Most men, reader, are suckers. Exhibit A—yours truly! Simp of all simps, I’m a poof ungainfully magnetized to straight guys.

Before I substantiate my original claim with other choice examples, let me sketch my dilemma for you. Plainly said, the qualities that thrill me—swagger, derring-do, coolheaded competence, big muscles, aggression—always seem more pronounced in men who prefer women. To quote another fag on the trouble with me, “You’re like a diabetic with a sweet tooth.”

Having squandered my youth hanging around red-blooded goofballs like a lovesick cumsock, I came to discover the surprising power that women have over men. And I would like to share some of my notes with you.

 

Take Anthony for instance.

During the Obama years, I matriculated at one or another land-grant university in New England—pick your favorite—where I met Anthony: a brooding, rugbying mix of Armenian and Sicilian. Neither heritage stunted his height. With straight, black hair flowing to his broad shoulders, a full beard fleecing his square jaw, and heavy brows looming over his dark eyes—he lumbered into the cafeteria one morning, bulging in his gym rags, and intimidated me on first sight.

Now and again, I’d eyeball Anthony from afar in the dining hall, typically as he embarked on a heaping bowl of hardboiled eggs. Once, his sleeveless bulk happened to be crowding a tiny table beside the only exit, his tricep all but clotheslining passersby. I had to clench my fist on my way out, not to rake a careless knuckle across the hot globe of his nearest shoulder. (“Oh, my bad!”)

His saturnine front belied great conviviality. By chance, Housing had thrown Anthony in with a techie from the Theater Department. At the time I was trying, and failing, to entrap a dashing actor with a girlfriend back home, so I lollygagged a lot with the histrionic crowd. Through his lucky roommate, I got introduced to this sweet monster and his private habits, e.g., how he hulked about their dormitory in the nude at all times.

Sometime after our acquaintance, we all fetched up at dinner together and his roomie asked him, with a boogery grin, to tell the story about how he broke a leg days away from senior prom. Anthony’s beard ruffled in a reluctant scowl at the suggestion, but then he dished the details anyway.

I forget which leggy fracture this was—whether it was the time he got flung against a boatside from a jerky jet-ski, or the time a steel-toed boot smashed his shin during an impromptu soccer match, or the time he hotdogged off a balcony and snapped his ankle. A ragdoll Hercules, Anthony had shattered every bone in that wonderful body at least once. Even his handsome face had been surgically reconstructed, courtesy of a powerful headbutt from a visiting rugby team.

I pedestalled him as an honorbound Spartan who, unlike me, enjoyed blood. After I nearly got the snot beat out of me defusing a violent boy-girl fight in my dorm hall with only quick-witted flimflam, my first thought was to find Anthony and ask if I’d been brave enough. (I didn’t follow through, though. There wasn’t a scratch on me; I was just shook and wanted a carnivorous hunk to coddle me.) Prom night, however, revealed a new side of Anthony.

His high school sweetheart was furious with him over the injury, but finally conceded Anthony was in poor shape to cut a rug.

She agreed, at first, to spend prom night as a couple at his house instead, where the broken galoot could keep his leg up and snore through a rom-com of her choice; but erelong that itchy-heeled vixen was bellyaching about missing out on quality time with her girlfriends. And it would be humiliating, she said, to go alone. When Anthony’s own mama began needling him to reconsider the bind he put the poor thing in, he finally settled the issue.

“And that’s why she’s your ex,” I concluded prematurely.

Au contraire: that reckoning came later! No, at the last minute, Anthony got refitted for another tux (having just returned one), packed a small cooler of ice for the limo ride, and slow-danced with that spoiled princess awkwardly, painfully, on a pair of crutches. “She enjoyed herself,” he added, almost beaming.

I was flabbergasted; although I might’ve guessed, given his taste for pain, that he’d engage in frivolous agonies to appease some rib! Not even at my twinkiest could I have pulled that one over on a he-man half Anthony’s size.

 

Earl was tall, blond, strong and simple, and I’d carried a torch for him since our pimple days at Podunk High, back when he had curtained hair and braces. I remember sitting around homeroom and making him laugh so hard once, he doubled over too fast and smacked his face on his desk. I thought it was cute.

Brains you can take or leave, but Earl made me feel safe—a sentiment which his college hobby, weightlifting, only deepened. When a poet I met at New England U gave a reading in an unfamiliar part of the city, I invited Earl, though he preferred vidya to verse, to tag along as my support muscle. I chickened out, however, and cancelled our plans at the last minute, lest I got hooked on having big straight Earl’s protection which I knew I couldn’t keep for myself.

The summer he was at his buffest (210lbs, or so he gloated), he was also at his busiest. Earl juggled two or three jobs to pay his way for a set of wheels, his urban digs, and school; he did “Tough Mudders” and other tetrathlon terrors; he attended concerts, festivals, and an endless list of weddings.

