Born that Way

My date and I were headed to a new restaurant on Church Street that had gotten good reviews. To get there we had to walk by one of Nashville's few gay nightclubs, and as we passed, the front door suddenly flew open to let two guys leave. Through the open door we could see a female impersonator on stage, dressed like Madonna.

My date looked up at me. "I don't understand. Why do they want to do that?"

Instantly, my thoughts flashed back to Mickey and Beth.

Twenty-four Months Ago: Brooklyn

"I hate the bar scene!" I exclaimed. Another quest for female companionship had just ended in failure.

Mickey just laughed, but I was serious.

I had been in the SoHo bar less than an hour when some drunken girl had turned abruptly and spilled two steins of beer all over my shirt and pants. She apologized incoherently and the bartender lent me a clean towel, but it was no use. There was nothing for me to do except call it an early night and head back to my apartment.

It was so demeaning having to ride the subway in that condition. No one would sit near me; they must have thought I was a derelict who had pissed himself. I could hardly stand the smell myself.

When I finally reached my stop, I saw a lot of sidelong glances in the station. People who ride the subway won't look at you, at least not directly, but I was still aware of the attention I was drawing. I just hoped no one I knew happened to be around. It's very rare to see someone you know in New York, but I figured it would be just my luck to do so tonight.

When I finally got to my apartment, I had a hard time getting my keys out of my sodden pockets. Mickey must have heard me because the door suddenly opened and he stood there, filling the entryway. "Well, haven't we had a party!" he exclaimed amusedly. I didn't really appreciate his humor, but it doesn't pay to mouth off to a six-foot-five guy, even if he is a drag queen.

I had moved to the Big Apple eighteen months ago, fresh out of engineering school. I'd gotten my master's degree in computer sciences with a specialty in security systems. Thanks to some unknown but benign deity, I landed my dream job with Google straight out of E-school. Not only did they offer me an amazing starting salary, but they also threw in a relocation to New York City from Nashville, my home town.

My classmates were highly envious, and I felt pretty good about my coup as well, at least until I started looking for a place to live. I'd assumed that I'd be able to rent a nice apartment in Manhattan on my new salary. When I began checking the listings, I found my assumption was correct -- if I was willing to share a place with five other people! I actually checked out a few of the listings I could afford. The best one I saw offered a bedroom the size of a small walk-in closet. The worst – well, I won't even try to describe it, but you can find a description in Dante's Divine Comedy by checking in Inferno. Suffice it to say that after a couple of exploratory trips, all I wanted to do was to hide in my hotel room. This boy was in culture shock.

"You're going about it all wrong," my colleagues at Google advised me. "You can forget about having your own place – you can't afford it. And you can forget about living in Manhattan unless you're willing to live in a high crime area."

"You need to look in the other boroughs. Try Brooklyn -- that's where all the young professionals are. You'll still have to have roommates, but at least not so many that you'll have trouble learning their names. The place to start is Craigslist."

And so that's how I wound up walking down a Brooklyn street a mile from the nearest subway stop, looking for an address. The street was lined with charming old brownstones, each with a stoop out front, all shaded by mature sycamore trees. But I'd been warned that I'd find nothing there; the yuppies had bought them all up and were busily rehabbing them, and they were being resold at premium prices. I could have bought a mansion in Nashville for what one of these remodeled brownstones was going for.

I turned the corner onto a commercial street and nearly missed the address. Right next to a neighborhood restaurant was a plain doorway opening onto the street. The number painted over it had faded with time; I had to double back to find it. Once I did, I walked down a long hallway that led to a stairwell. The apartment I was looking for was on the second floor.

The listing sounded nice and the rent was high but affordable. When I'd replied to the email account with the listing, I was given an appointment to view the place and meet the tenants: Mickey and Beth. I wondered if they were a couple, but the listing said three bedrooms.

When I knocked on the door, I saw an eye peer at me through the peephole before the door opened to reveal a slim, attractive young woman wearing a skirt over a leotard. "Hmm," I thought, "this might not be so bad."

"Are you Peter Morrison?" she asked brusquely.

