Late April, 2008. The lazy final weeks of 12th grade, at my pluralistic Jewish private school in Houston. It was a recent tradition for the senior class, come May, to go to Poland and join something called The March of the Living. How to explain this to gentiles: imagine a sort of immersive death march, a Times Square tour of former concentration camps. After the Poland chapter, the class would head to Israel for one of those typically militaristic bus tours around the country.
My mother and I agreed: the Poland leg was a joke. Three grand, to walk around Auschwitz with J.A.P.s in Ugg Boots? Instead, I’d take the week off and meet the rest in Tel Aviv, where my grandmother—a living Holocaust survivor and not an a tour guide—would be waiting for me with open arms.
Most of the class went on the march. Only a few of us holdovers stayed back in Houston. It was a great time. Miriam and I went to see Iron Man at midnight. I got my wisdom teeth removed, and watched Buffy DVDs over frozen yogurt. I blasted Madonna’s Hard Candy as I drove around in my uncle Jerry’s hideous Cadillac.
My 18th birthday would be the first week of May, by which point the ten of us who stayed behind would join the rest of our class, and our hot headmaster, in the holy land. The celebration would have to go down now. I wanted to go to South Beach, Houston’s mega gay club. But how? I didn’t have a fake ID.
But Sam P did. I didn’t think we looked alike, and unlike me, he had abs, the eternal marker of social superiority. But any way you shook it, we were two twinky Ashkenazi boys in one of the most diverse cities in the country. Who would look twice?
We must have taken my mom’s white Ford Explorer that night, and thank God she was so open-minded. She’d also paid for two rounds of Accutane, a dermatological dark magic which did God knows what damage to my organs and psyche. But still, I cleared prom night without a blemish—unlike the year before, when I’d had to wear so much cover-up that I stained my tuxedo rental.
And now I had a clean face for my first night out. I looked like fresh meat, though there wasn’t much of it on the bone. My growth spurts and weight fluctuations have always been jagged; come senior year, I was insatiably hungry all the time, skinny in a way that makes me cringe to look back on. I was a friend to everyone, agreeable and smiling, an affable eunuch. I’d been out for years by then, but hadn’t had anyone to kiss. It would be a decade, at least, before I’d really explore my authentic sexuality.
What I did have was Queer as Folk, which I’d be introduced to at 14 by my closest friends, the twins Tina and Tanya. Their mother, Anne, was chic and discerning, and knew it was harmless for her daughters to watch hot gay Canadian men fucking on Showtime. I’d never seen anything like it. I wasn’t out to my parents yet, though considering how many times my dad and I watched Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion together, I can’t imagine that they saw that ambush coming two years later. Tina and Tanya opened the door to my cinematic queer awakening, and now it was for me to cross through.
I checked the mailbox with rabid enthusiasm come sophomore year, waiting for the Queer as Folk DVDs to arrive one-by-one, sleeve-by-sleeve, from Netflix. “It’s Battlestar Galactica!,” I’d screech, when my mom would ask what I’d gotten this week. Then I’d fly up to my room and slam the door shut.
When I slipped in that first disc, I put it on at the lowest possible volume, waiting for my parents to head to bed. In the dark of my room, I stared in awe as the gates opened to the show’s signature nightclub: Babylon. Pink confetti and laser light doused the screen, as endless pornstar bodies danced to “Let’s Hear it for the Boy.” I knew nothing about gay nightlife. Could this be real?
When you are 17 and standing at the club gates, at midnight, with a fake ID, you really do think that you’re about to die. I’m in my mid-thirties now, when the rush of a first time is a rare luxury. The other week, I saw a hot daddy at my gym, went up to him, and asked for his number. It made my afternoon, certainly, and got my blood pumping, but the stakes didn’t feel so climactic that they’d kill me. What’s the worst that could happen: I go home and take a nap?
But here I was at 17, shitting bricks as the bouncer checked my credentials, a vein bulging in my forehead. Agony, and then, in one miraculous instant, they let me and my crew of Jewish girls through. I couldn’t believe it. The Jew switcheroo had worked; I owed Sam P. my life, and, depending on the night’s events, perhaps my virginity.
It was better than Babylon, bigger than Babylon, open and spacious and packed with real men. A stripper beckoned us over; my friend Jennie tipped him and he let me rub my hands over his chest. He was hairless and impossibly firm, hit muscles juicy like strawberries. I’d never seen skin so tan, teeth so white; a touchable version of my straight brother’s hot goyish roommates.
There was a charge in the air. Even if it was my first time, I knew this was no ordinary night. I looked up and around and saw a familiar face, projected onto the screens. I heard her voice, beckoning us to the dancefloor. No way. Awareness came all at once. Unknowingly, by god’s grace, we had stumbled into a Madonnarama.
My first CD, given to me by my mother: The Immaculate Collection. The video I watched every morning before fifth grade: Don’t Tell Me. The song I danced to when I got my college acceptance letter: Into the Groove. My yearbook quote: Like It Or Not. The patron diva of our household now presided over my commencement into adulthood.
This was but a few months before Lady Gaga would debut Just Dance, and Katy Perry “I Kissed a Girl.” We were in the final year of the Bush presidency, during which time Madonna was all we had. Hard Candy may have been forgettable, but Confessions was like a missive from Professor X’s Cerebro headset: if you were gay when it came out, and conscious, it changed you.
So we danced, probably with as much sex appeal as you’d expect from a high school cast of Fiddler on the Roof. The Madonna hits kept coming—no remixes—and the party got wild. Who knows what I wanted. But Jennie was on a mission, gleefully introducing herself to any stacked man I had my eyes on. “IT’S MY FRIEND’S BIRTHDAY,” she yelled in their ears. “WOULD YOU GIVE HIM A KISS?”
Naturally, this is the sort of behavior I would today condemn: a sexless young fag and his straight handler. But god damn if a little J.A.P. insistence didn’t go a long way. Three men came my way, and planted ‘em on me. The kisses were wet and toothy, leaving my lips cut and beer on my breath, which I’d never once tasted. And that was that.
Should this have been my first experience? Would it indeed define years to come of performative, overblown sexual theatrics, dancefloor encounters which could almost serve in place of genuine intimacy? Weren’t there some deeper blocks apparent here, never to be fully healed?
Who cares. I’d have my twenties for therapy, and my thirties for writing personal essays. Even if the dancefloor would expose me to violation and reenactment, fantasy and delusion, first kisses full of empty promises, those would be passing phantasms. My prince may never come, but the dancefloor itself would prove to be one of the great loves of my life. And that night, we met for the first time.
Another 17 years have passed—a full lifespan for me back then. I’ve switched cities five or so times, changed my name and my hair and my career, learned much and resolved much less. And yet, just this last Saturday night, when the DJ put on Hung Up , I was back where I started: dancing the same dance from that night with the fake ID, the same dance when I’d blast Lucky Star and play Sailor Moon in my childhood bedroom. “Time goes by, so slowly…” The clock ticks, Madonna sings, and I have only just begun.
