I attract the fascist gays. The gays who “don’t see color” but wear the rainbow. The gays who find Russia aggressive, China offensive, and Iran intolerant while they Hajj to Fire Island or Tel Aviv. The gays who want the wife, the ring, and a white picket fence cul-de-sac.

I connected the dots because of where I met my latest misadventure. When I first moved back to the IE I’d frequent Flexxx, a gay club in downtown Pomona designed to shake you down for spare change and get you shitfaced. Entry is free before 9, drag queens are on at 9:30, and drinks are half off before 10. Perfect my unemployed ass thought. I want to be gay the London way. Sweaty basements, banham keys with plastic baggies, spit traded between sets, cigarettes handed out like Haribo gummies, the fullness of the bass, lace, hands, tongues tied, the Dolls, all of it.

But this is Pomona, not London. Fullness has been flattened. Gayness is “fun,” traded on a market like a commodity, a game, for the out and proud like me it’s miserable. The hands let go, dumb fucking straggots, raisins punishing their liver not knowing how to move past their heyday. It seems when you contain your gay, the steam shoots out like the slit on a tea kettle. Hard and fast, burning everything in its wake.

I went to bounce, freely, but loose hands, lips, a vortex of, I thought my body a temple, no piss in peace. My body a game, my joy a commodity, my temple a fairground, a conquest to conquer?

A brown boy in a crisp leather jacket found me. We danced and flowed. A 21-year-old virgin sought me out from behind. Pulled away. A flurry, friends packed into a clown car and out they spilled onto the floor. Movements untrained,how do we dance to this?, they asked me. Fuck do I know? I lost the brown boy in a crisp leather jacket, and in a flurry of laces I escaped to the smoking area. The 21-year-old virgin followed me out.

He began asking me what I do or did. I gave it to him raw. UN bullshit with a side of art faggotry. His interest piqued. Turns out I was talking to the student envoy for North Korean defectors through Turning Point USA. Blah, blah, blah but someone told me recently that your network is your net worth, so I thought what the hell. I scheduled a date with him for the following week.

Fast-forward and there I was watching a Sydney Sweeney movie in theaters with a 21-year-old virgin from Menifee. Six-foot, white, green-eyed, and a former varsity water polo player. A survivor of conversion therapy and a Liberty University drop-out. Unsurprisingly, I learned that white people openly say the n-word, use blackface, and sexuality is rigidly policed by the Honor Code in a town called Lynchburg. Who could’ve guessed?

After, we pulled up to the park along the tracks and crawled into his backseat. He asked me to take his virginity. I said no. I didn’t want to have sex, but I slipped so very far down the slope—he drove so far for me I thought. Where the hell was my backbone. We made out, his hands explored and I didn’t say no. Then I did. His rage followed. You deserve to wait for the right one, settle for nothing less he ranted on his story the next day.

Sex is a currency. I used to dish it out freely. In London, I lived around the corner from a cruising bar wedged between an unassuming Indian restaurant and a realtor’s office. I buzzed a silver box every other Tuesday and fell deep into a dungeon. Swings and cinemas, semi-private rooms with saddle doors, boards with cylinders cut at waist height, men everywhere unclothed. I didn’t really care who or what, it just flowed out.

One night, I met what the King of England described as the “future of zookeeping.” Connor knew his role to be Darwinian in nature. In our lifetimes, glaciers will cease to exist alongside hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of species known and unknown. The march seems to have transformed from a slow parade to a death march, here side-by-side toward our certain demise. The Zoo, always a plaything for the lookie-loos and the human, the rational the powerful, holds a unique position in this world of absolutes. What’s his role? End-of-species care? The final dissections? What can we expect from a boy with a hyper fixation with anteaters and K-pop at the end of the world?

In the dungeon, with no expectations, he poured into me and I into him. Our energy transfer. Open, free, unassumed. Liberated, desire free, soft touch, a kindness, boundaries, membranes shared, a fragility in our embrace. Soft hair, hard ass, lips kissed everywhere. Sweetness as the swings and moans filled the air. We left together, a shwarma shared, and a kiss before he slipped onto the tube home. I knew that the next time I’d see him again would be by chance, and that’s okay.

What are we? I was asked than two years later by a man who describes himself as queer. Dangly earrings, patchwork tattoos, puppy dog eyes, and Wasian flush. Picturesque and adorable. We met on Hinge and on our first date we went to a wine bar. Every sip of his natural wine, his face gave away what he really thought. Oh my mouth! My esophagus! My stomach! My liver! My colon! The cancers! I learned then he was the spawn of doctors.

I showed him around Upland. It rubbed him the wrong way. The moonlit streets, the white people, our Masonic Temple, and the Carnegie Building was too townie. We went to the Cable Airport to watch the planes land and take-off. He didn’t care; all he wanted was me. My lips, whatever was between my legs, my chest. I wanted to see the planes, show him a piece of me, go slow. Back to his, my cock a joystick, a seed extracted, the goddess of the night carried me home. I bought myself a donut. A small death, a road never traveled, and our intimacies held and let out.

His friends are homophobic and he’s writing 50 pages on queer terror. That is using queer theory for national security. In other words, studying queers so the state can understand how to dismantle them better. Beware the adorable ones. I hope he finds his people soon.

I gave up on love a couple of weeks ago. My power is used and abused when I expect too much. If sex is the currency, let me clench my purse. I am out and proud, but the IE is hostile to those like me. The ones who find joy in the crevices and cracks, not the white-picket fences. Unafraid of families or the mobs, I’m abundant in love, a privilege. The nighttime then, the discreet, DL, straggots, the one’s at Flexxx who drink to forget and use and abuse.

Joy in every sense, I want it wide open, demanding something more, normal, threaded, beautiful, challenged. Queer love means different. Care is expansive, demands more, but I’ll wait for it to come back.

When I gave up on love, I met a poolboy behind bleachers by the train tracks. He didn’t share his face on the app nor did I. Torsos and cock. I walked behind the diamond and there he was, in grey sweatpants, a black tee, with a baseball cap. I pulled him close, back against concrete, hardness, cold, buckles at the knees, fingers interlaced, spit, oh the trains coming. We ducked behind the barricade, and the train cars lit us up. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. He hid from my gaze, took his face the other way, pulled his hat over his eyes, pushed his member up into the waistband. Darkness, silence, a bird whistled. He looked back at me, kissed me, starved. Warmth, what I’ve missed, I don’t mind the fear nor the secrets. Careful hands and soft kisses, he knows this is one-of-a-kind.

What should a boy of me demand or dream of in an empire inland?