Unpaid Advertisement: Other People’s Boyfriends
HE WORKS OUT, a lot. No visible body fat, but not like hungry-looking: like 1992 Marky Mark. Strength, capacity, Calvin Klein masculinity. When he picked me up from the airport after a trip in May, I walked out of baggage claim and he magically appeared, tall and smiling and not in the car waiting but already outside it, walking toward me with perfect timing and arms open for an eager, nourishing hug. Kinder than we’re taught men who look like him need to be. He picked up my bags—naturally—and put them in a car I suppose he owns, or at least pays for with his advanced-degree job, which I’ve heard he likes but honestly I don’t know that much about it because: He is not my boyfriend.
It says a lot about my own historical motivations for having boyfriends that as all of this happened, the first thought I had, amid the swirl of stepping out of an airport, was: Why does anybody even have boyfriends when they can use other people’s?
I mean “use” in the most respectful way here. We all need help sometimes. I love this man, but as I know him mostly as the boyfriend of my friend Ryan, our interactions have been limited and thoroughly uncomplicated. After he dropped me off at Ryan’s house, I told Ryan’s housemates, another lovely gay couple, about my thought. They laughed. But they themselves were happily putting me up for the night in their beautiful Seattle home. Later, one of them—another other person’s boyfriend!—offered me a bunch of free tech support for this very website without my even asking, the same unsolicited way the ride from the airport had materialized.
As I thanked this sweet, generous, tech-savvy man profusely while he was completing the work, he said the same thing he had said the multiple times he’d made me elaborate dinners, once when I was a total stranger coming over for the first time: Happy to do it.
Happy to do it, my pleasure, I’d be happy to do it again.
You might have better taste in boyfriends than I often had. Let’s be honest: You probably do. Much of my boyfriend/husband time has been spent in dynamics with people who say they’ll do it but then don’t do it, or do it, but resentfully. I subconsciously picked these, my past therapists would say, because I was reconfirming my belief that I don’t deserve nice things, let alone people who will be nice to me.
Gabriel Mac
As I write this now, I feel fantastic. Steady but soft, refreshed, energized by a shower I took earlier at my friend Sky’s house, where the guest bathroom is cleaner than a nice hotel’s and has more—and better—amenities. As I stood soaking up hot water and steam, my laundry spinning in his sexy washer-dryer set (who’s with me that there’s nothing sexier than a shiny washer-dryer set!) downstairs, I thought: I can’t believe I have access to these things without having to make the money to buy them.
And this guy isn’t even my boyfriend.
Sky has several paramours. None of them are me. And I did once make that kind of money, overworking until Burnout, which is the diagnosis that should actually be on all my paperwork. I once almost used that money to buy a less-radical house, before I burned the whole life I was living and its attendant lies (I’M not exhausted!) down. Instead, I spent it creating two homes: First, this body, which makes it so that I’m home no matter where I am. And then this house, which is also my car, and which cost $16,000.
I’m back in Washington, where I somehow conjured a community in a place I ran to, knowing no one, two years ago. Tomorrow, I’m heading to the house of some friends who are married. One of them—someone else’s spouse—is clearing brush, in addition to her million homesteading and child-raising activities, so that I can make my way down their driveway in my house, which is small for a house (says some people; my whole-ass lofted guest bed ⬇️ begs to differ) but big for a car.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
They’re not just welcoming but making way for me, actively, literally. When I first arrived here, I ended up at their family’s Thanksgiving through an old friend who’s from the area, and it’s my favorite holiday gathering—full of warm, queer joy—ever.
“You don’t need another husband,” my friend Kelley, she of the brush-clearing, said to me a few months ago. We were sitting outside, late at night, in a clearing between cedars, where a slew of rural queer performance artists had just taken the outdoor stage. In the car on the way home, I objected to her comment, saying I’d never had my gay marriage. Neither of my husbands had known they were married to a man. And neither of them had been trans, which my third and final husband would definitely be.
She apologized and said she was joking. She asked if she got veto power over my choice, though, which I granted, laughing. But while it’s my right—my duty?—to have the gayest marriage now, one between two magical trans fags, parts of me want it, while part of me wonders if though I can, I really should. If I really would, if my needs were met in ways I never could have imagined among chosen friends and chosen family, as they’re starting to be now.
Last night I had a dream that I was with this beautiful man whom I felt I needed to marry, worked up and spun out with the urgency of it, and then suddenly we were standing, nude, back-to-back, and I exhaled a deep, relaxed sigh. “Aren’t you glad we can just be pals now that we’re not getting married?” I asked him.
Tonight, I walked into my house with a bag of hot laundry fresh out of Sky’s dryer. “It smells so good in here!” I said to myself. I’d earlier put on a big pot of black bean soup, thick with garlic. I felt so in love with my life in that moment that the feeling seemed like it would blow open my chest.
The other day, I texted Ryan, the boyfriend of the new friend who picked me up at the airport, to ask if he could do some Car Daddy things for me, little mechanical chores I feel daunted by. I don’t know if I’ll just keep benefiting from other people’s boyfriends in lieu of my own, but if not, I’ll certainly use them as the models for my next one.
“Yes,” Ryan texted me back. “I would love to :)”
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