"Yes, I'm Peter," I replied, "and you must be Beth. I'm here to see about the apartment for rent."

She frowned slightly when I spoke and I wondered if my southern accent had put her off, but she merely motioned for me to come in. I started to ask her a question, but she waved me off. "You need to talk to Mickey."

We emerged from the short hallway into a decent-sized living area. Seated on the sofa was a man I assumed was Mickey. As Beth and I came in, he rose – and kept rising! He had to be six foot five -- even in the high-ceilinged room he was a towering figure.

I was apprehensive. If he were ill-tempered or hard to get along with, he could make for a daunting apartment mate. But I relaxed as he politely began to show me around, pointing out the various attributes of the place. And it was nice, nicer than anything I'd seen to date. I guess the unprepossessing entrance must have scared away the developers and kept the rent down. In any case, I liked the place.

I was even happier when I saw the sleeping arrangements. The apartment had originally had two bedrooms, but the larger of the two had been divided into two smaller rooms. To my surprise, Mickey and Beth wanted me to take the larger bedroom. The reason for their generosity became clear when they explained what my share of the rent would be: 60% of the total. Nevertheless, I could afford it and this looked like a real possibility, the first I'd seen.

When we returned to the living area, however, I learned that my decision was not necessarily the important one. The two of them proceeded to quiz me about my job, my background, my interests and my lifestyle. I answered their questions patiently, but in truth it felt more like I was being interviewed for membership in some exclusive club.

After another twenty minutes, Mickey suddenly stood up and began to pace. Even though he was on the other side of the room, it still felt like he was towering over me. "You seem like a nice enough guy," he said. "I just have one more question: are you gay?"

"What?" I stuttered. "No, of course not." I wondered what I had done to give him that impression.

"Oh," he said. "That's too bad. Beth and I are."

I looked at the two of them in surprise. This man who looked like he might have played football and the graceful young woman who looked like a dancer were gay?

Then I noticed that they were both staring at me, obviously waiting for my reaction. I realized that if I wanted to live in this apartment, my next words would be crucial.

"I'm not gay," I repeated, "but I hope you won't hold that against me."

They looked at each other; then, Mickey burst out in a laugh and Beth gave an amused smile.

"Okay," he said, "I guess you can be our token straight tenant."

After that, we all relaxed and they welcomed me into their little household.

It turned out that I had been right about Beth: she was a dancer. Of course, that wasn't how she earned a living; her steady job was as a waitress at an upscale Brooklyn restaurant. During the day she'd spend long hours at a dance studio or going to cattle calls for Broadway musicals. She'd gotten a few chorus line parts, but they weren't lucrative enough to pay the rent.

But the bigger surprise was that Mickey was a dancer too, except that he danced at a club as a female impersonator. I went to see him a couple of times, and there was something about this giant man in make-up, a dress and heels that was simultaneously hilarious and compelling. He had a regular weekend gig at a Greenwich Village club; during the day he was a Starbucks barista.

I soon realized that despite the grilling I received when I came to look at their apartment, the two of them were desperate for an apartment mate, especially one able to pay over half the rent.

And so we became comfortable with one another. I was soon inured to seeing Mickey in lipstick and eye shadow. And if Beth occasionally had a female visitor who spent the night, I politely ignored her in the mornings when I was fixing my breakfast.

As for me, I think I became a cross between a pet and a zoo animal as far as Beth and Mickey were concerned. I'm exaggerating, of course, but they were genuinely fascinated by me for several reasons. First, I was straight. The last two roommates they'd had had been gay females, so having a straight male was a bit of a novelty. Added to that was the fact that I was a native Southerner, a creature they'd seen on television but never encountered in real life. My Southern accent was a constant source of amusement to the two of them.

All in all, it was a learning experience for the three of us.

Working at Google was also a learning experience. The place was staffed with highly intelligent people teeming with energy and ideas. I'd thought I was pretty smart when I got out of engineering school, but I quickly found out I was just one of the crowd at Google.

