boyful and not at all triumphant

cous and i recently had coffee with a couple of friends. and let me tell you, there's nothing more humbling than having cafe mochas with your debutante friends. i call them "debs" because they just recently came out - and i mean that in a very gay way. well, to be accurate, they (a) "came out" to me just recently, (b) have yet to "come out" to the rest of the world, and (c) "came out" online years ago. (fact is, they've hooked men of various shapes and sizes via chatrooms. something that i've been a total bust at.)

let's call my pair of debs tom and russell.

there've been lots of talk about tom. a tsunami of rumors swirling around the place, in fact. i think everyone who knew him, at one time or another, had asked, "is tom gay?". well, yes, he was. but he wasn't flaming or fancy-pantsy or anything like that. like i said, he wasn't even out out. just one foot wedged between the closet doors.

"i'm not gay," he said, smoothening his perfectly pressed sports-shirt. "i'm not-so-straight."

so, of course, i had to ask, "so does that mean that you're not-so-gay?".

he merely laughed. let's put it this way: he has a 20-year-old hottie at his beck and call.

russell, on the other hand, had been nothing but perfectly straight that i nearly choked on my starbucks cookie when he finally told me five months ago. "you're what?!" i screeched, eyes round and mouth agape. how could my sweet little russell be gay?

"how long have you known?" i asked, dumbfounded.

"forever," he replied.

but how could that be when i knew for a fact that he boned an older woman not so long ago? and a younger woman - a friend - soon after that. "but you had sex with so-so," i sputtered.

"belly-fillers," was his answer. apparently, he didn't believe in wasting a hard-on.

so there. russell was gay. or bi, at the very least. and in a very i've-had-orgies sense, too. orgies! i actually knew someone who had participated in an orgy! a threesome i could digest. but a six-way cruise down hershey-highway? i don't know how that could even work. i mean, i get tired just thinking about it.

"did you do everybody?" i asked.

he shook his head and said, "i think i did four."

i imagined that lone boy he didn't do and felt sort of bad for him. he must've been really ugly or not-so-gifted. or both. because, to be honest, russell, unlike tom, wasn't that picky.

"and then what happened?" i asked some more.

"then nothing," he said. after he mounted four boys (and since he didn't believe in being the mountee), he just lay there, amid a sea of skin. just lay there and basked in the orgy afterglow.

it was kind of depressing that cous and i had no exciting sex stories to share. i mean, they were getting it on with jailbaits! they were having orgies! russell was even having trans-pacific phone sex! how can a couple of nice catholic girls compete with any of that?!

so there we were. two painfully-straight girls on one end, and two not-so-straight boys on the other. boys who had probably seen and committed to memory all episodes of queer as folk. tom showed us photos of his prospects, carefully catalogued in his mobile phone/pda/camera, while russell sat there, all fresh from a breaking-up-with-a-young-stud dinner at italianni's.

to the outside world, we probably looked all double-datey. we laughed. we downed coffee and shared chips. we occasionally reached out and touched each other affectionately.

but in truth, it was just us girls on a night-out.