Cruising

Last night wound up being uneventful. I met up with my friend, whom I’ll call Arch, and his boyfriend, whom I’ll call Carrot. Arch is a black guy with glasses, about 5’8, and Carrot is a fair-skinned, red-haired white guy, about 6’4. I wouldn’t peg them as a couple if I saw them together, but then again, everyone’s the same in bed, right? It’s a Benetton world.

On the way over to meet them at Barracuda, I ran into UrbanPlanner and his boyfriend. UrbanPlanner and I will be seeing the Beaux Arts Trio on Sunday for $6.50 — not a bad price for a legendary chamber music group.

I got to Barracuda, and Arch and Carrot arrived a few minutes later. It was strangely uncrowded. Too uncrowded. So we walked through Chelsea, down Eighth Avenue, and over to the new place — which was not Heaven, as I’d thought, but rather another new place called XL. There was a line outside, a long line of identical tight-shirted buzz-cut Chelsea boys. No thanks, we said, so finally we wound up at g.

While Barracuda had been desolate, g was packed. g has a circular bar, and to get anywhere, you have to move along the donut-shaped path that runs between the bar and the wall. We squeezed ourselves along like toothpaste. Arch and I each got a Corona, and the three of us stood there and talked and looked at the boys. I’d decided to wear the same outfit that had made me feel so good last weekend — tight black gay-boy t-shirt, jeans — but I didn’t feel as good as last time. g has so much New York attitude and smugness, and we remarked that there didn’t seem to be much cruising going on. Perhaps, like me, everyone was too afraid to cruise. Or maybe it was too crowded to cruise. Or maybe I just didn’t look glamorous enough. Whatever. Take me back to the East Village.

We didn’t stay for very long, so we left and wandered around, and Carrot felt like going home to Queens, and I felt like going home to sleep, so we split up less than two hours after we’d met up.

Morals:

1) I don’t like Chelsea. I always forget this. Chelsea is the Los Angeles of New York City. Everyone and everything looks the same, and it’s just too intimidating; everyone is trying too hard to impress. But I can’t hang out in the same places all the time, and it’s nice to have a change every so often. It just makes me appreciate my preferred hangouts that much more.

2) I can’t cruise. This I’ve known. I’ve written about it here before. I just can’t do it. I have a mental block. Maybe it’s Chelsea; what average guy could cruise in a place like g? It seems a little less threatening in the East Village, and a little easier. Arch told me that he thinks the East Village bars are probably more my style. But really, I think cruising just isn’t for me, at least not now. Other than the sheer fun of it, the reasons for cruising are:

Reason #1:To find romance. But I seriously doubt I’m going to find the love of my life in a bar — yes, I know I shouldn’t say that; why close off potential opportunities? But really. The possibility that the random guy over there will not only be attractive, but will also turn out to be totally compatible with my soul and my personality and my desires to boot — it just doesn’t seem likely. There has to be some sort of filtering process. In the last few months I’ve decided that the way to get a boyfriend is by having your friends introduce you to other people. That’s one of the best filtering processes: if you share a friend in common, then there’s a better chance you’ll have some common interests as well. There’s no better recommendation than that of a friend.

Reason #2: To find sex. I can’t cruise in public for sex, though. If I’m going to find a hookup for the night, I go online. It feels lame and antisocial and furtive to write that, but I think I have a hangup about anonymous sex, as fun as it is. It’s something I try to get out of my system, something I tend to do more impulsively than not, something I prefer to do from behind the comfort of my own computer screen. I think I need to become more comfortable with my sexual desires, let them out in the open a bit more, be more comfortable publicly advertising a desire to get laid.

But my biggest barrier to cruising is that I’m just plain shy. If I see a cute guy at a bar or club, and we make eye contact, I get nervous. I look away. Oh, if there’s an initial hello, that’s different. Get me into a conversation and I’m fine. And I can talk to people at parties, where it’s less goal-oriented and more enjoyable. But starting up a conversation with an anonymous person at a bar — that’s harder. It’s this barrier that I can’t seem to get past.