My first few months there, I felt like an imposter. I didn't know the people, I didn't know the procedures, and I felt like I was running at the back of the herd trying to catch up with everyone else. But gradually I began to contribute to the team to which I'd been assigned, and after six months I thought I just might make it.

One of my requirements in my new job was to travel periodically to company headquarters in California. At first it was exhilarating to visit the Google headquarters in Mountain View, but after several trips, the novelty quickly wore off. A direct flight from JFK to San Jose takes about six and a half hours. With the prevailing winds at your tail, the return flight usually only takes about five hours, but you lose three hours because of time zones, so by the time you've made the final approach over Jamaica Bay, it's usually very late. They still expect you in the office by nine the next morning.

One result of all this was that my love life suffered. Or at least it would have suffered if I had had a love life.

The stereotype of an engineer is a geeky dork who's just a little anal-compulsive. I'd like to think I'm the exception that proves the rule. It's not that I was voted "Most Outgoing" on campus, but I was certainly socially active during my undergraduate years, or at least as active as I could be and still get top grades. I hadn't found my soul mate, but I was actively engaged in looking for her.

All that stopped in May of my senior year. My parents were driving on the interstate to my graduation when a drunk lost control of his car, crossed the median and hit them head on. They were killed instantly. At the age of twenty-one, I was suddenly on my own in the world.

I had already been accepted to graduate school in engineering, but there was no way I could have enrolled that fall. Instead, I spent the next nine months in a daze, handling funeral arrangements, attending the trial of the drunken driver, who miraculously survived, settling my parents' affairs, and mourning. Other than occasional invitations to dinner from sympathetic friends of my parents, socializing dropped off my radar screen.

MIT was very understanding; they held my slot until the following year, when I was finally able to get my act together. By then I had sold the family home and closed the Nashville chapter of my life. I would miss my friends and familiar surroundings, but I was glad to put some distance between me and the sad memories my home town held. I was off to Cambridge.

At MIT I buried myself in my studies, only rarely emerging to grab a beer with classmates. And since the ratio of male to female engineers was woefully unbalanced, I found few opportunities for dating.

By the time I graduated, I was more than ready to resume socializing, and I hoped that moving to New York would enable me to do just that. The city was teeming with attractive young women, so I'd heard, and I figured my prospects were good. I figured wrong.

That's not to say there weren't plenty of available women, they just weren't the kind I was looking for. For starters, many of them were older than me, often ten to twenty years older. I had no problem with older women in principle, but the primary characteristic of the ones I met was an aura of urgency. They were looking for a potential husband, and they didn't want to waste any time. I often got invited to share their beds, which was fine, but the after-sex conversations usually revolved about my plans for the future, my thoughts about children, and other awkward questions I wasn't ready to answer.

Of course in addition to the too-eager-to-get-hitched set, there were also plenty of women my age. Unfortunately, a large percentage of them that I met appeared to be well on their way to becoming alcoholics. The women I encountered in bars were often halfway to intoxication by the time I struck up a conversation. Those I asked out seemed to need a couple of stiff drinks before they could make relax. Parties just seemed to be an opportunity for them to get stinking drunk. My run-in with the drunken woman in SoHo who gave me a beer bath was the last straw.

Complaining about one's love life to a gay drag queen might sound like a waste of time, but Mickey and I had become friends, so when I got home early that evening and changed my clothes, he patiently listened as I poured out my frustrations.

When I finally paused for breath, he shook his head. "You're going about this all wrong, dude," he said. "If you keep trying to meet women in bars, the only thing you'll have in common is alcohol."

Grabbing my arm, he led me into his bedroom to the tiny desk where his computer sat. "Here's what you need to try," he said, typing a URL into the browser. Up popped a website entitled "EyeContact".

"A computer dating service?" I asked dubiously. "You've got to be kidding."

"No, man, you've got it all wrong," Mickey assured me. "Sure, a lot of services are pretty lame, but this one's different. I know some of the guys who work there."

I looked at him skeptically.

"Hey," he protested, "not every gay guy is an interior decorator. We've got some computer jocks too."