Additionally, he’d started dating a strapping little tomboy, who vented her latent girlishness by playing dolly with my easygoing fag stag. She decked Earl out like a teacup terrier in smart, tight clothes, and kept him as manicured as a retiree’s front lawn.

I bitterly regretted the scant availability of such mouthwatering eye candy, but managed, at last, to score a lunch date. However, from the moment he picked me up in his jeep (and an adorable navy-blue button-up with teensy white spots), Earl seemed like a spacier cadet than usual. Distracted, fidgety and worse, inattentive to me.

He hadn’t bunked on campus at his school and envied the hijinks of student life that I got caught up in, so I used to love spinning yarns for him, like “the Only Straight Actor” or “Anthony’s Third Leg,” but even more gripping tales than these need a stimulable audience.

Dropping me off after two coffees failed to revive him, Earl explained that he’d been up all night visiting his squeeze. Wryly, I asked whether congrats were in order, which caused him to crack a smile, but he added it was no booty call. And while she had blow up his phone, urgently texting “come over, come over” at quarter-to-one, it hadn’t been a burglar alarm either. She’d just wanted some handholding through the wee hours.

“She was upset because the night was dark,” Earl said, presumably spoofing on her word choice.

“Does she have night terrors?”

“Not really.”

“Well, shit!” I huffed. “The nights are always dark.” By that time, I had already muddled through more than my fair share of dark, lonely, fretful nights and without a warm gorilla on call, like Earl, to tuck me in. I was incensed this amateur nyctophobe could beckon him over, not even put out, and still get the white glove treatment, sapping his stamina and dampening my afternoon.

Headline: “Boy likes girl; girl approves. (Faggot confused.)”

 

Jocko and I grew up in the same neighborhood. Through our senior year at Podunk High, we worked nights together filming dry-as-dust school committee meetings in a desolate cafeteria. He took to driving like a big-rig savant; I panicked if I looked at my keys, so we carpooled to-and-fro in his elderly pickup.

I had the hots for Jocko because, in short, he was a beefy, ferociously competitive Scorpio with the steely brain of a math ace. His exes, a couple of whom I matched him with, deplored Jocko for being a horny, suffocating lummox—whereas I, too effete to finish my homework, sorely craved a vigorous, micromanaging daddy to keep me on task. So, graduation being around the corner like a sure escape hatch, I made a pass at him during one of our starry homebound trips.

He was flattered but not interested (of course); although my failed come-on did occasion a rare moment of intimacy between us. Jocko pulled over beside a dead park and started in on a heart-to-heart with me, cataloging his secret, bloodthirsty fantasies about success.

It didn’t disturb me that Jocko named people he wanted to rip limb from limb to get ahead. That he wanted to hear skulls crack as he climbed yet higher on his dispatched rivals. That he wanted to amass strength and power to get his way, always. I would’ve vocally approved, but I couldn’t steady my breath.

After pulling myself together, I still struggled to make a request, a bold one. I wanted to feel his bicep. We were alone, and Jocko was, I knew, too full of himself at that moment to refuse showing off, even to me. Semi-disgusted, he rolled up his sleeve and offer me a flexed lump, colored like a small pumpkin by a streetlight. There were fitter guys at school—Earl was one—but nobody had done this for me before. Giving it just one quick squeeze, I almost fainted.

We fell out of touch soon thereafter. I tried to reconnect in college, once, by post. Jocko replied a month later with sheets of chicken scratch about being busy, written on the back of graded exam papers. I threw out his letter without reading more than a paragraph. I had deigned, at least, to write mine on loose leaf.

You’d think, with ambition like his, Jocko would be leading a fascist coup in South America, running a violent crime ring in Eastern Europe, or masterminding superweapons for the DOD. Instead, I heard through the grapevine that Jocko had chased some pussy into a “my wife’s son” situation, and was now part of a husband-wife doula duo.

I was the wrong choice for Jocko because, in addition to being male, I would’ve cultivated his killer instincts for my pleasure, rather than smother them like an unwanted fire under the milky heft of female coziness. I suppose that’s what he really wanted, to be domesticated. Plenty of men call that the “good ending.”

 

Nowadays, I work a cushy front-desk job with potted plants and piped-in yacht rock, handling stampedes of the public through an office lobby.

As always, I’m draw to big, powerful bodies and dominant personalities among the male clientele. Shooting the breeze with these bruisers, I see the same mechanics grinding away like clockwork. Neither strength nor assertiveness avails any macho man against the merest woman—doubly so, if he’s sweet on her.

I’m not sure who I envy more, the woman for her ability to attract the man, or the man for his occasional luck to enjoy what he’s attracted to. I’m still single. (You’re not surprised, are you?)

Masculinity is, it seems, a convenient gizmo or pretty trinket, a gift men carry from their mothers to other women.