Read Online How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle by Ethan Mordden - Free Book Online
Authors: Ethan Mordden
Tags: United States, Fiction, Romance, Literature & Fiction, Gay, Gay & Lesbian, gay romance, Genre Fiction, Lgbt, Gay Fiction
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such finely nuanced democratic principles that he’d give a mercy fuck to anyone who asked. But not till Lars Erich had I met a hunk so stimulating in his worldview that he made me reconsider my beliefs.
“How can I write porn,” Cosgrove grumped, “if I don’t know what anyone is?”
“Well, you describe him.”
“He’s a big young guy. He’s a cute authority figure. He’s like your minister but then he takes you to the prom for your first secret kiss. What kind is that?”
“It’s type, not kind. And what type he is: I don’t know.”
“Last week, when you were being extra reproachful of Cosgrove who forgot to pick up the laundry, you said you know everything.”
God, am I turning into a parent?
“Anyway,” Cosgrove went on as he tended another batch of pretzels, “get ready for more types. Because now J. said he would bring his roommate to dinner this Thursday.”
“Vince Choclo? You’ve got to be kidding!”
“And Cosgrove is not unhappy to meet him after all these tales we’ve heard. I may be seen taking notes.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Is he ready for us?”
“J. thinks their relationship will soon reach critical mass. They’re up to the massage stage.”
I was hunting for the big orange household scissors, which are supposed to be in the flatware drawer but finally turned up inside the carriage of the pasta machine.
“How would you feel if I canceled this dinner?” I asked.
“You can’t! I have to meet Vince Choclo for myself!”
“Why?” I said, going to my desk to wrap Dennis Savage’s birthday present, a cashmere sweater he had fallen in love with in Bloomingdale’s and had alluded to perhaps 387 times in the last four days. Cosgrove, having coated his pretzels with honey and salt and laid them in the oven, followed me, wiping his hands on a dish towel.
“I need to see,” he told me quietly, “what J. wanted instead of Dennis Savage.”
I was wrestling with the gift wrap, an insufferably thin and easily crinkled paper in a baby motif. * “You mean,” I said, “you need to see what J. wanted instead of us.”
And that brings us to a final type, marginal yet timelessly essential to the gay world: what I call the 60–40. You won’t find this genre of man hanging around Splash, but he might have turned up in a bathhouse in the old days, on a night when his wife had taken the kids for an overnight to visit her mother.
The 60–40 is apparently straight, actually. (For an even truer statement, switch the adverbs.) Sixty percent of him is attracted to women, enough to make a marriage on and, if he is a willing stooge of homophobes, stick with it. However, 40 percent of him seeks carnal knowledge of men, and that is a hefty fraction of oneself to control. The healthier 60–40s find outlets on the sly and may even leave the marriage; the more damaged 60–40s go through life insane with frustration at all the Hot Guys downloaded into the American consciousness by advertising, movies, and real life, hating what they were born to be and, sometimes, heading “family preservation” groups for the Religion Nazi community.
Generally, 60–40s never enter gay life in any true sense. You may meet a few describing themselves as “bisexuals.” But most 60–40s don’t describe themselves at all. Like the freedom-fearing people whom Lars Erich cited, they feel perilously submerged in choices. The true 60–40 is a shadow figure, one piece of him maintaining a profile existence as a round-the-clock hetero and the other piece frantically darting in and out of a fantastic existence: ours. A single honest moment and he is destroyed.
But now I’m going to have to give Vince credit—he was honest to a fault at our dinner. True, if he was a 60–40, he concentrated on his 60 side, rapping endlessly about women, whom he treated as a genre divided into three categories. Gash, his favorite, loved sex and asked for no more than a good lay. Princesses, whom he resented,
“How can I write porn,” Cosgrove grumped, “if I don’t know what anyone is?”
“Well, you describe him.”
“He’s a big young guy. He’s a cute authority figure. He’s like your minister but then he takes you to the prom for your first secret kiss. What kind is that?”
“It’s type, not kind. And what type he is: I don’t know.”
“Last week, when you were being extra reproachful of Cosgrove who forgot to pick up the laundry, you said you know everything.”
God, am I turning into a parent?
“Anyway,” Cosgrove went on as he tended another batch of pretzels, “get ready for more types. Because now J. said he would bring his roommate to dinner this Thursday.”
“Vince Choclo? You’ve got to be kidding!”
“And Cosgrove is not unhappy to meet him after all these tales we’ve heard. I may be seen taking notes.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Is he ready for us?”
“J. thinks their relationship will soon reach critical mass. They’re up to the massage stage.”
I was hunting for the big orange household scissors, which are supposed to be in the flatware drawer but finally turned up inside the carriage of the pasta machine.
“How would you feel if I canceled this dinner?” I asked.
“You can’t! I have to meet Vince Choclo for myself!”
“Why?” I said, going to my desk to wrap Dennis Savage’s birthday present, a cashmere sweater he had fallen in love with in Bloomingdale’s and had alluded to perhaps 387 times in the last four days. Cosgrove, having coated his pretzels with honey and salt and laid them in the oven, followed me, wiping his hands on a dish towel.
“I need to see,” he told me quietly, “what J. wanted instead of Dennis Savage.”
I was wrestling with the gift wrap, an insufferably thin and easily crinkled paper in a baby motif. * “You mean,” I said, “you need to see what J. wanted instead of us.”
And that brings us to a final type, marginal yet timelessly essential to the gay world: what I call the 60–40. You won’t find this genre of man hanging around Splash, but he might have turned up in a bathhouse in the old days, on a night when his wife had taken the kids for an overnight to visit her mother.
The 60–40 is apparently straight, actually. (For an even truer statement, switch the adverbs.) Sixty percent of him is attracted to women, enough to make a marriage on and, if he is a willing stooge of homophobes, stick with it. However, 40 percent of him seeks carnal knowledge of men, and that is a hefty fraction of oneself to control. The healthier 60–40s find outlets on the sly and may even leave the marriage; the more damaged 60–40s go through life insane with frustration at all the Hot Guys downloaded into the American consciousness by advertising, movies, and real life, hating what they were born to be and, sometimes, heading “family preservation” groups for the Religion Nazi community.
Generally, 60–40s never enter gay life in any true sense. You may meet a few describing themselves as “bisexuals.” But most 60–40s don’t describe themselves at all. Like the freedom-fearing people whom Lars Erich cited, they feel perilously submerged in choices. The true 60–40 is a shadow figure, one piece of him maintaining a profile existence as a round-the-clock hetero and the other piece frantically darting in and out of a fantastic existence: ours. A single honest moment and he is destroyed.
But now I’m going to have to give Vince credit—he was honest to a fault at our dinner. True, if he was a 60–40, he concentrated on his 60 side, rapping endlessly about women, whom he treated as a genre divided into three categories. Gash, his favorite, loved sex and asked for no more than a good lay. Princesses, whom he resented,
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