Ultimately, I let Mickey bully me into trying it. "Hell," I thought, "it couldn't be any worse than what I've been going through lately."

Mickey was right about this service being different. The first difference I noticed was the cost. The initial fee for a one-year membership was a lot steeper than I'd expected.

"What kind of a rip-off is this?" I protested to my hulking friend.

"Don't you get it?" he asked. "This is an up-market site. Their fees are intentionally set high to keep out the 'hit-and-run' type daters."

"Yeah, well that's a lot to pay for a service I've never even seen advertised," I shot back.

"Exactly," he said smugly, "they're not targeting the mass market, they're aiming for a more exclusive clientele."

Maybe I was tired, or maybe his arguments actually made a little sense. Whatever the case, I filled in my credit card information and hit Enter, hoping I hadn't just thrown my money away.

The next screen that popped up was a questionnaire for me to complete. But where other services ask for your description of the ideal woman – as if any of us really knows that until we see it -- EyeContact asked questions about me, my background, my work, my interests. I'd taken some psychological assessments before, and these questions seemed similar in nature.

As I worked on the seemingly endless questionnaire, Beth wandered into the room and began looking at my answers over my shoulder. "That's about what I expected," she muttered archly.

I wondered which response she disapproved of, but since Beth seemed to disapprove of males in general, it was hard to tell. In any case, when I reached the bottom of the screen and hit Enter, I suddenly realized that I had finished.

The next requirement was a photo. I didn't have any photos of myself around, but Beth disappeared into her room and returned with a digital camera. She messed with my hair a little, adjusted a few lampshades to improve the lighting, and snapped off a few shots.

As she looked through her efforts, I tried to peer over her shoulder, but she fended me off. "Well," I demanded, "how do I look?"

"Almost human," she snapped.

Nevertheless, she downloaded one of the shots to my computer, and when I looked at it, I thought it wasn't half bad. Then I uploaded it to be included in my EyeContact profile.

An instruction box popped up to prompt me to save my profile. When I looked at him quizzically, Mickey said, "That way, in the future you'll be able to review your answers and make changes if you want." That made sense, so I saved a copy to my hard drive.

"Now what happens?" I asked.

"Just wait," Mickey advised. "This is where it gets cool."

A minute or two later, the screen suddenly displayed profiles of three women. Each had a headshot photo with a brief description below it. My eyes widened: all three were very attractive, and a quick scan of their profiles indicated that they might actually be interesting to meet.

The bottom half of the screen instructed me to review the profile of each of the women and then to rate them on the basis of several criteria including physical appearance, common interests and overall attractiveness. I clicked on the first one – this was going to be fun.

As I did my ratings, I could hear Mickey and Beth whispering behind me. I also heard a few snickers.

When I had completed all three, the screen asked me to rank each woman in terms of datability: "Tell us which one you would most like to ask out."

Damn," I thought, "all three of them look way better than most of the women I've met lately." But I dutifully reviewed each to be sure of my preferences.

When I'd finally ranked them in 1-2-3 order, I heard Beth speak up behind me. "Told you! Pay up, buster." Mickey sheepishly fished in his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill, which he grudgingly handed over to her.

"How do you do that?" he asked her. "You're not only gay, you're not even the same sex."

Beth just smiled serenely.

While this little interplay was going on, I was watching the screen to see what would happen next. Nothing did. I turned back to Mickey.

"So what's the deal: how do I contact her? When do I get her number?" I asked.

"You don't," he said with a grin. "Those are just models; they're not 'real.'"

Before I could get upset, Mickey pointed me back to the monitor. A new screen had a message for me.

Thank you for completing the initial screening process. Within 24 hours or less, EyeContact will provide you with profiles of three members who best fit your tastes and interests based on the information you have provided. This time, however, you will receive contact information for all three. Please feel free to contact any, all or none of them, as you prefer. EyeContact will continue to update and refine your profile based on your selections in order to find the ideal match for you. Thank you for choosing EyeContact.

"That's it?" I demanded, swiveling the chair to face Mickey. "No lists, no photo galleries? I just wait to see who they pick out for me?"