The Dating Game: I’m Hard to Get, Stavros, All You Have to Do is Ask Me

It’s only been a week since I met this guy, and already, yes already, I can think of and see absolutely nothing but him. All day I think of him. I dream of him at night. I think in clichés. He’s the first person I talk to in the morning, the last before going to bed. If we don’t talk, I look at his pictures and smile myself to sleep. I say his name all day, out loud, trying to get that slight trill in my “r.” In the past, I’ve used pseudonyms in my blog for the guys that I’ve been interested in, perhaps a subconscious acknowledgment of participating in a kind of fiction. But this man’s name is Stavros, and he’s the realest thing I’ve ever known.

Except that he lives in Greece, and I actually haven’t met him in person yet.

I can see you all rolling your eyes. “Again??” Someone even asked me if perhaps I’m the one afraid of intimacy, and this is why I’m attracting these guys who live in other time zones and on different continents. Ma che dice! I am like an intimacy sponge! I’m so open to and craving intimacy that I’ll look for it everywhere, as the feeling that I want to experience isn’t tied so much to specific things like mutual interests or a common language or convenient transportation, but to a kind of emotional exchange that I’ve experienced a few times and just can’t get into a relationship without. It’s what you see between Bogie and Bacall in To Have and Have Not.

It’s there with Stavros. Just his voice pierces something deep in me, some emotional G-spot. I have nothing to lose in being my effusive self with him, he actually welcomes it, and returns it as fervently. There seems to be only one gear to shift into, and, damn the potential torpedoes to come, that’s full-steam-ahead.

The Dating Game: GROWLr and the Foot Guy

So I’ve placed an ad on GROWLr. It’s this dating app for the iPhone that’s tailor-made for the homoesexualist looking for love, and without having to wander too far from home: it’s GPS based.

I, of course, am looking for significantly more complicated entanglements than most guys on the site, but I seem to have worked my way through all the other dating sites without finding my Mr. Right, and thought, what the heck, maybe Mr. Right is hidden somewhere among the Mr. Right Nows.

Following the lead of most guys on the site, I posted a picture of me with my shirt off, during the buffest moment of my life, which mercifully wasn’t too long ago. I said simply that I was looking for love… short and to the point. Immediately the incoming message tone started blinging, woof after woof, grr after grr. I heard from several guys who had completely ignored me on other sites where I had my shirt on and all serious about looking for a relationship. I tell ya, take your shirt off, don’t say much, and they will come. My next door neighbor even hit me up with a woof, not recognizing my chest. Men are this shallow and this predictable.

So this morning I got a very heated request from this one guy in New York who wanted pictures of my feet. Just my feet. I don’t have or share the kinds of pictures most guys on those sites are after, but I was waiting for my oatmeal to cook and had finished the paper, so I thought, what the heck. After the first photo, he texted back excitedly, asking for more pictures. I took another, and another. His requests became more and more specific, of the soles of my feet, just the soles. But not cropped, he wanted the entire foot in the image. And the other one, too. He even texted me sample pictures. It was not easy, with my oatmeal boiling on the stove, but I endeavored to oblige. I had never met a textbook fetishist before, just the weekend ones at street fairs and such. This one was so demanding, more more more. One picture was not enough, please just one more, and then one more. And only one angle of view seemed to satisfy his insatiable craving. I sent him a final picture, exhausted, and sat down with my oatmeal.

Fear and Self-Loathing in Southern California, or Only Love Can Break Your Heart

He hides his head inside a dream
Someone should call him and see if he can come out.
Try to lose the down that he’s found.
Only love can break your heart
Try to be sure right from the start
Yes only love can break your heart

And thus, my dear readers, ends another thrilling chapter of my Dating Game. Señor Grant gave me the boot, a few days ago, about 3 months after our initial flirtation, although actually I think I scored the technical KO by telling him first that I didn’t think it was a good idea to be seeing him anymore. After his swift affirmative response, I quickly tried to jump back into the ring, painfully aware of my impulsivity, but it was too late, he had already moved on, perhaps just waiting for me to do the dumping all along.

So how did I blow this thing? Well, it all started when I told him I cared about him. As soon as I shared my feelings he suddenly ceased any kind of affectionate or romantic exchange. Remember he lives in another town, so we didn’t get to see each other that much. When not in physical contact, we had only language, our courting conducted via phone and text. He was romantic, attentive, responsive, excited… until the moment I told him I cared. I was so completely discombobulated, like waking up in Backwards Land. I tried talking about it, which only frustrated him. For the last month we’ve been tussling over this, while simultaneously feeling more and more physically connected. I couldn’t make any sense of what was going on.

