How I imagined myself, at 18 years old, to be an expert on the ways of the gay, I'll never know. But there I stood, a college freshman seasoned even then with several years of low-grade debauchery and one illicit relationship with a redheaded goddess six years my senior, deeming another not gay enough. True, I had a certain maturity. Teenage years spent drinking and hanging out with a Grateful Dead cover band had left me with more than just a fashion sense limited to wrap-around sari skirts and tie-dyes. I was a junior hippie, reeking of patchouli, my long hair pulled back only the better to paint anti- (Gulf) war posters.
     Bypassing the fresh-scrubbed sorority pledges at my first-year college, I weeded out my own kind, teenage girls from the suburbs with a budding love for pot and Frank Zappa, and cool kids from the Northeast Virginia who spent their weekends hanging out in Washington, DC. So when I met Kelly and her new-age boyfriend Chris, friendship came fast. We fell naturally, effortlessly into afternoons spent beside the New River, reading poetry and drinking cheap red wine. Tall, with her blond hair and slightly pockmarked face, Kelly was an approachable beauty. Her New Age man was less savory, a cross between Arlo Guthrie and a weasel. He thought it was clever to quote bawdy passages from Henry Miller. Once, he carved for me a wooden necklace, beads and all, with an oak tree painted on it in green oils.
     I guess I should have felt a little guilty, then, when I found myself in his girlfriend's dorm room that spring evening. Pressed together in a ridiculously small twin bed, Kelly let her hands move over my body softly, before she kissed me. Eager and clumsy, all long arms and legs like a wild horse, she conquered fear and the unknown to reach out to me. Her softness, unlike my first lover's self-assured advances, was unappreciated by me. I responded with a callous sensitivity that I would love to blame on youth, but which in truth still characterizes some of my behavior today. "Don't try to be gay," I spit out, rising from the childlike bed. "Go back to your boyfriend." With the overblown diva drama that accompanies the gay and young, I hurled my good-byes to Kelly, donned my earth shoes and trekked across campus.
     Nearly 15 years later and all grown up, I ask myself, "Why did I not want that for my friend?" Did I feel as though the gay life was only meant for me, something to be jealously guarded? Even at that young age, I could see that being a homo—despite the accompanying occasional harassment—was way cooler than anything straight life had to offer. Compared to the suburban ennui straight life promised, gay life was an exit ramp that led to a swirling wonderland where unparalleled style, risqué behavior and Bali-hi adventures awaited. 'Gay' offered something more, an instant community fused together merely by the courage to defy society and the will to seek personal satisfaction.
     Through the years, I saw Kelly several more times, both of us following parallel paths across East Coast cities. I found her in NoVa, another New Age boyfriend in tow, her misery apparent. Later, I ran into her again at a backyard barbecue in Maryland. I had crashed the party accompanied by several of my 'girls' from Baltimore. We made up a loosely based gang of sorts, primarily involved with throwing underground raves, defacing public property in the name of art and acting tough. I was 24 years old, invincible and unnaturally preoccupied with making straight men squirm. We had left the grilling area in favor of the chilling area, and were smoking upstairs when a loud-mouthed braggart hipster boy with a tight, vintage, buttoned-down shirt started shooting off. My gang swarmed in like the Dead End Kids.
     "Let's trade shirts," offered one of the girls, attempting to convince him to part with his obviously prized possession for her wholly unremarkable, stained T-shirt. As he grew uneasy, hipster boy began to mouth off more, as if to compensate. More than a little drunk, I suggested he shut his piehole. It wasn't until my switchblade landed solidly in the wooden chair between his legs that he took my advice. Petrified, he ran off, while my girls and I got a good laugh. He reappeared soon with the host of the party, his girlfriend, . . . Kelly. My shock at seeing her gave way to a new kind of shock when my ridiculously inappropriate party behavior was rewarded by Kelly's lecture to her hipster boy about how to act around lesbian guests. Something about us not being used to hanging out with guys, and a warning to him to be sensitive to the needs of minority groups.
     I don't know how long the two of them stayed together—probably not much longer than my dalliance with that gang of no-longer-juvenile delinquents—but I never forgot that scene at the barbecue. I crossed paths with Kelly again, several months before I returned to New York City. She had moved to Baltimore, gotten a job with a non-profit group and was living with a woman who was her lover. Although we only saw each other once more, she seemed happier at that moment than at any time I had known her.
     When I think back to those college days, I wonder what possessed me to act the way I did toward her, to advise her not to be gay—as if her sexuality was up to me to decide. If anyone could ever be deemed qualified to judge another person's gay quotient, it sure as hell wouldn't have been me at 18. And apart from that arose the bigger question, "What the hell was I thinking?" What would ever possess me to advise someone to not be gay? With her feminist leanings and penchant for kissing girls, Kelly would have made a hell of a lezzie. Although I can't quite convince myself that her string of wolf-in-sheep's-clothing New Age boyfriends was entirely to blame on the flip advice of a freshman college kid, part of me knows that the scene stuck with her, too. It is broken now, the beads knotted with their green twine, but I still have that little wooden necklace with the painted tree, stashed away in an ornate box lined with purple velvet. It reminds me that life is more complicated than man versus woman, gay and straight. And although I laugh out loud when I think about the ingenue I was, silently a small guilt rises to the surface, like a bubble slowly escaping from the wreckage of a sunken ship.

 

WINNIE McCROY is a freelance writer who works for numerous New York publications, including the New York Blade and GO NYC Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn, where she divides her time between cataloguing every Humphrey Bogart movie ever made, and stalking B-grade celebrities.