A Doll's Life

Sometimes, as a gay man, one starts to feel like some sort of publicly-owned Raggedy Andy doll, to be touched and admired and spoken to with a kind of automatic familiarity that implies a history of days and nights spent sitting around the tea party table or held tightly under mounds of tightly-tucked blankets or dragged by the arm from room to room.

I was gazing lazily into the mirror the other day, watching Kiki cut my hair, when a female hairdresser - Kiki's a man - came into view and kissed Kiki and complimented me on the way my short hair suited me. Then Kiki told her I was getting married and suddenly our two-man party become a threesome and she was asking me this and that about the wedding and suggesting this and that about the wedding, and then she asked me had I seen the new wedding show on TV and I screamed YES I love Logo! but then it turned out she was talking about some other wedding show on the Style network which also sometimes has gay weddings, which excited me just as much as me giving her a heads up to Logo excited her............(pant pant).............and then Kiki told her that M. also gets his hair cut at their salon and before I knew it I had whipped out M.'s highschool yearbook photo that I keep in my wallet, and YES she knew just who he was, she'd seen him and he was cute and she could see why I'd be attracted to him and why he'd be attracted to me, and then there was some confusion about how maybe it wasn't him that she'd seen because she was thinking of a regular and M. has only been there once, but anyways she still thought he was cute.

By that point, Kiki was just about done, so we finished up with a little just-the-two-of-us smalltalk while Girl Hairdresser started on her own client. I got up, gave Kiki a peck and a hug goodbye, gave Girl Hairdresser a little wave, and before I knew it she'd reached her hand out and I thought, Well okay we'll shake on it, but then she was pulling me towards her and then she was kissing me and winking at me and wishing me good luck with the wedding and I staggered dazedly over to the counter to pay, feeling slightly violated and trying to figure out where that darn leak in my Personal Space Bubble was coming from.

And this is, more or less, the way it goes. Gay Boy meets New Girl. New Girl showers loads of attention on Gay Boy, Gay Boy feels loved and accepted, Gay Boy responds with conversations and experiences and hobbies and interests that New Girl can relate to, and before Gay Boy knows it, New Girl has inserted Fabulous! into their lexicon and Gay Boy becomes confidante to all of New Girl's boyfriend and husband woes, and New Girl adopts a certain intense familiarity into her gaze that says Yes, you understand me, I can depend on you, we are friends for life and soon I will be inviting you for overnights and bringing you shopping with me and when you get dirty, Mama will just throw you in with the laundry and sprinkle you with some Johnson's Baby Powder and you will be just like new.

It's happened with girls I've met at school, it's happened with girls I've met at work, it's happened with girls I've met at parties and dinners and hair salons. And it is absolutely a two-way street; were I to put out my Do Not Disturb sign, or not respond to the attention, or not ask emotionally-pointed and open-ended questions, that's where it would end. But it feels good to have things in common to talk about, and it feels good to know that Someone Cares, and it feels good to feel like you have something to offer in the way of comfort or reassurance or kindred soulship. And while you're busy feeling all these good-feeling things, somehow you fail to notice when The Line Has Been Crossed and then it's too late, because she's gone and mucked up your face with a marker or a crayon or some grape jelly and it's too late to return you now, and besides you're too nice to say anything once you've noticed the change in her eyes, that mixture of love and adoration and desperation that says Please don't leave me I love you and I'm putting all the other dolls in a box in the back of my closet and I'll bring you to school and on car-trips and in the bathtub and I'll tell you all my secrets and we'll develop our own private language and if I ever lose you I think I'll die so please don't leave me I love you. Or something along those lines.

In short, girls love gay men. And gay men love girls. And some gay men like myself are lucky enough to find a large double-handful of the best girl friends I could ever hope to find, and it's me who doesn't know what I'd do without them.

But there are always the crazies who watch the Queer Eye and go to the gay bars and love the gay men and try to find in a Gay Best Friend what they're not finding in their girlfriends or boyfriends or husbands, and somewhere along the line it became acceptable or even de rigeur to have a gay best friend, or even to treat all gay men like best friends, and to bypass the standard practices inherent in developing social relationships and Jump Right In. And that's not what the Girl Hairdresser was doing, but we gay men start to develop an instinct for this particular problem, and I can assure you that, given a little more time or a change in venue, she would have had me marked and tagged and I would know the ins-and-outs of her relationship with her crummy boyfriend and everything would be fabulous and I would be typing this from my lonely perch atop her powdery pink four-poster, loving it and hating it and debating it all at the same time.