The Way We Were Then

It may not always be sunny in Philadelphia, but more often than not our memories of youth seem brighter in our mind’s eye. It’s insane how my days get carved up. I don’t remember it being like this when I was, well, 22. The days seemed to linger longer then …and so did the nights, spent chasing boys.

Everyone had their favored scent and they all competed with cigarette smoke, which hung like a mist over the room. I contributed to it, lighting one as intermittently as I could, using the lit cigarette to emphasize points and augment gestures. A lot of people did, I wasn’t alone in smoking for effect. In a way it seemed a part of the seduction game. But everyone had their favored musk or cologne, a few spritzes before a night out. Mine was Polo Blue. I remember how on my strapped college kid budget I would fret over the roughly $50 price tag of the small blued bottle. It’s strange because it seems to me that no one really wears cologne or musk anymore, though I’m not mourning that reality. I abandoned even wearing deodorant when I moved to Berlin. 

It was funny when we’d walk into the bar and find ourselves enveloped by that sickly sweet odor that immediately clung to us and invaded our nostrils with the pungent urgency of potpourri though, the commingled smell of Polo Blue and Black, Abercrombie Fierce, the assorted Calvin Klein lines, and cigarette smoke, the stale scent of beer and ash and crumpled butts in overflowing ashtrays. I don’t think I’m presenting the best case for the way we were then, but that was the way it was: a lot of people smoked and nearly everyone wore fragrance. 

We mostly went to Woody’s in those days, occasionally drifting off to the other bars in our little Gayborhood. Woody’s consisted of several rooms in a two-story complex at the corner of 13^th and Walnut, very different from the new Woody’s, when they knocked down all of the walls and made at least the first floor into one large bar with the ambience of a suburban pizzeria with the exposed brick and warm wood accents. I remember a new verb I learned around the age of eighteen or nineteen in one of those advice guides to gay life that flourished at the close of the last century and the beginning of the new one when it seemed that all of my life, or at the least my social and sex life, was a fumble. We had to be taught, or at least I did, or at least some publisher thought that we did, and without the internet we had little to go on when we first emerged into our new world. So as a shy and precocious debutante I spritzed myself with Polo Blue and entered the bar to perform my “twirl”, as it were. I had learned that a twirl was that familiar action first performed when entering a gay bar and it was a slow and planned waltz around the room to see and be seen, to assess the crowd. 

They all saw me or all of us when we entered because everyone whipped their heads around and craned their necks at the sound of the door opening to let in the night and a potential stranger. Everyone would look and it was intimidating, though of course no one wanted to acknowledge that the act of being examined by a dozen or more strangers was intimidating. If the weather and the season permitted the excuse then we would move from the first bar and into what they called the Pub Bar, and from there into the café, which adjoined the coat check. The café served lunch and even dinner, though I never ate there, and as the night progressed young people who had not yet learned to drink publicly would slump into its chairs to moan and regret their recent decisions. In reality the whole charade was an excuse to move from room to room in order to find the man of our dreams. He could be there anytime, anywhere, and there weren’t too many ways to find him short of stumbling on him. 

The normal impetus was to move upstairs, to what we called the Cyber Bar. The Cyber Bar turned out to be a sad bellwether of our later fates. The owner had tucked several consoles into the rear corner and a trickle of men would use these complimentary machines to cruise the earliest online dating services or the personals, or to chat in chat rooms or to look at porn. We’d watch them or peer over their shoulders and titter and guffaw—look at them! Came out to stare at a screen all night—why can’t they do that at home? So sad. Why would anyone do that? I think about those moments and that laughter all of the time now. 

Most people were strangers. There was no way to know them, no online community, no way of knowing that someone was a thirty-year old bottom into rough play and oral with a body weight of 158 pounds. Now we can peruse someone’s recent vacation photos before we even hear his voice, if they provide the right links. They would become familiar with time but remain strangers—some even disappeared, because we would see them out each week. We saw whom they talked to and how they danced. When they disappeared we speculated that they had moved to New York. Everyone wanted to leave Philadelphia for New York in those days. People speculated about the reality of Pittsburgh because of a certain show and others assured us that it was nothing like that, just a sleepy little place. 