Finally, he confessed that he just wasn’t ready to open himself up, that he was drawn to me initially because I represented something that he’d always wanted, the potential for a mature relationship. Somehow his plan didn’t include me feeling anything and certainly not expressing it, my enthusiasm welcomed like the swine flu.

He related my behavior to his own personal experience—pining after someone not interested in him, and still carrying around the shame of his actions and ultimate rejection. It unnerved me to be compared to this version of himself that he described as being “emotionally crippled,” and I feel wrongly rejected because he closed his eyes to who I am and where my actions were coming from. I made no demands and had no expectations of him other than welcoming my feelings in whatever way he was ready for, and treating me in a way that was appropriate to what our bodies were doing.

But, alas, he just wasn’t ready to feel or express anything beyond fear, and steadily and unwaveringly turned from my advances, Daphne fleeing from Apollo, Eros’ golden arrow having pierced my heart, the lead one his. I went from A Date With Judy to feeling like Liam Neeson in that movie where he wakes from a coma and his wife (was it January Jones?) denies even knowing him, his identity erased.

I’m really disappointed that I couldn’t have been more respectful or even aware of his boundaries, and that I screwed this up because of feeling something and not knowing how to contain or express it appropriately. I’m deeply confounded by the notion that I pushed him away by loving him.

But what can I do? I have to accept that I can’t make him feel anything he’s not ready for, or just not feeling. Whatever the reason, I don’t have to understand why, just to accept it, and henceforth to navigate more carefully through the treacherous waters surrounding Emotionally Crippled Island. Arr…

The Dating Game: Herb Ritts & The Cult of Celebrity

On Sunday, Señor Grant took me to the Getty to lunch with his cute girl buddies, Liza and Kim. They’re sisters, almost identical, smartly dressed with glowing white teeth. They finish each other’s sentences, refer to each other as “my sister” and are just a delight to observe. We walked through the Herb Ritts show, which left me with nothing. Unless you call emptiness something. He was a great technician, or the people who printed his pictures were, who masterfully appropriated the visions of countless other photographers—Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Edward Weston—to create beautiful images of beautiful people that are completely without depth, all about surface. But oh those surfaces. Black skin in particular is rendered as a sumptuous textile.

Luckily, there was another teeny little show nearby, Portraits of Renown, consisting of celebrity portraits from nearly the dawn of photography to contemporary times. Each portrait conveyed an essence of the individual, the spark responsible for their fame. A portrait of John Barrymore as Hamlet by Edward Steichen had Barrymore in profile, slightly blurred, but his body sharp and in focus, the fiery energy in his head not to be contained. Lewis Morley’s iconic portrait of Profumo Affair strumpet Christine Keeler was shot in 1963—but printed around the time that the film Scandal was released—a publicity shot for a proposed film project, of her naked, confident, straddling a chair, her nudity hidden by her arms and the back of the chair. The show lusciously demonstrates how the photographic image has shaped our perception and experience of celebrity.

The Dating Game: Mickey, Señor Grant and Me

Last weekend I flew down to southern California to spend some time with Señor Grant. On Saturday, he took me to Disneyland, after prohibiting me from participating in any planning. Always content to submit to the agenda of others, I happily surrendered. This guy knows his way around Disneyland like I know my way around a pint of Häagen Dazs Dulce de Leche. We spent about 12 hours running from attraction to attraction, with hardly a moment of rest, except for the brief corn dog respite.

Now, my experience with corn dogs has pretty much been limited to Trader Joe’s Meatless Corn Dogs, which are more like a medium for the delivery of ketchup. The Disney ones were like the Trader Joe’s ones plus about 1500 calories, a lot of grease, and seemingly real meat products. I wolfed down two and then was rushed off to the next ride.

I think that my favorite ride was Soaring over California. You sit in a ski lift-like buggy in front of a massive screen which effectively fills your entire field of vision. On the screen a film is projected from the point of view of Superman, or some gravity-defying Disney character, flying over the Golden Gate Bridge, through Yosemite, and various other parts of California, except I think Sacramento, our capital, which didn’t seem to make the cut. They raise the seats and blow air at you, and even pine scent as you pass over the timber line, so that the effect is like you’re really soaring over the state. It was simultaneously completely convincing and completely artificial, like being tossed into a giant movie.

I also loved the Hollywood Tower of Terror. You get in an elevator in this old hotel and suddenly you’re dropped 14 stories. And then the elevator goes up again and you’re dropped again. And again. I screamed and screamed. Aaaaaaaah! I nearly lost my corn dogs.

