Corrosion

I’m going to be a touch reflective today. And maybe a wee bit crabby . . . but not at you guys.

Last Sunday I allowed myself to be talked into going to the annual Motor City Pride celebration nearby. I know a couple of people who look forward to the event all year, and I have to admit I feel a little sorry for them. Michigan’s version of Pride is a little bit underwhelming, to be honest.

In years past, the celebration used to be held in an out-of-the-way parking deck, which made the collection of informational booths seem a little bit depressed and seedy. Subsequently it was moved onto the streets of a trendy gay neighborhood, which brightened up the mood a lot and brought the event out in the open. Despite the improvement in the surroundings, I never found Pride as fabulous as its aspirations. The booths are a mixture of the earnest—the volunteer organizations that do great good but which largely are ignored by the crowds, the pet shelters, the churches trying to welcome the lesbian and gay community with open arms—mixed with the slightly embarrassing home craft booths, like the two gay guys trying to sell homemade candles in the colors of the rainbow flag, or the woman selling godawful ‘festive penis piñatas’ that look like nothing more than stubby pink paper-mache fingers or pencil erasers. Or in the case of the black piñata, a Tootsie Roll.

There are the special interests groups, of course, and the social organizations handing out their literature. And then there are the just plain oddball exhibitions, like the Best Buy booth advertising its Geek Squad services by featuring wholesome young white men dressed up in equally white dress dress shirts, black pants, shiny black shoes, and black ties. (“What are the Mormons doing here?” asked every person in genuine puzzlement, whenever they passed the booth.)

Most people go for the dancing, or the beer tent, for the drag shows, or for the lesbians singing their folksy music on acoustic guitars at the most distant of the sound stages. But Sunday, when it was a chilly and damp Michigan afternoon and the skies kept opening up to pour down on the crowd, I couldn't say that people were having a lot of fun.

I’d had the foresight to wear a hat and a hoodie, at least. But when I trooped inside one of the business establishments along the festival’s street to join some of my friends, I was damp and a little disheveled. Worse, one of the first faces I saw crowded inside that tiny space was someone I detested. I sighed, wedged myself between two buddies who were sharing a snack, and tried to remain unobtrusive.

The guy in question is someone I’d not seen in about six years. Once every half-dozen years is more than enough. Usually it takes quite a misdeed to turn me off someone so badly. Not so with this guy. I can’t pinpoint exactly what it is that repulses me about him. It might be his smell, which is something akin to urine and mothballs. It might be the way he always kisses me on the cheek when I see him, with lips that are soft and dry and curiously repellant, like a disliked grandmother’s. Mostly, though, I think it’s his presumption that because we’ve seen each other in person maybe all of four times in a dozen years, that he and I are the best of friends and that he has the right to greet me with, “So who’ve you been throwing your legs in the air for lately, sugar?”

And a little bit of my dislike for him, I have to admit, is that the very first time I encountered this guy, he suggested the most outrageous sexual act on which I've never been tempted to follow through. It was at a gay.com party, about eleven years ago. The object of my dislike, who then was a really ugly guy with serial killer eyes and unruly hair and the smell of living in his mother’s basement thick upon his skin, backed me into a corner and asked if I wanted to help him live out a sexual fantasy. “What fantasy?” I asked, unwisely ignoring my instinct to run shrieking into the night like a frightened schoolgirl.

“What I’m looking for is someone who will poop in a pair of white briefs, then call me up and let me know you’re coming so I can lie down under the mail slot in my front door. Then all you have to do is drop the drawers through the slot.”

I was horrified. “You want me to drop my shitty briefs through the mail slot?” I echoed.

“Onto my face,” he explained. Then, to top it off, he actually licked his lips and purred, “Mmmmm.”

You may be surprised, but I declined that offer.

I let ol' poopy pants talk to the friend with whom I’d driven for a while, as I pretended to be invisible. It didn’t work. He worked his way around our circle of friends one by one, having a private word or ten. Eventually I felt him tugging on my sleeve. “Well hey,” I said with no real enthusiasm and a lot of feigned surprise. “How are you?”

“Damn, girlfriend,” he replied, almost immediately setting my teeth on edge. “You look so skinny. How’d you lose all that weight? What’s your secret?”

“Not eating,” I replied, quite truthfully. Years ago I used to weigh more than I do now. Sixty pounds more, in fact. Better eating habits got me back down to a waist size smaller than I had in college, and have kept me there for the last four years.

“Well whatever it is, you’re lookin’ good!” The loathsome one proceeded to tell me that he was moving out of town in two weeks for a job in a southern state. I managed not to jump up and down in glee, but instead congratulated him and let him glide on. Thankfully, he didn’t invite me to a going-away party. Nor did I offer to throw one.

After I disinfected with some Purell, I thought no more about that encounter until we’d given up on the rainy Pride event and were all at dinner, an hour later. “At least he’s leaving town,” I said, after invoking the unholy one’s name.

“Oh my god,” said the friend who’d talked to him first. “He is such a bitch. Do you know what he said about you?” I shook my head. “He said, ‘What’s wrong with Rob? He’s lost so much weight. Is he sick?’ And I told him that no, you’d lost weight because you’d gone on a diet, a long time ago. ‘Well he looks terrible,’ he said.”

“Oh my god,” echoed another friend at the table. “He said the exact same thing to me after he talked to you. He asked if you were sick, and said you looked awful, and that you just know what a lot of weight loss means when you're that way.”

“He said the same thing to me,” piped up someone else. “And I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. He looks great. You must not have seen him in a long while.’ ”

Around the table, everyone had the same story. This loathsome creature, even though he knew we were hanging around as a pack that afternoon, had gone around and told everyone how terrible and unhealthily skinny I appeared, with simpering insinuations of what it meant to lose so much weight in so short a period of time.

“I lost that weight over the course of three years!” I was angry for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, the corrosive quality of the gossip was bad enough. The way he’d moved from person to person, spreading his poison and hoping it’d somehow stick was even worse.

And perhaps most unthinking of all was that at least two of the people to whom he was tittle-tattling were HIV-positive.

I've been aghast all week. Why in the world would anyone try to mock or trivialize another person’s serostatus in such a way? I’m not sure I understand why anyone would use that particular fact as ammunition against another person—particularly in the gay community. Are we so hardened by the stones thrown at us by outsiders, that we feel free to pick them up and use them to finish off each other? It makes no sense.

I felt so dirty, after I learned about it. And angry. Who knows to whom this vampire gossip will flit next, trying to poison their minds? It reminds me of high school. Back then I’d worry obsessively about who was spreading what ugly rumors—and that was during days when the noxious winds of gossip were what turned the school’s mills.

The difference now, though, is that now I really don’t give a rip what people think about me. Not for longer than about two minutes, anyway. But oh, those two minutes . . . if they could’ve been captured, my feelings would have to be bottled in pure diamond, so corrosive they were.

I just checked one of the guy's online sex profiles. I jack off thinking about guys making me take a poz load, it says. Oy. The sheer amount of psychic dissonance between his fantasies and his actions makes my head hurt.

Play nicely with each other, guys. That's all I ask.