With my single night with James as my one gay sex experience, and still secretly suffering massive confusion over my sexuality, I did the only sensible thing I could. I appointed myself the town’s young leader on gay rights.
Any time the government talked about its opposition to gay marriage or adoption, I appeared in the paper claiming outrage. I wrote furiously on the issue of inequality, calling out for social justice. I was angry and determined. I spoke with confidence. I was Gay Dave, and I was proud.
My lack of sexual experience didn’t bother me.
Seriously. I had kissed a guy. That made me Captain Gay.
I put my celibacy down to nerves. I was privately sure that one day I would summon the courage to go cruising and pick up a beautiful man. I bored Amber to death with my endless list of longings and crushes. I was still desperate for romantic intimacy, but I did little about it. The thought of approaching an actual person and flirting caused my body to shake with fear. I would find myself saying all the wrong things in front of even the most mildly attractive of men, and then I would relive my dorkiness a thousand times in my head, letting myself almost reach a panic attack before I tried to calm myself.
I made a lot of external noise to compensate for my inner turmoil. My final project as an undergraduate is a perfect example.
It started out simply enough. I would interview a bunch of parents and grown children about homosexuality, combining the material into a short play, the draft of which I would deliver to my lecturers, and it would be read aloud to my classmates. This seemed entirely suitable to Donna, although she was a little concerned that I had set myself too much work. I scoffed. I would be fine. Besides, this town needed a play like this. I was Gay Dave, after all, and it was my responsibility to lead the cause.
I had a brief meeting with a gay-health organisation in Brisbane. They applauded the project’s philosophy and happily donated three hundred dollars as sponsorship.
Three hundred dollars.
That was a budget.
This was a proper project now.
With that kind of money, I did what any gay-rights leader would do: I trashed the idea of a reading and decided to put on a full production. I would have a cast. They would have costumes. There would be a set.
But only one show? No. Three shows. And then another two shows in Brisbane. Yes. A touring production.
I would write, produce and direct the show.
Too much work?
Pffft.
I had never directed or produced anything before. Luckily, I was Gay Dave, and gay people do theatre. It’s one of their superpowers. So I wasn’t worried.
Make no mistake, the show was awful. But what it lacked in craft, experience, knowledge or narrative cohesion, it made up for in enthusiasm. I was ticking two major boxes. The first was, of course, being Gay Dave, inspirational leader to the under-experienced and confused. When people saw this play, they would say things like:
‘Hey, gay people are all right.’ ‘I was gonna bash a faggot, but now I’m not going to.’ ‘Man, I think I’ve been feeling gay, but I’ve been too scared to admit it. I’m going to go out and get a sweet dickin’.’
All of this because of me.
The second box I ticked was putting on a play, and I had figured out that that was what I really wanted to do. More than act, I wanted to write plays. So off I went to assemble a cast.
I asked my friends. Nina jumped in, although not without rolling her eyes at my ‘poetry’.
‘“The whole world is inside me, and it’s ending”,’ she read from her script. She looked up to me. ‘Really?’ I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yeah. She’s having an orgasm.’
‘So,’ she began, with slight confusion, ‘she’s not enjoying it?’
‘No! It’s brilliant! It’s her first truly liberated moment.’
‘Right. But it feels like the apocalypse?’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Yeah, it sure is, Dave,’ she said with a smirk. ‘It sure is.’
I was proud of that scene, where all four characters (two male, two female, all gay) described these beautiful sexual experiences. It was rendered as pure romance, and it was completely fake. Because, after all, I had almost no experience of a beautiful sexual experience. Nina persistently challenged me on my bullshit, but my facade was so thick at this point that her subtle protests bounced off with barely a whimper.
But with Nina’s assistance and one particularly helpful and intense rehearsal with Donna, more than a third of my material was cut and replaced. The show went on. My mum drove the cast to the performances. My parents and extended family happily attended.
Picture my sweet grandmother at an art gallery that held a dozen people in inner-north Brisbane, as a small cast yells in her face about the woes of being gay and young. She beamed with pride for me the entire time.
‘Wonderful!’ she said, hugging me after the show.
Nina’s lesbian partner in the play was a girl called Dani, a free-spirited teacher-in-training whom I had met through a friend of a friend. She took to the show enthusiastically, and gave a gorgeous performance of my flaccid script.
We topped off the season with an afterparty, the spirit of which reflected the afterparty where I had first played spin the bottle three years earlier. Gay Dave was happy. He had fulfilled his mission.
Gay Dave got very drunk and made out with Dani for quite some time in a private corner of the backyard.
Gay Dave. An experienced, confident campaigner for homosexual rights.
