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Years ago, my "Irish Twin" and I used to freak out hysterically over some of his unwanted mail, which included openly gay menswear from an underwear brand called "International Male". We would giggle until tears poured out of our eyes in the kitchen, laughing over his dead-on impression of the intensely wide-eyed stare that typified most of the leering expressions of the scantily clad male models inside. We'd never seen something that gay before, certainly not sitting on the wood counter-tops of our parents' renovated kitchen, which included that suburban staple of life with kids, those blond wood kitchen stools made for quick breakfasts and fast exits, not softcore gay porn.
It was an impression of gay life that stuck with me for many years, and I found it to be dead-on, because years later, I entered the very gay worlds of art, design, media, and New York City nightlife. The first "lesbians" I met were introduced to me next to the dance floor at a disco called "Danceteria" that catered to a domestic country crowd with it's retro look, pop tunes, and "gay lite" versions of reality. My friend's cousin from Harlem was her boyfriend and prom date, and he served as our ambassador to club life on the night of our junior prom, like a scene out of a Huey Lewis video when the music skips to a stop across the DJs record, as the white kids from the 'burbs enter onto the dance floor, which wasn't far off from what really happened.
We were all wearing prom dresses and tuxes that were clearly the product of better upbringings with more money than the original mean streets we all came from as New Yorkers, which was exactly the point behind it for my parents who wanted better for us than they had. Nevertheless, Lawrence laughingly told me (after a few minutes of banal conversation) that his two friends were "gay, Marie" in a deprecating way, because he condescendingly assumed that I didn't know what a "lesbian" looked like in "real life", though that was far from the truth. "Gayness", as me and my brothers already knew just from our mail, didn't exclude itself from families who moved out of the city to the suburbs, because we all had openly gay family members, but my friend's friend didn't know that.
He saw us as naive "white" people (even though my art classmate, boyfriend, and junior prom date, Raphael, is from a prominent Puerto Rican family), in stark contrast to what he thought was his more authentically-crafted street persona as a handsome, knowing, hip, African-American male from Harlem. After all, the very word "Harlem" has a connotation that's worldwide for a very specific lifestyle, and as a savvy wanna-be musician looking to move up in the scene, he sold his version of our world wherever he could peddle it. It was actually the beginning of my internship in the arts, as I navigated the characters who haunted the edges of what would become my actual world of real artistic credulity and not his, but back in the 80s, he made it look good, and at the time when we were teenagers, appearances mattered more than the truth to someone like him.
Years later, when I transitioned from being a constant, steady girlfriend to a series of former male classmates, friends, and workplace acquaintances to a defiantly stay-at-home single woman by choice (there's only so many bars, nightclubs, and parties one can go to, after all, because hangovers only get worse with time, and besides that, I'm that horrid anti-thesis of manic club life: the devotedly sleepy working-class "early riser", something I learned to cover up as "uncool" in college, though my steadily productive, daily work habits have made me far more successful than anyone in my crowd could ever drunkenly hope to be), I dove briefly into the compulsively driven world of internet dating. I was at an age where my career goals mattered more to me than some workplace-affiliated fling could ever aspire to be, because my work and my life is far more important to me than some casual guy who wants to sleep with me.
Trade my formerly active sex life for a really solid design portfolio with excellent work I made on my own? Yes, please! It was exactly what I always wanted: my name on great-looking books out there in the real world, on bookshelves everywhere. This mama also paid all of her bills on her own for too many years to count. No good reason to mess with my money, you know what I mean? Men may come and go, but the truth I had in my 30s was that I was the only one who remained and endured in my lifestyle, because that's what I could count on after all my long-term, monogamous relationships with men. I was worth much more than some guy who may be passing through town, because that's exactly how a lot of corporately sponsored out-of-towners treat New York City; like our lives are just some small part of their big ATM account that they can endlessly withdraw from without ever giving back to those of us who gave them such an excellent life. Uh uh, boyfriend. This girl is sapped!
When I finally began concentrating on myself in earnest, my work grew in stature with the more time I put into it, because I was no longer intruded upon by someone (or something) in my household who needed taking care of besides me. It was a relief, it was eerily quiet, and it was (at times) achingly lonely. After finding myself on a computer for anywhere from 8-14 hours a day, for sometimes 6-7 days week (and this went on for many many years, readers), I naturally surfed in between the bone-crushing, high-pressure deadlines at work, as I waited for some big file to upload to the printer. Anyone who remembers old Internet connections will know that lengthy time bar of which I write of. Oh...watch this for hours? It's like trying to watch ceiling pant dry; not much happens when you're looking.
