before having joined a fraternity tends to put the experience in its proper place, while a person for whom it’s their first club tends to take it way too seriously. Similarly, if a person gets through college without ever having been on the inside, and then moves to a big city and is immediately accepted into the gay community, he has a tendency to be the worst. He learns the rules and the lingo and the dress code, and he is fucking vicious to the people who don’t know them. He has been denied membership in a club until very late in life, and someone is going to pay.
In the gay male community of New York City in 1994, the fat guy was the someone who paid. It was not yet cool to be a hefty, scruffy gay dude the way it is now. Gay men have always been a little more body-conscious than the rest of the population; guys are visual and sexual and disgusting and hot, after all. But in the years after the initial AIDS crisis, as its death toll kept hitting new peaks, the focus on the physical became manic. A community whose most public faces had been sick and dying for more than a decade seemed bent on projecting health. Fitness. Power.
Or maybe broad shoulders and abs are the mutually agreed-upon hottest things, the way blond hair and big tits are the all-access pass to the straight male world, and having them is the surest way to get yourself laid. A little of both, probably.
The rest of the Chelsea bars followed the same template as Splash. Same guys. Same rules. Same Robin S. But I was an eager young man fresh out of Catholic school, so I kept searching. In any major city, there are gay bar magazines, tour books to the scene to tell you where to go and which nights to go there. There were two in New York at the time: Homo Xtra and Next. I grabbed them both from Splash, took them home and went at them with the Hi-Liters I’d stolen from work. My home on the Upper East Side, the place where all postcollegiate prepsters settle when they move to New York, boasted affordable rents and numerous draft beer specials, but almost no gay bars. The magazines listed one ritzy piano bar in the east Sixties for guys in their seventies, another place near Bloomingdale’s exclusively for Asian twinks and Asian twink enthusiasts. And then one place called The Regent, which was summarized thusly: “A young entrepreneurial crowd mixes with an appreciative older audience.” Young? I am that! Entrepreneurial? I am in the world of business, sort of! Older people? I have been taught to respect my elders, plus think of the stories they could tell! Sold. I dressed in my finest polo shirt and khakis and hopped on the southbound 6 train, toward my destiny.
The Regent was down by the tram to Roosevelt Island, a hidden little place without so much as a sign—just a red light over the door. The appreciative older audience likes to relive the bad old days, I figured. I swung open the door and entered just as “Show Me Love” by Robin S. made its crescendo. The lights were dim. The crowd was segregated: young’uns along the wall, older guys—and we are talking older guys—along the bar. Three empty, silent feet in between. The two groups surveyed one another. It was like a junior high mixer. I struck up a conversation with a good-looking younger guy in a very tight tank top and a goatee. “You new?” he asked, looking over my shoulder at the older gentlemen. “I am!” I said. “Well, you know. Good luck.” Talking did not seem to be on anyone’s agenda at this place. A guy at the bar signaled him over and he went. They spoke for a quick moment, the older guy settled his tab, and they left. I stood alone, with my back against the wall, nursing a Bud Light bottle. A cold room. It’ll warm up, I figured.
After twenty minutes or so, the drunkest of the older guys at the bar waved me over. I stepped to him.
“Hi! I’m Dave.”
“You’re new.”
“I am!”
He looked me up and down and then up again and then down again. “How much?”
Have you ever had the experience of being in your kitchen and you see an ant, and you think How strange, an ant, and then your scope of vision