We dined in Ariel’s Grotto, outside by the water, romantic, in the only table with no heat overhead. So I shivered through my meal, warmed visually by Señor Grant’s fiery countenance. After dinner we made our way through several heated indoor attractions and then, suitably warmed, hopped over to the other side of the lake to see the World of Color show, “the WOOON-derful world of COOOOOO-loooooooor!” in which scenes from recent Disney films are projected on eruptions and sprays of water. Despite the signs everywhere warning that the area we were in was a “wet” zone, Señor Grant insisted that it was “only a mist.” When our neighbors expressed concern about getting wet, he calmed them with “it’s only a light mist.” The show was dazzling, the colored jets of water zigging and zagging, the fountains growing higher and higher… and then came the deluge. Which didn’t stop. Everyone around started screaming, I ducked behind Señor Grant but to no avail. We were soaked. I tried to avoid the angry stares of my wet neighbors, glaring at Señor Grant.

Actually I loved all the rides—the roller coasters, the singing animatronic critters, the Haunted Mansion—except for the Finding Nemo submarine ride, which was pretty lame. But to be fair to the Disney designers, by the time we got there, it was close to midnight, the corn dogs were wreaking havoc with my GI tract, we were wet, tired, kids were crying, everybody stank. It was time to go home.

The Dating Game: On the Moors

I’ve decided to cease writing about my dating life. For now, anyway. Up to this point, I’ve looked at dating as a kind of game, partially to keep myself from going mad with frustration and to not take it all too seriously—to find the humor in what is really my most serious endeavor.

I learned in my past relationships that being open and honest was key to the success of any future relationship for me. And I really want just one more, someone to spend the rest of my life with. This openness sort of backfired recently, when a few of the guys I’ve gone out with reacted negatively to this exposure—like, maybe my need for openness doesn’t have to include the entire internet?

One guy’s ready to dive right in, another’s not quite ready to open himself up, yet another seems not quite right for me. For the one not quite ready to open himself up, I feel something that feels like love, already, so powerful, but not the liberating love that I felt with Manny or Bob, just a disagreeable Bronte-esque longing that seems, frankly, unwelcome at this stage. Yet I feel this thing. I want to jump ahead, past the chapters about loneliness and despair on the moors.

It doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen—all that exposition, I can’t avoid it. I do hope to pick up the story later on, and fill you in on those details, in edited and perhaps less graphic retrospect, but for now it doesn’t feel like a game anymore.

Christmas in March

Señor Grant came up from LA for the weekend, the whole weekend. It was like Christmas, my handsome package delivered via Virgin Airlines Friday night. We saw Beach Blanket Babylon at Club Fugazzi, Double Indemnity and La Casa de mi Padre, the Rineke Dijkstra retrospective and Mexican photography show at SFMoMA, and soaked in the baths at the Kabuki Hot Springs.

I enjoyed Beach Blanket Babylon a bit less this time around, feeling like only one number connected with current pop culture, or, rather, the not-too-distant pop culture of my own youth, but that number was a doozy, with Snow White stripping off her familiar outfit to reveal a Madonna cone bra ensemble, then flying out over the audience as she sang about “surviving gravity,” perfectly over the top. The show outside was just as entertaining, with heterosexuals everywhere, dressed in green, gurgling green beer and stumbling into the street, tottering drunk girls sent home in taxis by boys who wanted to continue partying, one couple drunkenly breaking up on the sidewalk…

The Rineke Dijkstra retrospective is pretty fabulous. Her photographs present people formally almost always in the center of the frame, looking directly at the viewer. The references to place are minimal—a beach, a room. The subjects aren’t engaged, they’re observed, revealed. There are also videos on view, of club kids dancing for the camera, single static shots that last so long that the initial awkwardness of the dance movements gives way to something revelatory and intimate about each subject. Another multi-channel video piece focuses on kids who are shown responding to one of Picasso’s weeping women. They discuss what the painting could mean, in raw, unguided engagement with the work. Their speculations about why she’s sad range from the, well, childlike, to incredibly insightful.

I remember before I moved to San Francisco, seeing some hysterical documentary about earthquakes and plate tectonics, about how Los Angeles and San Francisco are slowly moving towards each other. I wish it would hurry up. I really like this guy.

Christmas is over, back to work. Thank you, Santa.

