“He’s gay, you know,” Bonnie said.
We were sitting on stools at a then trendy, now long-gone bar on Melrose, surrounded by Amstel Light bottles and cigarette smoke, and I’d just confessed that the guy she’d introduced me to a few moments earlier had made me feel like I’d been struck by the love-at-?rst-sight lightning bolt.
Of course, I’d felt such bolts before. I was twenty-?ve years old at the time and I couldn’t fathom relationships built on trust and mutual compromise; I saw only fables or romantic comedies, Cinderella’s prince or the lead actor rushing toward his one true love at the ninety-minute mark. I had no interest in what would happen post-happily-ever-after: Love, I was convinced, happened in a lust-?lled instant, and there was no mistaking it for anything else.
“Really?” I gasped.
“Really. And not just gay—very gay.”
While I nodded at Bonnie, Brian and I caught eyes again and gazed at each other the way only two people who are dying to tear each other’s clothes off can. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Bonnie, making my way across the room to Brian’s side.
“Oh, my God, Bonnie just told me,” I blurted, knowing I didn’t need to finish the sentence. I felt absolutely confident that the lightning bolt hadn’t only hit me—from the moment Bonnie had introduced us, Brian and I hadn’t taken our eyes off each other. The news about his sexual orientation felt worse than disappointing; it actually seemed intrusive, like it was infringing on the course nature wanted us to take. “Is it true?”
Brian nodded but continued to look at me in a way that I can only describe as deeply heterosexual. “It is—I mean, I always have been. But maybe—I don’t know…”
That opening, combined with the sight of his sparkling hazel eyes and perfect cheekbones, was enough for me. “I’m buying us shots,” I announced, fully confident that my bar order was the only thing we needed to get us to the next step and erase any notions he’d had before this point about his sexuality.
I know all about falling for gay guys. Since college, it had been my way of swooning over unavailable people without having to get involved with married men, and it’s safe to say that in the ensuing five years, I’d been attracted to more than my fair share of guys who preferred guys. My previous biggest crush in this arena had been on Martin, a tall, spectacular British boy I met during my junior year in Cambridge, when we were in a play together. Everyone in the play—the entire cast of straight women and gay men—was in love with Martin. Not only was he charming, hilarious, and beautiful, he also didn’t seem distinctly oriented one way or the other. Finally, at the cast party, I’d had enough of unrequited love so I confessed my feelings to him. And then Martin—charming, hilarious, beautiful, and, as it turned out, gay—told me that I had actually helped him to come to terms with his sexual orientation because, subtle though I’d thought my crush had been, Martin had been well aware of it, and when he compared the attraction he felt for me with his attraction to a short Asian guy whom he didn’t think was as attractive as me, I lost. (Whether or not this was true, it was a brilliant rejection on Martin’s part, as I walked away with my ego more than intact.)
But this was different. With Martin, there had been signs. He had loved Bananarama. (I’d justified that as a British thing.) He wore pink. (It looked good on him, I told myself.) He was in a musical with only straight women and gay men. (You can’t label someone just because of his circumstances, I’d thought.) Though Brian was, in fact, out, he also happened to be sartorially straight, dressed in a button-down shirt and gray slacks, basic black, nondesigner shoes, and no product in his hair. Plus, there was the matter of the eye contact we kept having—not to mention that he seemed far more interested in cornering me for one-on-one conversations than the gay men I’d met before, who would start off talking to me alone but then trot me over to their friends like I was something they’d found outside and wanted to display in show-and-tell, usually urging me to be “fierce” and funny.
At the end of the night, I had all the confirmation I needed. “I can’t believe it, but Brian is into you, too,” Bonnie said, shaking her head. “This is just too bizarre.”
With that, I went up to Brian to say good-bye and he asked if we could go on a date the next night. I nodded, giddy, and we kissed good night—on the lips, in the bar, with seemingly no worries over who might see. What kind of a gay guy does that?
I figured the conversion process was more than halfway through.
