The Unitarian Church hosts regular "circle suppers," where eight or so people assigned "at random" meet at someone's house for a potluck. It's not really random: I am usually assigned to a group consisting of mostly gay people.
But the other night my group consisted of four heterosexual couples and me.
Still, I was rather looking forward to it, since last time I went to a completely straight party, I met a cute college boy, the host's son, and we dated for about six months. I've had good luck meeting guys so far in 2017. Could lightning strike twice?
No. The couples were all "my age" (chronologically, anyway), which means that their kids had all "got married and moved away."
Well, maybe the food would be good.
No. Craggy, tasteless chicken enchiladas, green beans with a weird minty tang, a macaroni salad loaded with mayonnaise, and two kinds of cheesecake. Plus a lot of alcohol.
Beefcake? Half the fun of gay parties is cruising the new guys.
An enormous penis would make up for any number of physique imperfections, but of course at a straight party men don't typically get naked.
Not that I wanted them to. If they got naked, the women would to, and I would be out of there fast.
Well, maybe the conversation would be ok. At gay parties, we start with conversations about gay subtexts or actual gay characters in books, movies, and tv programs.
"Has anyone seen Sleepless yet? I hear it has a kidnapped son, instead of the usual kidnapped daughter."
They talk about quarterhorses, the use of Amazon Kindle way up in the mountains where there's no electricity, scuba diving in the Caribbean, and how you would like to die (the consensus was: instantaneously while on the way home from a nice dinner with your husband or wife).
I've been to dozens of gay parties, and not once did anyone consider "how you want to die" a fascinating topic of conversation.
Maybe we could move from sports and death to romance. At gay parties, we tell about dates from hell, the biggest penis we've ever seen, celebrity hookups.
So I told them about Ricky with a Y, who spent our date bragging about how much money he had and psychoanalyzing me.
Clarice tells about Joanie, who who met her current husband while still married to her last husband, but she still stuck with him during his illness, taking him to all his doctor appointments. She didn't start dating her current husband until he died.
That's not funny at all.
I told about the nephew of my first "boyfriend," who I ran into 40 years later on campus. Cool twist.
Teresa had a boyfriend in high school. He wanted to marry her, but she knew that his dad was an alcoholic and abusive, so she refused. Sure enough, he turned out to be abusive. Years later she and her husband saw a guy that looked exactly like him on a train. He wasn't.
That's not a good story. The abuse makes it a downer, and the guy on the train wasn't related to him. If it was his son or grandson, maybe.
I couldn't discuss enormous penises here, so I told about Alan the Pentecostal porn star, and let them figure it out.
Barb tells about the time her boss invited her out for breakfast. He was enormous, at least 300 pounds. She thought it was for business, but he thought it was a date. So she quickly fixed him up with someone else.
Stories shouldn't criticize someone's physical appearance. There's an obese guy in the room who will feel rejected.
How about celebrity hookups? I told about my date with Richard Dreyfuss.
Andy and Abby visited Los Angeles about twenty years ago, and saw Zsa Zsa Gabor walking a poodle in Beverly Hills. At least, they think it was Zsa Zsa Gabor. No, they didn't actually have a conversation.
Either heteros lead very boring lives, or they don't know how to tell a good story.
Maybe the party games would be ok. At gay parties, we usually played "guess the penis" and other erotic-style games, but it wasn't obligatory. Once we played a homemade gay edition of "Trivial Pursuit."
Our party game: go around the group and each tell about what you were doing at a decade in your life: age 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, and what you had learned by that point.
Because their goal in life was to raise children? The children are raised, so they have nothing to do but reminisce.
My goal in life is to find beauty. Not only in male form, but in art, literature, music. It's never over. Like Kevin the Vampire said last week, it's an eternal now.
Fortunately straight parties end early. By 9:00 pm, everyone was dividing up the leftovers, putting on their coats, and driving off to their hetero lives.
The gay-friendly coffee house and the gym were both closed, so I went to a straight bar downtown, where college kids hang out.
It wasn't crowded -- a group sitting around a table, a couple playing pool. More boys than girls. Looked eerily like a twink bar, except no one was dancing.
The bartender was a buffed guy in his 30s wearing a backwards baseball cap.
"You look like you've had quite a night," he said. "What can I get you?"
"Perrier, if you have it."
He frowned. "I'll have to check the store room. No one has ordered that for as long as I've worked here."
"What can I say? I'm a child of the 80s."
I looked around the room. "I'll bet I could, too."
See also: Ricky with a Y; My Date with Richard Dreyfuss; Picking Up the Host's Son at a Straight Party.
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