File this in the “I should know better” category.
I am an out gay man. I live in NYC. I am not into the bar scene or frequent Chelsea or the West Village. I work in a job where I deal with the general public yet would be frowned upon if I actually met someone from the general public to date. Hence I don’t go out much on dates. So I have to rely on my overactive imagination to get me through. Well, one day (or rather, many many days) of working at the same place can get to a person so it was a big deal to walk into the office one day and saw Brian. Brian did not fit into your cookie-cutter corporate office mold. He was an artist (found this out later, obviously) with the requisite tattoos, piercings and inkings, the heavy beard growth, the sexy (did you plan it) buzzcut and the goatee. He was working the phones (and working them quite well or was that just my heady interpretation?). I quickly turned to one of my Managers and said, “Who is this?”, got my introduction and I was on my way to falling very hard for a — drumroll, please but no surprise here — STRAIGHT MAN!
Well, that didn’t stop me. Brian was good at what he did (totally objective) and quickly worked his way up the ranks from hourly employee to temporary full-time employee to Supervisor to Manager, in the course of about 2 years. The more I knew about Brian, the more I fell in love with him. Okay, so he had a girlfriend (who I had not met so she was not real to me) but when he moved to Chelsea with her and started walking his pitbull down 8th Avenue I began to watch him for his reactions to his new surroundings. Like a typical straight man who is liberal, he wasn’t offended by the guys checking him out or trying to pick him up (no one tried to pick up his girlfriend making her slide down the list farther into obscurity) but he realized what it was like for a girl to get oogled by guys.
Well, I would do silly little things for Brian like make elaborate mixed tapes for his birthday, take him out to lunch to discuss “business” and pretty much acted like I was dating him. I don’t know if he ever had a clue that I was so in love with the idea of being in love with him and having him as my boyfriend (as this would clearly never happen) but when we both left our jobs I didn’t hear from him for a span of about 2 years. I recently got a nice “hey, how you’ doin’?” e-mail from him complete with attached pictures of his girlfriend (now his wife) and baby boy.