When I was getting ready for Brian to pick me up the next night, I found myself more excited than I’d ever been for a date before. Perhaps it was my desire for thrilling, dramatic, romantic-comedy love, but there was something fabulously intense about an attraction so deep that it penetrated the standard definitions of sexual orientation. The notion of a date with a regular old straight guy, who wouldn’t have to sacrifice or defy anything to go out with me, seemed downright dull in comparison.
At dinner, Brian and I wasted no time in psychoanalyzing his past. Over steak and red wine, Brian told me all about how his older brother had stolen his teenage girlfriend away from him. Brian had been devastated and had found himself obsessing over thoughts of his brother and the girl together, and especially the thoughts of the two of them in bed. And then—this part’s a little vague, as I think we were well into our second bottle—he started obsessing over his brother sexually. He knew it was incestuous and wrong and horrible, but it felt better than obsessing over wanting to kill his brother for stealing the girl away from him. Soon after, he hooked up with his first guy.
I listened sympathetically as I poured him more wine. “My God,” I said, feeling as I imagined Freud must have when he first coined the word hysteria, “You’re not gay—it’s just that a traumatic event made you think you were gay.”
Brian shrugged, and I leaned in so that our faces were inches away from each other. “Maybe I’m bisexual,” he said.
I was willing to accept that for the moment. After all, this transition back to straightness might be slow for my new boyfriend.
I nodded and he kissed me—a real, passionate, entirely straight kiss.
After dinner, we went to a bar across the street and though it wasn’t a gay bar, the minute we walked in, we ran into two gay guys we both knew. One of them, Matt, was decidedly hostile to me, even though he’d been quite friendly when I’d met him a few months earlier and he’d been hitting on one of my gay male friends. When Brian went to the bathroom, Matt turned to me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
“What are you talking about? You mean, with Brian?”
“Of course I mean with Brian. What kind of game do you think you’re playing?” With that, Matt got up in my face (though he was a few inches shorter than me, so he was really more up in my neck).
“We’re just hanging out, nothing to get worked up about,” I said. Even though in my heart I imagined that Brian and I were setting new standards of what love could be, I knew Matt wouldn’t make an appropriate confidant. Actually I felt angry over his attitude. Shouldn’t I be the one concerned with whether or not Brian was playing games with me? I was doing what I’d always done: going out with a man. Brian was the one betraying his group, and while I was personally thrilled with Brian’s decision, I didn’t appreciate Matt treating me like I was some wanton woman out to trap gay guys in my tangled web of heterosexuality.
When Brian came back from the bathroom and Matt went off to smoke, I told him what had happened. He shook his head. “We used to date,” he said of Matt. I should have figured; Matt probably wouldn’t be the last of Brian’s exes to have a problem with us.
Brian and I went back to my apartment, where I opened a bottle of wine and we both lit cigarettes. After we were done smoking, we started kissing. As we kissed, I started to move Brian toward my bedroom, but when we got to the door, he suddenly stiffened. “I don’t feel comfortable doing anything more,” he said.
While this was the first time I’d heard a guy say anything remotely like this, I was even less prepared for my reaction. “Why?” I asked, feeling like he was suddenly backing out on the courageous and important journey we were taking together.
“Look,” he snapped, showing me for the first time shades of a less-than-perfect personality, “that’s all I want to do. If you have a problem with it, I suggest you go to the bathroom and masturbate.”
“Stop,” I said, kissing his neck. “No pressure.” Brian calmed down, and after kissing for a while, we cuddled and I was able to erase from my mind the notion of my being someone who puts pressure on men in bed. After a while, we just lay there trading cigarettes and sad stories about our respective dysfunctional families and the times we’d been in love or thought we’d been in love, doing the postcoital thing without any coitus. When he described his utter confusion in the face of romantic relationships, it seemed like he was stealing dialogue from my own inner script, and the conversation felt more intimate than anything that had transpired thus far.
