It's Not You, It's My Libido

I remember fondly the first moment I heard about gay bars at the ripe age of 17, after being denied at the third straight bar we tried to enter, lacking proper ID to get past the bouncer. It went something like this: "I know of a gay bar we can probably get into!" Before I could sing one line of a Culture Club song, my best friend and I were effortlessly gliding through the door at Ryan's, the hottest gay bar in upstate New York. Little did we know we had met our destiny as the hottest fag hags in town.

Nothing could have seemed more glamorous or fun than to be immersed in a gay man's lair where multitudes of hot men danced with us, doing poppers beneath the disco ball to "You Spin Me Round", getting us drinks and lavishing us with the male attention we had never experienced before at any straight bar. Usually, we'd have to wait until the end of the night when all the "cooler girls" were taken and the guys left over were too drunk to even see your face clearly, but horny enough to take you home anyway. Gay men actually appreciated us, commented on how great we looked, genuinely seemed interested in our lives… and our outfits.

Soon my friend and I were the belles of the ball. We increased our entourage of homos, and soon all our closest friends were gay or fag hags that we recruited from the "underage club for future female alcoholics". They not only would happily go shopping with us, but actually had real concern for what clothes we chose, what color lipstick best matched our complexion and taught us how to look "fierce". They fed us the lines to every Madonna song while they cooked for us, made up beds for us to sleep in (while our parents thought we were sleeping at girlfriends houses) and even wrote notes for us so we could skip school when too hung over to deal with Biology. They became not only our best friends, but our mommies & daddys all wrapped up into one.

For years, I really thought I had "boyfriends". Of course there were the ones with only one foot out of the closet who would sometimes make out with me. The only time I ever came home with a hickey was from a gay man (aptly named BJ) but I didn't really know how to tell my furious mother that, so I let her think she was raising a potential slut for the convenience of heterosexual assumption.

Then one night I was watching as a drag queen successfully hit on this really hot guy. Sure, "she" was gorgeous and had a much better butt than me, but as I watched her Adam's apple bobbing up and down and listened to her deep, husky voice with its femme fatale cadence, while my friend Joe simultaneously tried to convince me to distract one guy while he had sex in the bathroom with another, it hit me like a ton of bricks: YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO GET LAID IF YOU CONTINUE TO HANG OUT WITH GAY MEN.

Maybe it was that I was maturing or that I needed more male attention below the neck, but my libido was crying out to me and it was time that I listened. I had to break up with my homos.

I genuinely enjoyed hanging out with them and to this day, I have the best times with my gay friends, but being a wing "fag hag" just isn't enough and they weren't willing to compromise. To be in a bar around straight men (the gays ultimate conquest, btw) watching them drool over women without the hope of a date was akin to a vampire in a room full of pulsating vein filled necks they couldn't bite.

We could still "be friends" but I just couldn't spend every waking moment with them anymore. This didn't fare well with most of them and after I met the love of my life, it really turned sour. My main homo, Greg, who I had planned to start a family with where he could go off with men and I could, well, take care of the kids (side note: WHAT WAS I THINKING?!?) didn't take it so well. He made me mix tapes all with songs relating to the true value of friendship and every conversation turned into how friends stuck with you till the end but when romance was involved one was always taking a huge chance and setting oneself up for potential disaster. I realized then that the gays could be as selfish as the heteros when they wanted their women, but that my primal need for sex and affection could only be relieved by one of the two.

So in essence, it is never you my dear gay boyfriends, it's just my libido.