finding dwayne...

unlike most american heterosexual men who hail from below the mason-dixon line, the cajun boy is a friend to the gay man.

this has not always been the case.

of all the shitty things that i've done in my life, and that list is an extensive one, perhaps none haunts me more than the way that i reacted to finding out that my dorm roommate from my freshman year of college, dwayne, was gay. i was 18 years old, away from home for the first time and had never known a gay person in my life. well, let me re-phrase that...i had yet to know an OPENLY gay person. homosexuality wasn't something that was well-accepted in rural southern louisiana, so most gays were closeted.

i had lived with dwayne for a couple of months and by this time my doubts about his sexuality were extensive, but i remained hopeful. he bore all of the common stereotypical traits of gayness...effeminate, meticulously clean, spoke with a slight lisp, was in love with madonna, etc., though he claimed to have a girlfriend. he spoke of "her" often and was usually away on the weekends to visit "her" though i was suspicious to have never seen a picture of "her" around the dorm room.

my friends at school had a ball with this. i caught so much shit because EVERYONE thought that dwayne was gayer than liberace, but i was steadfast in my belief that he wasn't.

"dude, he has a girlfriend!"

i can't tell you how many times i must have uttered that phrase. i don't think that i actually believed it deep down inside because i was very conscious about undressing while dwayne was around, but i certainly wanted to believe it.

and then valentine's day rolled around. it was mid-morning and dwayne was in class. i was in the room watching a soap or something when there was knock on the door. there was a delivery. for dwayne. a dozen roses. attached to the roses was an envelope which contained a letter. i must have stared at that letter for an hour while grappling with the temptation to open it and read it before i finally caved.

i would regret doing so.

the roses and the letter were from a guy, dwayne's apparent boyfriend, who was in the navy and away on a ship somewhere. dwayne's boyfriend's letter was quite graphic on how much dwayne was missed and what he wanted to do to dwayne when he next saw him next.

i completely flipped the fuck out, flew into a tirade and probably called everyone i knew with a phone and raged about how i was going to beat the shit out of dwayne.

now in defense of me, there are two things to keep in mind here. the first being that i was hopelessly ignorant regarding gay people because of where and how i was raised and secondly, that this was in 1991 at the onset of the AIDS hysteria. there was so much rumor and innuendo floating about the disease and how it could be contracted. i can remember being terrified that i may have drank from a glass that dwayne had drank from and thereby exposed myself to the virus.

i'm not sure how but dwayne must have somehow caught wind of the fact that i had discovered that he was gay and was on a rampage, because he never came back to the dorm room that day. he didn't come back the next day either.

on the following day i went home for the weekend where i discussed the issue with my parents. my father dispensed his own gem of wisdom, "don't sleep on your stomach", which didn't exactly help to alleviate my angst.

i returned to school and to my dorm room on sunday night to find that dwayne had completely removed all of his belongings and moved out. there was not a trace of dwayne left. he left no note.

i never saw dwayne again. he apparently dropped out of school. nobody that i know ever saw him again.

my ignorance and the hysteria that it fueled may have caused this kid to alter the course of his life. i'm not very proud of that.

contrast that to the present day where my circle of friends includes a plethora of gay men. it's kinda hard to live in nyc and work in the field that i work in and run in the circles that i run in and not have gay friends, but still, it's kind of astounding when you think about it.

how did i get from there to here in 15 years?

even further, a few my aforementioned gay male friends are occasionally quite forward, usually when they're shit-hosed drunk, about their desire to bring me over to the other side. i will flirt and tease a bit, it's kinda fun actually, but in the end it's just not going to happen. though i have often wished that i could be gay so that i would never have to deal romantically with any human form in possession of a vagina, i am hopelessly hetero.

there was even a time recently where one of my friends brought a bunch of his friends over to the LC. one of them was a gay guy named rocco(i shit you not, that was his actual name).

anyway, for reasons that befuddled me at the time since there were much more attractive guys there for him to hit on, rocco set his sights on me and came after me hard. what started off as quiet conversation about music and the arts turned into him asking if i had ever been with a man, if i would ever consider being with a man and if so, why he, rocco, should be the guy to pop my gay cherry.

it was around this time that one of my friends came over and said, "rocco wants to fuck you."

"yeah, i gather that."

"just be careful, rocco has converted a lot of straight men."

"well then they were never truly straight in the first place...and he ain't converting me!"

despite my resistance, rocco's persistence never waned.

"just let me suck your cock...i can get you off better than any girl ever could."

no. wasn't happening.

the next day my friend who had brought rocco over apologized to me and noted that i had handled myself well under the agressive nature of rocco's pursuit. rocco himself even got in touch to apologize personally. when i asked him why he wanted me so badly when there were model-esque guys at the same gathering he said that i was "the most butch, but also smart and cultured...it would be a trophy to get a guy like you to convert."

so there you go. i still wonder though...how the hell did i get from there to here?

the old me would have probably punched rocco in the face the first time he grabbed my ass, which he did continuously that night. how i wish i could have been more enlightened back then.

i've been thinking about dwayne a whole lot lately. i wonder where he is and what became of his life. i wonder if he's happy. i've been thinking of trying to find him. i would love to track him down and offer an apology to him for my ignorance and any strife that it may have caused him in his life.

i might just do that.