In drama school you learn how to feel things. A lot. All the time. My first fortnight at uni was like emotional boot camp—the exact kick in the heart that I needed to restart the sense of who I was.
We spent most of the first semester in a small room of painted-brown concrete, developing a show for young children. The quickest way to get to know someone is to create something with them, so our merry band of seventeen strangers quickly became a chaotic orgy of liberated outcasts. We were all outsiders, we were all geeks, and we had all found safety and refuge in the drama room at school. Now we were in a drama class that never ended. In fact, we were going to build our lives into a drama class that never ended.
Heaven, right?
There were a lot of feelings.
A lot.
And we were instructed to shout these feelings at top volume. Into a wall. Or to a partner on the other side of the room. Now with a partner, joining hands, chanting together to specific rhythms. Now as an animal. A shadow. Just syllables. Vowels. Consonants. Just as feelings. Noises. A tree. A tree in the wind. The feeling of wind.
Feelings! So many feels!
In between rehearsals we talked. We were seventeen drama nerds, all from different places, but we talked about high school as if we had managed to survive a war. There was the softly spoken young man who said he turned to White Pride and Hitler speeches in year ten in an attempt to make the bullies scared of him. The girl who self-harmed by heating forks over a candle flame and then branding herself, letting the burn marks sink into her skin. There was the charismatic boy who told us he had made it through the last few years of high school by drinking a bottle of cheap red wine every day.
That last one was Ravi.
I spent most of my uni years wanting to be Ravi. He was charming, handsome and exotic, and loved. Ravi laughed. A lot. His humour was infectious. And he was sexually free and liberated, or at least he appeared to be. With a bit of pushing, he would hint at sexual encounters with beautiful strangers. We would all sit around him, enthralled. I wanted to be Ravi.
I owned gay like a badge, marching forth and letting it lead my personality. Ravi had enough confidence to shrug in the face of his bisexuality and happily carry on. I hadn’t figured out how to do that yet, and it drove me nuts. I only knew how to be an outspoken gay guy, but Ravi was a relaxed gay (or bi, depending on his mood) guy. Of course, he was coming from an equally confusing time at high school, but he seemed far more relaxed about the entire thing.
Friendship groups quickly formed, and I attached myself to Ravi like we were long-lost brothers. Ravi—strong, chaotic, sensitive, almost certainly a Time Lord. Ravi would come to uni cloaked in a pashmina he’d picked up from the op shop. He would take us on journeys through the town at night, finding little niches of parks with the best playgrounds, which I had never seen. He’d show us how to get to the town’s water tower and to hop, skip and jump our way to the top. Ravi and I had grown up in the same town, but in very different places. My bedroom had been my escape. For Ravi, the whole town was his hidey-hole.
I also became friends with Nina. Short-haired, sharp-witted, a simmering fighter. She’s a Legolas: a nimble elf, a precise marksman, an agile foe. Nina is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Her cutting, dry humour was fantastic in a drama class: she could dismantle even the faintest whiff of bullshit with the shortest utterance. She’d face up to the lecturers ready for any challenge, and she was rewarded. Beneath her thick armour beat a heart of fierce loyalty; she had a softness and deep affection for the special few she loved. She was the first one in the class that I came out to.
Mainly because she asked.
‘You’re gay, right?’
That’s how Nina asks.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
And that was it. I was out at uni. I was officially Gay Dave. I was Gay Dave with a merry bunch of friends.
The final friend to join this furious foursome was Amber. Amber was older than us by a couple of years. She had dabbled in various certificate courses before finally landing in the theatre course. Quiet, funny and smart, Amber was a perfect Hermione Granger. Her stability and calm influenced us all. She was frightened of the world, but she was worshipped by our class as it quickly became obvious that Amber knew how to organise a production schedule better than anyone else. In fact, Amber knew how to organise most things better than anyone. Ever. When she smiled or giggled, she hid her face, as though she was scared that you might see her feelings underneath. She wore black. A lot.
So, Gay Dave joined Hermione (Amber), Legolas (Nina) and The Doctor (Ravi). The experience of creating the children’s show bound us together quickly. When we finished, we set about putting on an afterparty that would become legendary in the halls of the arts faculty. Absolutely everyone was invited.
There were other, older gay guys at uni. Maybe this party would be the point where I would get some sex.
I humbly asked my parents to buy me a sixpack of Vodka Cruisers. I didn’t have a driver’s licence and wasn’t yet eighteen. I had no idea what Vodka Cruisers were. I had never drunk alcohol before. But Nina and Amber advised me to invest. Everyone would be drunk at the party.
I had kept myself locked away for years, certain that I didn’t like company. It all seemed too intimidating. But I really liked these people, and there seemed to be a chance for the sexy times that I had dreamed of for years.
What was the paradise that lay ahead?
Turns out paradise smells faintly of vomit and is very loud. It’s also a weird kind of clumsy soft porn that no one would ever be interested in watching. This was a university party. This is what I had been missing out on.
We were in someone’s driveway. Generic, pulsing music thudded out of the interior of the house. We drank. And talked. And somewhere, somehow, someone suggested spin the bottle. And I found myself sitting in a circle, watching an empty Vodka Cruiser spin.
I had consumed one bottle, and I didn’t feel particularly compelled to have another. I honestly couldn’t tell whether I was actually drunk, or whether I was just playing drunk for the sake of the party, trying to convince myself as much as anyone else. Amber took to a bottle of rum and coke with vigour. Nina, the classiest of us all, had a bottle of white wine. Ravi had several bottles of watermelon schnapps, which he kept offering to everybody.
