Then, with Latinx men who were recent immigrants to the United States, I was too American. When I dated Latinx men who didn’t speak Spanish or had fairer complexions, I got the feeling they were using me to prove something about their own identities, as if they were playing Seven Degrees of Separation from Sofia Vergara and I was a critical link. Either they felt a little too orchestrated (“I love your brown body against mine,” a man told me once on our second date, like we were a matching skirt and blouse), or there were other strange power dynamics that put me on edge. I’d dated other Latinx men, but there was always something off about those relationships.
“With every other Latin guy I’ve dated there’s been something, I don’t know, missing, but this feels so right.” “I’ve never been with anyone like you,” he’d said as he reached for our gold chains coiled together on my nightstand, where we’d flung them because the crosses kept getting tangled while he was on top of me. Just the night before, we’d been lying in my bed after a second round of sex.
To think before I did something I’d regret.īut the more I thought about it, the less what he was telling me made sense.
Was I supposed to accept the apology? Or did the situation call for me to react like a crazy woman in a telenovela, throw my drink in his face and call him a maldito sin vergüenza? I took a long sip of water and told myself to be chill. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” Diego said, staring into our plate of fifteen-dollar mashed eggplant. After getting to know each of us, it turned out he liked both. He figured he’d keep going on dates with the two of us while he decided who he liked more. What happened, Diego explained, is that he started seeing me the same week he started seeing him. Did he really need to have my boyfriend, too? He probably owned an island somewhere, or at least a Segway. It’s C, that one famous gay guy everyone likes, a fact about him which, coupled with his whiteness, felt like undeniable proof of his greed. Of course I couldn’t ask Diego to break it off. I wasn’t even sure if I was allowed to be mad. Not, Oh no, my boyfriend, who I think I love, is dating someone else.īut, Oh no, I love my boyfriend’s lover.Ĭ might as well have been Rihanna, he was so universally beloved. His lover was so famous that when Diego told me his name (I’ll call him C), my first thought was, Oh no, I love that guy. In his mid-fifties, he was one of those gay celebrities who is somehow good at everything, with a career spanning from Broadway to television and film. Now, though, hearing his lover-but-not-quite-lover’s name, our future together, and the charm that came with it, vanished. Our hunger had the potential to be a charming anecdote later, when we made it far enough in our respective careers that we could look back and laugh, as if it were something that belonged to other people in faraway lives. Struggling artists (him: a painter, me: a writer). Up until that second, the two of us only having enough money to split an appetizer portion of baba ganoush had seemed kind of romantic.
I assume this generous bit of insight into their arrangement was in response to the dazed look in my eyes, since I hadn’t yet said a word. “We’re just affectionate,” Diego clarified. If there were a word for the phase in a relationship between when you begin dating and start using the more-serious terminology-boyfriend, partner, situation-ship-that is what we were.īut technically, Diego’s lover was not his “lover” either, because they did not have sex. We were out to dinner at a fancy Mediterranean restaurant when my boyfriend Diego told me about his famous lover.Īt the risk of sounding desperate, Diego was not technically my “boyfriend,” though we’d seen each other every single day for the previous two months, from our first date at the gay bar a block from my old apartment in Sunset Park, till the day before, when he helped me move to Bed-Stuy, on the other end of Brooklyn.