THE FIRST thing that alarms me is the facial hair, dragging across my chin like an enraged porcupine. Then I feel large, rough hands cupped around my face. Then the musky aroma creeps up and stings my nose.
Holy absence of labia minora! I'm with a dude.
Cheap facials aside, I don't really know what I'm doing in the front seat of this car being, quite literally, manhandled. I just remember waking from my lesbian bed one day in a very bad lesbian mood. Suffering from a bout of clitoral despondency, I grabbed a fistful of phone numbers from my dresser and plucked from them the one with a man's name on it.
I was a woman scorned. (Maybe I was a woman desperate, but stick with me on the drama here.) I quite purposefully picked up the phone and, with no fuss, arranged a date. Then I hung up, looked in the mirror, and morphed into Munch's The Scream. "What are you doing?" my gaping mouth asked. "You're gay!"
This "one straight date" is a tactic used occasionally by some of my gay pals and me. Often it's a last emotional resort. We've suffered one too many crazy broads. We've gone catatonic talking about our emotions. We're convinced that if we don't explore the opposite gender, we'll end up with a mute dwarf.
We convince ourselves that we must find something simpler, or at least a little less complicated. We want our doors opened for a change, our outfits complimented, and for God's sake, we don't want to go Dutch on any more tabs. So we log on to dating Web sites as straight girls. Or we give our number to some cute guy at the bar. It's our sexual entremets, one friend noted - a light and refreshing heterosexual sorbet to cleanse our palates between heavy gay courses.
But this little hetero adventure takes a bit of practice. First you've got to reveal your scheme to a few trustworthy friends, just in case your body winds up in a duffel bag at the bottom of the Charles. In my case, I used my sisters as a litmus test.
"Good for you!" one said, convinced by my dating history that lesbians have some unique, crazy chromosome. The other acted as though I was speaking Cantonese when the word "guy" kept coming out of my mouth.
Friends can be a bit less forgiving, and I omitted some of my five-star lesbian friends from the conversation altogether. When I confided to one lesbian friend that I was going out with a man, she was stunned.
"You're the gayest person I know," she exclaimed.
"I can't be the gayest person you know, because you are the gayest person I know," I responded, before reminding her that she had a little bit of a boyfriend for much of the previous year.
Preparation for the one straight date can be grueling. You must scrub your vocabulary of gay thoughts and agendas. Revealing that you're a lesbian could be both the ultimate turn-on or turn-off for your male date, and you don't really want to risk either on a first rendezvous with a total stranger.
"Talk about places like Saint and Abe & Louie's," I advised one lesbian friend who was heading out on a straight date. "And Faneuil Hall. Those are good straight places."
We agree to omit references to Tribe, Toast, and Pure, all popular lesbian bars. And, God forbid, don't mention Club Café; you might as well stir your drink with a strap-on. If possible, avoid the South End, because you're likely to run into an ex or a butch friend with a wallet chain that could lasso the guy to the ground.
Are we deceiving people with this behavior? Some might say so. Others might say we're only lying to ourselves. If you're not so rigid with your sexual labels, you could view it as harmless experimentation, much like all those hetero housewives going down on each other after a few too many glasses of boxed wine.
Someone asked me recently where I fell on the "spectrum" of sexuality. Hopefully on someone's face, I thought. But seriously, I have a theory on my own sexuality. I came out sometime around age 20. Men at that age were a bunch of beer-guzzling dolts. Women were these soft cushions of understanding and emotion. They got me. And I was perfectly willing to let them.
In the decade since, men have caught up. Some of them now even talk about art and politics. And there I am sidelined at a beer-pong match with a bunch of lesbians in baseball hats. This particular guy that I find myself out with schooled me in the language of tequila. Up until now, I thought that consisted of three phrases: lick it, slam it, suck it.
He's what straight girls would presumably call "a catch." Handsome, intelligent, multilingual, well-traveled. But I can't stop wondering what his vagina looks like. While he's talking about his job, I'm eyeing the waitress. And my conversation keeps getting hung up on all the potentially damning gay bombs I'm about to drop.
But aside from the beard burn, I'd actually say the date is a success. Afterwards, though, I freeze. I can't get myself to return a phone call or write an e-mail or send holiday wishes. I think too much about how difficult it would be, and about all the explanations I'd have to issue and the condoms I'd have to buy and the cycles I'd have to keep track of. And I allow myself to get sucked back down the drain of lesbian drama, partly out of fear and partly out of desire.
But it's only been three weeks since our date. I think I should call him. Guys don't care about stuff like that, do they? They're not crazy, right? @
Jeannie Greeley is a freelance writer who needs some advice in this department. She can be reached at jeannieg@comcast.net.
[Illustration by Corey Smigliani]