‘Schnapps?!’ he’d ask, excited. ‘It’s well tasty.’
I would be lying if I didn’t say I was curious about kissing Ravi. He was a guy and he was bi. In fact, at this stage, we were the only open gays in our year. There were another couple of guys that everybody gossiped about, but no hard (get it?) evidence of homosexuality. There were gay guys in other years, from different parts of uni, but I hardly knew them. I wasn’t about to go and try pashing older guys; I barely had my gay training wheels attached.
I didn’t know where to begin. The whole thing was confusing. I seemed to have missed the class where people were taught to flirt. I didn’t understand it. Why would you flirt? Why not just ask the person if you could kiss them?
‘Schnapps?!’ Ravi offered to the people on either side of him in the circle. They each took a swig.
The vodka cruiser bottle was spun. The game was in motion.
I wasn’t about to tell anyone I was a kiss virgin. I was struggling to remain cool without a drink in my hand, let alone with admitting that I’d never locked lips with anyone.
All seventeen of us, a ragged bunch of outcasts, gathered around the bottle. The anticipation was like Russian Roulette.
First up was Hannah, a manic-depressive mature-age student who had dyed her hair blue in an attempt to fit in with the younger group.
The bottle spun to the chants of oooos and ahhhhs. It began to slow down, threatening to stop right at me.
Was this it? Hannah? My first kiss? Really?
It stopped short, landing on the girl beside me. Carmen, a black-haired tattooed girl with a collection of piercings she’d done herself.
Hannah crawled over to Carmen and they stared at each other for a moment before drawing in for a kiss. We all erupted in cheers. The pair didn’t let our applause go to waste. They stretched out their moment together, flicking their tongues into each other as we all laughed. It happened inches away from my face.
Hannah went back to her spot. ‘You’re an awesome kisser!’ she said to Carmen.
‘Schnapps?!’ Ravi said, offering them the bottle.
We went round the circle. People were pashing without a second thought. Dan, formerly of White Pride, kissed Anna, the girl from New Zealand who smelt like onions. Sarah, the self-branding self-mutilator, kissed Russell, the musical theatre-loving bombastic boy who was very keen to tell us that he wasn’t gay at all.
And so it went, missing me each time. I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed. Either way, it would be my turn soon, and I would spin the bottle, and it would, hopefully, for the love of God, land on Ravi. I wasn’t sure if I was attracted to him, or whether I just didn’t want to kiss anyone else.
It was my turn.
Ravi. Please.
The bottle felt cold in my hand. I took a deep breath, and spun.
Please, God, please. Just let it land on someone nice. And please don’t let me be crap. Please don’t let them laugh in my face. And what are they thinking? Is each person in the circle praying that it doesn’t land on them? Are they all dreading the thought of my face pressed against theirs?
It passed Ravi once. Twice. Three times.
It began to slow.
This was my first kiss. A game of chance in a driveway, with one bottle of orange Vodka Cruiser in my belly.
I knew who it was going to be a second before it stopped. The bottle pointed accusingly at Anna. Onion girl.
I smiled at her. She smiled back. If she was disappointed, she didn’t show it. My eyes flicked to Ravi, who smiled back sympathetically.
‘Schnapps?!’ he offered.
I almost took a swig, but I didn’t, fearing that it would be rude to Anna, who was now crawling towards me with her bulky frame.
One moment she was an inch or two away, the next, her face was on mine. I realised that my lips were dry, and hers were ridiculously wet. I heard the crowd around us cheering. She opened her mouth and I felt her tongue on my lips, which I kept tighter than a cat’s arse, not daring to let her enter. Finally it was over, and she drew away.
‘You taste really nice,’ she said.
‘Thanks, so do you,’ I said, not really thinking about it.
‘You taste like orange.’
I shrugged and smiled, ‘The vodka, probably.’
And then the game kept going.
That night I went from having kissed no one to kissing my entire class. Sixteen people in total. Ravi was my second kiss. His spin landed on me. My curious desire was about to be satisfied, and I wondered briefly whether this would be an evening we would both remember and laugh about in years to come. Was this how a romance would start?
Our lips drew together. His face was warm, and I realised instantly how different kissing a man was, if for no other reason than the mashing together of facial hair. I was confident now, and I felt ‘experienced’ having kissed a total of one other person. I opened my mouth and stabbed my tongue like a weapon into his face, but his lips remained tightly shut. I knew what that meant. It was exactly what I had done to Anna.
We drew apart and he smiled at me, and the game kept going.
I think I was disappointed. Possibly heartbroken. But the whole thing was so casual, so mundane, that I didn’t know what to feel. And, as I kissed a dozen or more others, I began to ask myself why’d I’d been so worried all this time. Why had I longed for a romantic partner as though it was significant? Affection, for us, at that time, didn’t seem to be too significant at all. In fact, it seemed like nothing. I suppose I should’ve felt relieved. But, somehow, I left feeling even more empty.
The cops turned up eventually. Ravi and a few others were talking about moving the party somewhere else, but I was done. It was midnight and I was cold. Any thin grasp the vodka had held on me was well and truly gone. Anna dropped me home. She’d been sober the entire time.
I crawled into bed and drifted into an uneasy sleep, the chanting and music still in my head. I was becoming a person I barely recognised.
For that, I was extremely grateful.