As if we were living a badly written sitcom, Dani and I began seeing each other in secret. If we didn’t tell other people, we wouldn’t have to admit it to ourselves. Dani wasn’t too keen to broadcast the news that she was fooling around with a gay guy. We both had reasons to keep it quiet.
Dani was short, wide-eyed, and had long strawberry-blonde hair. She was gorgeous—there was no use denying it. But it was her attitude and spirit that I was attracted to. Dani was laid-back. About everything. There was very little in life that Dani felt warranted being worried or stressed over. She was drifting through a teaching degree, but she found herself hanging out with theatre people.
Happiness came easy to Dani. Where I thought, talked, analysed, planned and worried, Dani laughed. Life was easy. Life was a game. The energy of it was irresistible to me. Her level of chaos was just the right salve for my tightly bound soul.
Besides, the physical affection was fun. And, for the time being, it appeared to come with no strings attached. It also happened slowly. Clothes tended to stay on. It was gentle. It was sneaky.
Amber was the only one who knew, and she’d just roll her eyes when she came home from uni to find Dani and me on the couch—again. Amber shrugged about the entire relationship, but I could tell she had her doubts.
‘Have fun,’ she said. ‘But be careful.’
I wasn’t sure what I needed to be careful of. All I could feel was the blissful freefall.
I felt relieved. I felt like a balloon that had been close to bursting, my skin stretched tight and void of colour, now finally exhaled, loose and full of potential once again.
Dani, somehow, understood. Perhaps not with her head but certainly with her heart. I don’t know what I gave her in those months. I couldn’t tell you why she stayed. But her affection spurred mine on, and the relationship gained momentum. It was growing out of my control. We met more and more often, and I found myself thinking about her constantly.
I soon felt the familiar sting of fear. What if this fling was not yet flung? What if Dani and I actually began a relationship?
But the question had a convenient point of resolution. I was moving to Brisbane soon, with Amber. Uni was finishing and my untidy life was being packed into my even untidier hatchback. Dani was finishing her degree too, but I drew a clear line.
We would not continue after I moved.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but the move felt like an appropriate point for me to withdraw and reassess. And so I was to drop Dani at her parents’ house for the Christmas holidays, and then continue, with my final load of boxes, to my new house in Brisbane. By my own rules, it was to be the last time Dani and I would see each other.
I had also created other neat little rules. While our layers of clothing had gradually come off, my virginity was still very much intact. That was a threshold that I was not prepared to trip over.
I was gay. Right?
I had spent the last three years building an identity based on my sexuality. To have it demolished would be disastrous.
Who was I if I wasn’t Gay Dave? Just ‘Dave’? What did that even mean?!
Crazy Drama Dave was long dead, and Gay Dave was facing death threats from a free-spirited hippie woman. I couldn’t allow this to happen. I had rules. Dani and I would end. And I would find Gay Dave alive and well in Brisbane.
The only issue was we were sharing a car for the final trip. And it was raining. Loading the last of my boxes had left us both soaking wet. We rushed into the car, our clothes squelching. The windows instantly fogged up. We both shed a few layers.
Suddenly, the car seemed very small. And Dani seemed very close. And my heart seemed to be beating very fast.
I started the car.
It was a ninety-minute drive. Just ninety minutes. That’s all I had to do. Just turn the music up and get us to Brisbane, wave her goodbye, maybe a quick kiss, and then I would go back to being the person I knew how to be.
Dani had other ideas.
And, to be honest, so did I.
‘Turn here,’ she said. We were only a few minutes from her parents’ place. ‘And here,’ she said again.
We were driving away from houses, towards a park.
‘Stop here,’ she said, and she got out of the car. She flew her hands open, welcoming the rain.
I followed her.
Around us, the trees and grass glistened a clean and shiny green. Our lips met, cold and slippery.
We found ourselves in the back of the car. It happened quickly. We still had most of our clothes on. We made a brief, clumsy attempt to find condoms. There were none.
But it happened.
My mind went into white noise.
I couldn’t think, or even feel, I was absent, forcing my eyes away from hers, facing elsewhere, immersing my head into nothing. I wanted it to happen, but my body was filled with anxiety.
It was over within a minute.
I was no longer a virgin.
The air seemed to vanish out of the car. I wasn’t sure if Dani was pleased, or disappointed, or perhaps as confused as I was. We sat in silence, the rain hammering gently on the car roof.
‘I should take you home,’ I said.
She nodded and smiled gently. ‘Yeah,’ she said.
I dropped her off at her parents’ place and drove to Amber and our neat little Brisbane home.
It should’ve been that simple, I suppose. Some part of my brain was certain that we would never see each other again.
Except we hadn’t used protection.