To Be or Not To Be... Myself

By Adam Kuhn
Posted Tuesday, July 10, 2007

I hope that age will never have an effect on the excitement that comes with planning a date on a Friday night. The anticipation is never boring, even though it’s the same routine we’ve gone through many, many times. The thoughts that go through our heads are all the same, “He’s really cute. Ooh, he wants to meet up for coffee. What if it goes really well? What if this becomes something?”

I was checking my usual websites for new messages, updates, and other mundane things when I came across a friend request on Facebook. He was looking to meet some new people in the area and stumbled across my profile. After seeing his name and a few pictures, another thought jumped into the cycle… “What if you’ve already been with him?”

I wasn’t exactly sure how to respond to this. I remembered him, but he failed to recognize me. Granted, I did look much different when we had our fling. As far as he knew, I was just another single gay guy in New Haven. And although I could’ve taken advantage of this, I decided to come clean and refresh his memory.

It was about two years ago. A group of friends and I were celebrating my last night in Connecticut before I packed up and headed out to my new life in Pittsburgh. We went out to a restaurant on the Post Road and decided to really make a night of it.

Maybe it was the occasion, maybe it was the drinks I had before going out, but something gave me the balls to make a pass at the devilishly good-looking host. I told the waitress that I thought he was hot, and if she could go say “hi” for me. A minute later, she comes back with a slip of paper and says “he says ‘hi’, too.” On the slip of paper was his name and phone number.

Throughout the night, we gave each other the I want you eyes when he would pass by. Before we left, him and I talked and arranged to meet after his shift. Unfortunately, I didn’t have somewhere to take him back to. I was staying at a friend’s house.

Long story short, we hooked up that night, and it was awful. It wasn’t because of him. It was more because of the fact that it was in a friend’s guest bed. Not exactly my idea of comfortable. The next day I felt even worse about it. It was awkward, and certainly not the night I intended for him. I led him back to the highway before meeting up with some friends for breakfast. I never saw him again.

After digesting the reality that his friend request was sitting in my mailbox, I put serious thought into whether or not I should tell him who I was. I knew that the right thing to do would be to tell him immediately, but something in the back of my mind feared that he never got past that awful, awful night.

As it turned out, honesty was not the best policy. On Thursday, he fed me a line about how he shouldn’t be meeting new people, and just got out of a relationship, and bla bla bla. The entire week, I was racking my brain over whether or not it was because I told him who I was. The first few messages back and forth were fine. It was when I mentioned that we knew each other when things headed south.

Would it have been that bad if I hadn’t told him? Would it have been that life-changing if he happened to remember later on, and it just happened to slip my mind all that time? In reality, don’t we all sometimes lie about who we are to get what we want? Or hide some certain part of ourselves to avoid unnecessary trouble?

Friday came and went and we never met up. Although I was pissed that he was the kind of person who would blow me off over some stupid hook-up a million years ago, I was even more upset with myself for not taking advantage of the situation. I could’ve had loads of fun…and this column would’ve been so much more interesting.

Was it really that big of a moral question? What would the harm be in wearing the mask for just a little while? In the gay world, don’t we all sometimes play the role of the faceless hook-up?

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