Out of the Closet and Into My Heart

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Mine was a lot of fun. Spent the day with the family eating eveything that wasn't nailed down, then went over to Roger Mexico's to trade reports of the day's events and do some much needed catching up. And now I've completely shaken off the last of the tryptophan and emerged from my turkey coma, ready to tell you a story.

I've always had a special place in my heart for Will and Grace. Partly because the show is funny funny funny, but mostly because I identify with it a little too well.

During my formative years, I was Grace Adler. No, I wasn't an interior decorator. I was a cover girl. A gal pal. A fag hag. From the age of about eleven to somewhere in my mid-twenties, at least one of my close male friends was gay. (I wasn't aware that my best friend in junior high was gay when we were eleven, but I had my suspicions. When he came out to me over cheesecake and coffee, I shrugged and kept eating.) And more than once, I either had a serious crush or dated someone who wasn't sure where he fit on the Kinsey scale.

For those of you who missed last night's episode, it was a flashback to 1985 when Will and Grace were in college, and had been dating for about three months. Grace was seriously smitten, and had been convinced by a friend if she didn't have sex with him soon he would end up being "just a friend." Will was still closeted and in denial, and after being outed by Jack (still in high school and already secure in his preferences), spent the majority of the show trying to figure out how to avoid Grace's advances. Finally at the end of the show, he came out to her, she got pissy, they didn't speak for a year, then made up blah blah blah.

Sometimes art imitates life in a scary scary way. (For those of you that have known me for a long time, I'm sure you already know what story I'm going to tell.) This is my weird little parallel Will and Grace story....

It was the fall of 1987, and I was stuck in a three hour Bio 101 lab. Boring doesn't begin to cover it - we were focusing on botany. Zzzzzzzzzzzz. I ended up partners with this attractive guy named Glenn, who was as equally bored by looking at slides of plant cells as I was. After a week or two, we worked out a system: rush through the slide work and the worksheets, then spend the rest of the class gabbing. He was friendly, funny as hell, and we had lots in common. I actually started looking forward to lab time. Yeah, I had a crush, but I wasn't able to work up the courage to ask him out. (I'm obviously not the most confident person in the world right now, but back then I was the poster child for low self image and awkward romantic situations.)

When the next quarter rolled around, I was dismayed to learn that Glenn had dropped the class, and I had no way of getting ahold of him. We'd never bothered to exchange numbers, and his listing in the student directory was wrong. After many frustrated mornings of "What the hell do I do now?" conversations with my friend over coffee, I decided upon a completely ridiculous plan. I took out an anonymous personal ad in the campus newspaper addressed to him. Heh heh. Ball's in your court now, buddy.

And then he wrote back. He wanted to meet. Oh shit. Now I felt like a complete moron.

I finally decided to invite him (still anonymously) to the nightclub that my friends were taking me to for my 19th birthday. That way if things went awry, I'd be around compassionate people and I could have a few beers in the process. (19 was legal for beer in 1987. Damn, I'm old.)

Well, long story short. He showed up. I finally mustered up the courage to go talk to him and let him know about my silly little personals plot. I then proceeded to make a complete stammering ass of myself. After about 45 minutes of this, I returned from a bathroom trip to find that he was gone. Damn. Blew it again. I took a good sized swallow off my Bud Light and resigned myself to pouting.

It was at this point that Glenn showed back up, with a pack of Hostess Cupcakes covered in birthday candles. He'd run across the street to the Circle K. Absolute sweetest thing anyone has ever done for my birthday, hands down. More beers ensued, as well as some sticky snack-cake smooching in a dark corner of the club.

About a month later, I took him to a party being thrown by my friend Ron (the cheesecake and coffee guy). Most of the guests were gay, and as it turned out, one of the other attendees had dated Glenn before I met him. Gossip spread throughout the party, and someone pulled me aside to let me know that my boyfriend was not necessarily on the straight and narrow. Glenn pulled me aside about a half hour later to explain the situation, but the way he explained it made it seem like a one time experimental thing. I bought his version of the story, and went on enjoying the party.

After we'd been dating for about three months, I started questioning what exactly was going on. We were together constantly, and it was obvious that he cared a great deal for me, but things had not progressed on a physical level since the night of my birthday. Not that I wanted sex at that point in the relationship, but the guy's hands never moved once. Either I was dating the politest man in the known universe, or something was seriously wrong. After running into him unexpectedly at the Metro (a gay club) one night while I was out with Ron, Glenn decided we finally had to talk.

"I think we both know what's going on here. I think we both know what I am."

I pretty much spent the next week drunk and sobbing. My heart was crushed. Logically I knew that there was nothing I could do to change his gender preferences, but logic didn't make much sense where I was at that point. After all, I was the last woman he'd dated. What if I was his last ditch effort at heterosexuality and I sucked so much that he'd given up on the female of the species completely? My self image was already pretty much in the toilet at this point in my life, and this most certainly didn't help.

Eventually we talked again. We ended up being best friends for about five years. He moved to Chicago for a while and I lost track of him, but he called me a few years back and left a message on my answering machine. "It's Glenn. I'm home. Call me."

We met for drinks and compared notes on the previous years when we had been separated. I saw him a few more times.(Actually he did show up to my birthday dinner two years ago; yes, he'd brought Cupcakes again. We both got a good laugh out of that one.) The last time I saw him was about a year ago, when we ran into each other on Fountain Square. I was on my way to happy hour with the suits, he was on his way to work at the restaurant where he waited tables. We exchanged pleasantries and phone numbers, and promised we'd get together after the holidays. So much for that.

At this point, we've veered from the Will and Grace scripting. Besides the memories of the five years we spent practically inseparable, our lives took radically different paths. We had no more mutual friends. He was still full of his "big city" stories of life in Chicago, and I was still the small town girl who never made it out of the backwaters of Cincinnati. He seemed more materialistic, and my gushing about writing projects and the poetry group didn't seem to interest him all that much. I guess people change, and that's just the Way Things Are.

I still miss my friend, though. Our story might not have been as glamorous as Must See TV, but I think we were running neck and neck in the wacky hijinks department.