I met Greg at his condo last Wednesday before our dinner date. As he spent hours in front of a
mirror slathering himself with some type of Dorian Gray potion in preparation for our supper at the I-Hop, I reclined on his couch and flipped through a magazine filled with pictures of men in their underpants.
Greg has the decency to keep his hard-core porn well-hidden from fragile lesbian eyes. But he
considers the underpants magazine acceptable coffee table material because it has self-help articles scattered among the photos of men who have what appear to be cocker spaniels stuffed in their Jockeys.
I have many gay men friends and I am not easily shocked by their antics. But there was one article in the underpants magazine that caused me to scream in disbelief. I ran into Greg's bedroom and shook the magazine in his face.
"Does this really happen?" I asked, showing him an article titled "The Benefits of Having Sex with Your Friends."
"Yeah, all the time," he said with a shrug. In fact, he told me, a friend had come to his place the night before to watch a movie. The movie was bad, they were bored, and it was too early to go to the bars. So they killed some time by having sex.
"Don't lesbians have sex with their friends?" he asked innocently.
I clutched my chest and collapsed on his bed. But then I remembered it was the same bed where he had had sex the night before with his friend. So I jumped up and wiped their sex germs off me.
"Don't even joke about that," I said with a shudder. And then I told him what happened when two of my friends slept together five years ago.
Leslie and Donna had been friends for 10 years when they slept together. They got really drunk one night and landed in bed with a thud. The next morning neither one could even remember whether they had had sex. But, just in case, they called all their friends together for a healing circle.
They told us that they were not attracted to each other and they would never sleep together again. And, they assured us, they would enter therapy immediately. "But that doesn't change the fact that we have betrayed you all by sexualizing our friendship," Donna said.
The healing circle nodded heartily in agreement. Several people voiced concern that Donna and Leslie's behavior would put us all at risk of having spontaneous sex together. This was quickly followed by accusations about past
inter-friendship flirtations.
One of my friends accused me of having batted my eyes at her one soggy evening at a wine bar. I patiently explained that after a couple glasses of Merlot I'd flirt with a goat. That touched off a
discussion about whether I should be allowed unsupervised visits with any of my friends' pets.
After several hours of hand-
wringing and recriminations, it was agreed that none of us could be friends anymore. In addition, we all needed therapy, both as a group and individually.
"What happened to Leslie and Donna?" Greg asked.
"They ended their friendship that night, too," I said, sadly. "But," I added brightly, "we all still go to therapy together."