The Dating Game: Barrels of Wine & Underground Gardens

Last weekend I had two really swell dates. On Saturday I drove up with Giancarlo to meet my darling wino cousins from Chicago in Sonoma County for barrel tasting. Participating wineries offer tastings direct from the barrel, before the wine’s been tweaked and bottled. There’s dancing and music and great food, a really lively celebration. And of course the beautiful Sonoma countryside. Giancarlo drove my car on the way back, as I was an enthusiastic taster and of course had to sample everything, plus I was rear-ended near Martinelli’s and still a bit frazzled, so he offered to relieve me of driving duty. Looking at him in the driver’s seat, I thought, “What a handsome man.” The sound of it coming out of my mouth as I thought I was just thinking it surprised even me.

The next morning, I drove down to Fresno to visit the Forestiere Underground Gardens, a maze of underground rooms, patios and grottos, framed and supported by Roman arches of local field stone, built by Baldassare Forestiere in the early part of the 20th century. Fruit trees and grape vines grow from the subterranean space up through circular openings in each room, creating dappled shadows, lush scents, and patches of orange-dotted sky. Señor Grant drove up from southern California to join me, once again captivating me with his wit, intelligence, and radiance.

The Dating Game: A Letter to Six Husbands, or, Torn Between Six Lovers and Feeling Like A Fool

My biological clock is ticking so loudly I’m sure I’m going to blow up any second. When will this dreadful swinging bachelorhood end?? #1 is already like a partner, we do almost everything together. Except intimate relations. #2 through #6 are great for different sorts of relations—with each devoted to a fairly specific and finely-tuned kind of activity—but I don’t really share enough in common with #2 and #3. I adore #4, but he doesn’t seem ready to settle down, at least his actions indicate that, despite his incessant marriage proposals. #5 lives in another town, and is the one I want to be courting exclusively, but, did you hear me? he lives in another town. Which means I have to play it cool. I know. Me playing it cool. Not going to happen. He’s already calling me a lesbian. I’ll wait, though, to get to know him better, to see him again, explore how something between us could even work… meanwhile months go by, more hair falls out, more beard hairs turn gray. #6 is a doll, a real doll, sweet, open, uncomplicated, but we’ve only just started getting to know each other. I’m practically ready to tell #5 I love him, the feelings are so intense when I’m with him. Looking into those beautiful eyes framed by that handsome face, I tell him everything else, “I adore you,” “I’m wacky about you,” “I love your eyebrows,” trying to contain and circumvent the overwhelming pheremonal impulse to give aural shape to the intensity I’m experiencing. He read my blog, my entire blog. No one’s ever done that. I don’t know, he might be one of those guys who reads the entire Credit Card Disclosure Agreement, but he also might be The One. Will he take the blue pill, or the red pill?

The Dating Game: A Date with Judy & Señor Grant


Let’s call him Mr. Right. Well, to distinguish him from all of my other Mr. Rights, for now, let’s call him Señor Grant. If the casting director of the Mary Tyler Moore Show had called for a softer, Hispanic version of Mr. Grant, this is the guy who would have gotten the job. He came up from LA Saturday night, and was back home only 24 hours later. We had been chatting online over the past few weeks, and he impulsively bought a plane ticket to come up for a quick visit. I was a little nervous, as I’ve never done this kind of thing before, that is, welcome a relative stranger into my home. Well, except for the one from Palestinia, who moved in. So yes, Señor Grant was the first person whom I had never actually met—and not already invited to live with me—before inviting to stay the night.

When I picked him up at the airport, he was wearing a black sweater and a black checkered button-down shirt, a black driving cap, dark jeans, and matching black eyebrows. Not just cute, but handsome, dapper. As soon as we got to my house, our lips were just sort of pulled towards each other, like big pink magnets. After an hour or so I pried him off of me and off we went to dinner at a basque restaurant, Piperade, which sadly was little more than a nice-tasting blur as I was so impatient to get back into a comfortable horizontal configuration.

Finally thus configured, we successfully prevented each other from getting any kind of sleep. When morning finally came, we watched A Date With Judy in bed on his iPad. Jane Powell, Liz Taylor, and Señor Grant’s furry white chest, an absolute perfect date.

He and I seem to be after the same things: companionship, substantial physical intimacy, engagement… He’s smart, well-traveled, a dapper dresser, with a job that provides access to the most glamorous of Hollywood, he articulates ideas that are complex and original, with squat hairy legs, those black eyebrows that drive me crazy, lips so soft that I keep puckering like a hungry fish…

“Be” and “let” are my magic new age hippy relaxation words for the day. And if anything, I’ll remember a really great day with a really great guy.