As computer systems improved, so did my multifunction job performance, because I could put the dull mechanical stuff in the background of my computer screen while I kept my brain active, alive, and thinking. We all did it in art and design departments throughout the world, and soon the people around us in the offices who are our group of daily onlookers as we sat immobile for hours realized why: the quicker the human brain powering the machine, the better the work, and the better the work we design, the more money we make as a company. It gives us the necessary freedom we need to produce complex visual communication regularly, but it also led to some nasty habits that could be compulsively addictive to the wrong kind of brain, and given the laxity most people wrongly presume working artists have, we attracted a lot of those brains, too, at least in the beginning of desktop publishing, when people also wrongly thought that modern artistry is like sitting at a typewriter. Once they gave it a "go", most of our co-workers realized that our job is more like powering a rocket ship as a NASA-employed engineer working in several different languages at once, and at lighting quick speed. We cleared out most of the kooks with time, eventually, as they learned to take their constantly fretting selves elsewhere, to safer hobbies and easier workplaces better able to provide for people afflicted with their predilections.
But in the beginning of online dating, that's exactly what was out there, as it was reflected onscreen: those Internet cafe junkies who stayed up all night looking for sexual thrills, spills, and quick jerk-off fodder. At first, I used my old, paid-for email account (before "free" e-mail service was offered with future revenue-producing caveats attached: I know, how quaint) and deliberately bad, blurry images of myself to attract guys looking to get to know me, and it worked in many ways. Instead of some "yahoo" fresh to the city looking for a sexy dark-eyed, "exotic" native to show him the city's ropes, I connected with highly-educated, well-earning respectable men like myself, albeit with a creative flair or two attached necessarily, for maximum compatibility. It worked!
Men would actually write to me over a series of days or weeks, getting to know me and my interests in the search for a real partner and not some bed-hopping club queen. Because I paid for access to the dating portion of my email provider's also paid-for email service, I attracted professional men who were older than me, just as I intended. In those early art directing days, I met the de rigeur European man du jour for lovely New York women with a French-sounding last name: the West Village-residing financial planner transplanted by his fancy Parisian firm. <shrugs to self, sitting at a computer>...at least I won't have to pay for half of all of our dates, I thought. Why not? He was handsome enough, and the wintertime was getting lonelier. There were only so many snowy walks in the park I could take with my Mal before getting weary of that, too, and my body was already in excellent shape through a combination of his hard pulling and the typically low-paying publishing paychecks that kept me housed and running, barely.
I met Francois offline in the safe area near NYU that is St. Mark's place, at a more upscale pub joint that caters to students and tourists. I was wearing my Old Navy light blue parka and a red, cowl-necked sweater that was form-fitting, and he was shocked. "How...how...how are you still single?" he sputtered to me over our first pints together. "You look like a petite model!" It was hard to fathom, and he was sensitive still about his newly developed fluency in English. Sigh...how to explain that I had already been a mother to other people's lives and children? I spoke about it in the best ways I could at the time, and when the night turned snowy again with sparkling snowflakes that dusted everything in the silent streets under an enchantingly lit stardust, he became entranced with the magical spell that beautiful New York City has on all the people who fall in love with the greatest city on earth. It was like being in a real, live version of Christopher Cross' song Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do): you can't help it.
I took him to a jazz club further uptown, and by the time the sets were almost over, I knew I had him eating out of the palm of my hand. We took a lightly gliding taxi back to his awesome (and very expensive) West Village townhome apartment, on the exact same block that the fictional character Carrie lived on, in the hit t.v. series "Sex and the City" (we saw the "Sex and the City" tours with touristy women wearing big feather boas and eating cupcakes from the then-trendy Magnolia Bakery down the block), because back then I was living for real what a bunch of out-of-town actresses were playing on t.v.: the hip, media-driven, New York City native girl showing a tall, strikingly handsome Frenchman with a fabulous apartment on one of the planet's most expensive neighborhoods a rockin' good time. It was for him, in fact, the best time ever, and that's exactly what it's all about for us here 'round the way, friends: having the best time ever. Thanks, NPH.
