Glances

I just came back from the vending machine, where I bought a bag of Peanut Butter M&M’s, and on the way back I made eye contact with a kinda-cute teenage boy. He must be 16 or 17. I work in the state court system, and random people are in the building every day to attend hearings. This boy has been here with a small group of people all day; I’ve seen him three times, and twice we’ve made eye contact. Hmm… the age of consent for homosexual sex in New Jersey is only 16… not that I’m going to pull a Brian Kinney or anything, but still, it’s kinda fun to be looked at.

I’m so bad at cruising, though. When I catch a guy looking at me — on a subway train or at a bar, for instance — I usually tell myself that he just happened to be looking around and that our eyes just happened to meet. After all, that happens, doesn’t it? Common scenario: you’re at a gay bar, or some other place where there are lots of gay people. You’re looking around the room, and somehow your eyes land on a guy whom you have absolutely no interest in, usually someone twenty years older than you, and then he catches you looking at him. So you look away, trying to show that you weren’t really cruising him. But then a minute later, you’re once again looking around the room, and no this can’t happen twice can it but your eyes accidentally land on him again, and again he catches you looking at him, and he gives a knowing smile. Again you look away quickly. But by this point your embarrassment has made you hyperconscious of this guy, and so you look at him yet again, and yet again he looks at you. At that point you move to another part of the bar where you’re out of his line of sight, you sip your drink, and you concentrate really hard on a point on the far wall.

Or maybe these things only happen to me.