The cosmic thread that people speak of had somehow connected us in the web of life. One was left to wonder if these ties would draw us closer in the coming weeks.

Through our texting conversations, we told each other about our families. Drake told me all about his brother being the liberal one in the family—the go getter who set his big brother on dates with other guys and recently left for a mission. There was also his sister who lived ten hours away yet remained the bane of his family’s existence.

I opened up a lot about my family. After my mission, I was instantly closer to my little brother, Darin, because we could share clothes and hang out with each others friends. Yet when I’d figured out why he was able to have a charming girlfriend and I found myself consistently uncomfortable in even the most casual of situations with girls, I couldn’t share that with him because of the way he’d treated a friend who came out to him the year before.

“I can see why you’re worried, but things have only gotten better since I came out to my family,” Drake assured me.
“I’m sure, but I’m not ready.”

The conversation stalled there.

We attempted to meet up several times in the month or so that we really kept in touch, but somehow there was always something in our way. I thought it was because we were busy and cities apart. Drake—as we later discussed in a meeting of very unexpected circumstances (to be revealed in a later series)—thought it was because I wasn’t interested. And perhaps there were other reasons. As a result, my priorities shifted, so I wouldn’t miss out again later.

At this moment in my life, however, I was more concerned with being comfortable with a new situation and set of experiences. Sorting through Connexion and the interconnected gay world around me would soon provide a number of lessons in that vein.

End, Part 4.