Starf*cker: a Meme-oir by Matthew Rettenmund

avoid doing extra work, I’d done enough manual labor to lose all my baby-elephant fat. I was ready to go off to college lean, mean, and anything but the machine my isolationism had threatened to make me into before I’d been thrust into The Real World: Flint, Michigan . It’s bizarre to think that a job where I was one step above the shit-cleaners could transform me inside and out.
    You could buy almost anything at The Fair Store, but what I took from it I got for free—and I’m not even talking about that wicked Forever Krystle perfume display I spirited out under my shirt.
    A few years later, when I returned to Flint, I went to the city’s premier gay nightclub, The Copa. This place was like a little slice of NYC back in the day, including appearances by Grace Jones and Studio 54-caliber dance moves. It was toward the end of its reign by the time I’d mustered the nuts to go inside, and who did I immediately find amidst the flashing lights and throbbing Hi-NRG music but two of the guys I’d worked with at The Fair Store who I’d never known were gay.
    “Oh, most of those guys were gay,” one of them told me of the back room staff. I felt like one of the giggling girls I’d worked with watching The Haunting while not really seeing it.

Nowadays, straight guys are so open-minded they’re a six-pack of Red Bull away from going gay.
    The allure of seducing a straight guy is about as easy an itch to scratch as it is to type Craigslist.com into your browser and hit return. Whatever challenge it once held is gone, girl.
    Back when I was in high school, though, surrounded by presumably straight boys and men at every turn, it wasn’t just a fun erotic goal to try to get a straight guy into bed, it was pretty much the only conceivable way to have sex with another male. After all, who around me was gay? No one. (Well, lots of guys, according to my current Facebook, but none I knew about. in the ‘80s.)
    The first great love I felt—and it was probably less about love than it was about closet-fed lust—arrived toward the end of high school when I laid eyes on Andrew, a charismatic brat who was both an academic overachiever and a soccer jock (no one played soccer in Michigan, so I’m not sure where he found people to play it with).
    I was hooked on him from the beginning. I was so filled with a need to reason out my theory that he was gay that I bought a generic journal and began writing in it daily, titling it, “Personal Thoughts and Related Poetry on One Disturbing Theme.” My unwilting boner was said theme.
    I think that hoary title broadcasts that I figured I was heading toward becoming the Tennessee Williams of Flushing, and that my private teen-years diaries and papers would shed light on an early love. Instead, my private diaries and papers make me want to gay-bash my teenage self, they’re so soaked in melodrama and puppy love.
    The way I wrote about Andrew embarrasses me so much I just know I have to share it:
    “From the moment I first took notice of Andrew, that day in chemistry, I felt that riveting desire for him. Something about his presence was a potent stimulant. I was drawn by the dark hair, the olive complexion, his casual masculine build…I don’t remember exactly what brought him to my attention, just that while watching his flamboyant actions, his intensely charming style, I was struck by a single thought that I recall very clearly as being the simple, unspoken statement: ‘My God, this boy is gay.’”
    Except he wasn’t.
    Andrew was just a hippie in yuppie’s clothing, a fun guy with a big ego that was probably stroked by the fact that his three best male friends (of which I would eventually become one) all wanted to sleep with him. Spoiler alert: All of the best friends slept with each other in lieu of bagging Andrew.
    I filled my journal with every detail of Andrew’s life I could glean, with every observation of his words and actions. Even a convicted stalker would read this shit