Boy Does World

There are upsides to being a tramp. Obviously, there’s the sex. That’s easy because, well, you’re easy. Then there’s the retelling. The bad tricks. The ones that got away. The smart enough to sleep with, but too stupid to date. The stupid enough to sleep with you, but smart enough to lose your number. The giddiness. The scares. It’s all about the stories you get to tell after. But I never expected, during my early years as a wannabe journalist in the nation’s capital, that after a desultory stint covering federal tax and securities policy, I’d find my calling by way of a humor column about my sex life. It began as a lark that I tossed off in an afternoon, a short story about my first time buying a sex toy. I wrote it sitting in my small apartment at the folding table I used for a desk, on which teetered precariously a behemoth PC with a spacious ten-megabyte hard drive and a monitor that displayed up to forty lines of amber-hued text. I shared the story with a few of my friends. It proved popular in my little circle because, naturally, sex toys are funny. Sometimes even when you’re using them, but we’ll get to that a little later. Months after, in early 1994, the essay worked its way into the hands of Randy Shulman, the editor of a small gay magazine that had recently launched in the city. By that point, I had essentially abandoned journalism for activism—after all those years as a young boy in the western Kentucky farmlands, I’d decided that if I was going to be gay, I might as well be as goddamned gay as I could be. So when I was offered a regular gig at Metro Weekly writing about dildos and dating, nightclubs and sex clubs, the timing happened to be very, very good. Plus, after all those years dreaming of being a writer, it was too tempting to be given the chance to actually be a writer, even if I ran the risk of regretting what I wrote. Thus was born “The Back Room,” my weekly chronicle of life as a young gay man in the city navigating the perils and pitfalls of sex, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, parties, discos, fashion disasters, and more sex. What I initially envisioned as an unholy cross-pollination of Miss Manners and early P. J. O’Rourke evolved over time into a place where I was as likely to write about my closeted gay youth as I was my latest foray into debauchery. The funny thing is, I’ve never regretted it. I have a certain bullheadedness about me—something about my Irish/German heritage, I suspect—that probably explains why, when confronted with a decade that told gay men to fear sex and intimacy, I decided to get as much sex and intimacy as I could. Not like every hour of every day. I had to make a living, you know. But if I were to boil down those early days to one word, I’d have to choose “exuberant.” All of which gave me plenty of material to work with. Like I said, being a tramp has its upsides. But being a tramp isn’t a choice for a lifetime. A search for sex and intimacy implies a search for something a little more lasting than a whirlwind weekend or even a months-long romance. As my own life and priorities changed—and as life for gay men came to be less about fear of what might happen and more about hope of what might be—my stories changed. So while “The Back Room” ended in 1998, I kept writing columns and essays for Metro Weekly, my own little journalistic home. What had started as a small column about being a tramp grew into a life as a happy and healthy gay man. And so a young country boy with a big dream got to see it come true—not exactly in the way I planned, but that’s what makes life interesting.