We’d order our drinks. These could often be part of the presentation, right alongside the nicotine and musk. A man who ordered a beer might be signaling that he was butch. Those were one of the sad things that mattered in those days, or seemed to matter more, the relative masculinity of a stranger. Initially I went through a phase that many young entrants endured, and that was sampling a variety of cocktails, some noxious, some bizarre, all in an effort to accelerate the planned descent into public drunkenness (but not too drunk!) and to find what we might like. A lot was about sampling in those days, though that hasn’t changed either. People think more has changed than it has, mistaking slight modifications for waves. We’re all really just iterations of the same people with remarkably similar motives. 

We had crushes and nobody knew our names. When I remind my peers these days about the crushes they sometimes deny it or they groan, but I know I was not alone in nursing crushes. I had a crush on a blond guy about my age. I remembered when I first prised his name from all of that secrecy and cherished it like a totem. A friend told me who was a friend with a friend of his. I’d dress for him. I’m not sad about it. I hoped to see him and maybe tonight would be the night that I would finally talk to him, but it never was. Many nights I wouldn’t see him and the city seemed so vast then, and I felt so small, and the culture seemed so insurmountable, all of these blond boys in bars and I was half mad about one and he didn’t know my name, and how many others crooned over other blond boys while that vaguely sad dance music that we all listened to in those days played? But it was a good feeling because it felt like being alive, my newfound queer freedom my own neon sign humming with a vibrant light. I didn’t mind being a small bit player in the mysteries of that night. 

I finally approached that blond boy but it was at his behest. The world was changing and we were becoming the way we are; a new platform named Facebook had begun to supplant one named Myspace. Myspace was tricky because not only did we not know each other’s names but we also didn’t know the contrived names we gave ourselves in our own spaces on this platform. However I had discovered the blond boy attended my university. I’d walked out of my Shakespeare class one fall afternoon and nearly collided with him. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to die of the pleasure and the pain. I was twenty-one and he went to my school! Clearly this was as auspicious as it was important. 

It’s easy to forget now but Facebook was originally for college students. We needed a college email to join. I knew his first name and I knew he was in my network. I searched for him and found him, or a thumbnail with his poorly lit face. I worried and fretted and then slid into his DMs, as they say these days, and I wrote, “I’ve always wanted to say hi to you.” The next day he replied. “Well then say hi next time,” and I did, because a week later I was standing outside of a class building on campus when he walked past. I did what any normal human being would do, and that was to climb over and through a network of hedges and topiaries in a large planting bed and follow him down the walk, dirty, stung, and covered in cobwebs. I finally caught up with him at a lunch truck. He had just ordered a breakfast sandwich. He was wearing black Adidas snap pants and black sneakers and a shirt I cannot recall. “Hey, what’s up,” I said with forced ease, as if I climbed over shrubbery every day to greet strangers. I immediately realized I had weirded him out. I thought I was good looking and charming when maybe I wasn’t. I slunk away after his perfunctory replies. I wanted to hide. I could never go to Woody’s again. I guessed I would probably now have to move to New York—and he wouldn’t be there! 

The saga ultimately had a twisted ending. In this ending my younger self gradually grew into the young man who would become the older man I am today. He continued to grow to like himself and he continued to explore his sexuality and his sense of self grew. He did not move to New York. (Though there are times that I wish I had.) One night he fell into an embrace of sorts with the blond. I don’t wish that I could say it ended well. He was just another stranger. Maybe that’s part of the problem with knowing too little about other people, though it’s hard to remember that when we now know too much. 

I don’t dislike the modern world. I don’t trust anyone who does. The world changed and we changed with it. The world I inhabited and described was also full of flaws. It was a hostile world where we were so busy having fun that we failed to notice that our growing sense of liberation did not include our brothers and sisters of color, or extend to our trans friends. I have since come to learn how many gay spaces made entry for potential black clientele difficult, if not disingenuous. It was a lonely world for the members of our Diaspora who did not have access to the welcoming spaces that I did because of my hometown being so close to a major city. It was also a world where we weren’t yet truly free, where the strait jacket of toxic masculinity still wrapped us tight in its vise, forcing us all too often to act or dress a certain way in order to present as “butch”. The modern world is chaotic and messy and confusing. So was ours.