I fell asleep with Brian spooning me and dreamt about being in Washington, D.C. I couldn’t remember any of the specifics in the morning—just that it somehow felt, as dreams sometimes can, deeply meaningful. When Brian woke up, I told him I’d dreamt about our nation’s capital, and he mentioned that he’d been born there. That’s when I came to the conclusion that I’d been working toward since the moment Brian had first caught my eye in the bar two nights earlier: We were soul mates and had been together in previous lifetimes. Given my fondness for storybook love and my well-established history of spontaneous passion—my third date with an ex was, essentially, a move from San Francisco to Los Angeles to live with him—this seemed the only possible explanation for our unlikely and illogical connection. When I shared these thoughts with Brian, though, he only smiled warily.
Over breakfast at the café across the street, Brian took a deep breath and gave me the apologetic look I realized I’d been dreading from the beginning. “I think you’re fantastic,” he said, his eyes intensely fixated on his over-easy eggs. “But I have to tell you: I really think I’m gay.”
“But…but…,” I sputtered, unwilling to give up on this fantasy so quickly. “What about what you were saying about being bisexual?”
“I know I said that,” he said, smiling his perfect pearly whites, his beautiful mouth making this rejection that much harder to take. “But after last night, I think I realized that it’s not true. I’m just gay.”
“But you’re attracted to me—you said it! A few times!” Horrifyingly, I found myself on the verge of tears.
“I know,” he said, sipping his latte. “And I think you’re very attractive. But I just can’t do this.”
That’s when I realized that there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot I could do. While I felt positive that what he was saying couldn’t possibly be true, a part of me also knew this was not a battle worth fighting. How could I accuse someone of being wrong about how he felt when our individual feelings, by their very definition, have to be correct?
Later that day, I stopped at a spiritual bookstore in West Hollywood that I’d passed many times and barely noticed. They sold the usual collection of crystals, affirmations for inner children, and books about creating your own destiny. I was looking for some comfort, some explanation, some confirmation that what I’d experienced with Brian was as real and important as I thought it was. I saw the book I’d subconsciously been seeking: Only Love Is Real: A Story of Soulmates Reunited by Brian Weiss, M.D. That the author’s first name was the same as my potential soul mate’s was all the impetus I needed to buy the book.
It had been a crazy few days and I’d slept probably a total of about seven hours over the past couple of nights. But I stayed wide awake that day, riveted by every word of my new book, even though I’d never been one for self-help or spiritual books of any kind before. It explained that not everyone was comfortable with the notion of previous lifetimes, let alone the concept of meeting and falling in love with the same person over and over again. Brian will come around, I thought, as I underlined and dog-eared passages and pages that I found significant. I brought the book along to dinner that night with Bonnie, certain she would support my exciting new discoveries.
But she, as logical and wise about love as I was dramatic and superficial, just shook her head. “Anna, you’re going on no sleep, ranting about how you’ve fallen in love with a gay guy, clutching this crazy book. I’m worried about you.”
I wanted to shake my head right back at her, but hearing her summarize my behavior brought just the tiniest bit of perspective back. I put the book back in my purse and willed myself to talk about something besides Brian over dinner.
I wish I could tell you that Brian came around and we were able to go on our journey hand in hand, while teaching the world not to be so hung up on labels like gay and straight. It would be wonderful to report that the other Brian was right and my Brian and I had ended up as together in this lifetime as we had been in the previous few. But the truth is that Brian and I didn’t speak again until we ran into each other a few months later, when he glanced at me with embarrassment—the kind of look I’d imagine a straight guy might give a gay guy he accidentally ended up in bed with one night when he was feeling experimental. “I’m so sorry for getting you all mixed up in my confusion,” he said. “I was going through a rough time then.”
A rough time? His confusion? I had so many questions I wanted to ask, but my ego and pride—not to mention my suspicion that Brian probably wouldn’t have any answers—kept me from doing anything but smiling kindly. “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.”
That night, I tossed Only Love Is Real in the trash, letting go of both Brians at once as a sign of my commitment to finding a love beyond the dramatic, you-must-be-my-soul-mate kind. The real story, after all, begins only after the credits roll.