Social Masochism.

Tuesday is Valentines Day and for whatever reason the gays really go all out for it. I stopped celebrating valentines after 8th grade until I met Mr. Man, with whom I enjoyed 5 Valentines Day celebrations. They typically consisted of dinner and yes even flowers and chocolates. Prior to receiving flowers from another guy I thought I’d never get used to it, but I must say, it is nice. So guys, as antiquated a notion as it might seem, flowers are a great way to get the desired result. Note to self.

I went to a party Saturday night and a great time. There were a lot of guys (and some girls, and some guys that acted like girls) in attendance. I met some new people, socialized with old friends and genuinely had a good time. This party was clearly a success. I am solely responsible for mixing up some cosmopolitans that would strip 100-year-old paint off of an iron bar. They provided just the right amount of social lubrication to make things interesting.

I had some interesting conversations. One in particular stuck with me. My friend made an observation that I thought was very poignant. He noticed that even though there were 50+ guys squeezed into a 500 Sq. foot condo, we all still managed to segment ourselves into distinguishable cliques. There were the facial hair rugby bears in one corner, the pretty boys who feed off each other’s compliments in another. The intellectual elitists, the “I’m too young to hang with this old crowd” and the “we all know each other from whateverwebsite.com” crowd were all represented. The thing I noticed, being a natural social tweener who can float from group to group, reinventing myself along the way, was that I enjoyed the conversations I had with everyone EXCEPT the pretty boy clan. They were cold, non responsive and genuinely boring. They seemed completely uninterested in speaking about anything of substance and were difficult to engage. While I too am guilty of associating with this demographic at different points in my life, I can honestly say that I would have never gone out of my way to discourage conversation from anyone who approached me. The really funny thing about these types of people is, they are only as strong as they are numbered. You get these guys alone outside in the day light away from their sphere of influence, and they break down quickly.

The overall takeaway from this is here: All gay men suffer from self-esteem issues. We all, at one point in our lives, realized we were different from others in a socially unacceptable way. This murdered our confidence. We spend years trying to find a normal place where we can have shared experiences with people like ourselves. When we finally do find “our community” why do we insist on creating micro social dynamics that support a social cast system similar to the one we spent years trying to escape? We are a community full of social masochists.