Status Updates From Boyfriends of Dorothy (The ...

they liked our gay boyfriends, ... because they liked what our gay boyfriends brought out in us: self-confidence, outrageousness, unrestrained laughter.

And in New York, miracle of miracles, you could find a straight man who was a little big gay, which my gay boyfriends and I referred to with the acronym ALBG.

By rejecting gay men, mocking them, they were rejecting and mocking me.

Wayne Koestenbaum: "the third rail" - a resting place where it was possible to be straight and unstraight at the same time

"Friends of Dorothy," ... code for gay. (It had to do with "The Wizard of Oz" and Judy Garland worship.)

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In time, the "gay boyfriend" would become a recognized trope in pop culture thanks to shows like "Sex and the City" and "Will & Grace."

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My gay boyfriends were like girlfriends, only guys ... But with sex out of the equation, they could see us and celebrate us for who we were.

They had to celebrate femininity, to worship it - to not just want girls.

I had squandered it by trying to change it.

"It doesn't become you at all. Here, for goodness' sake, let me fix it up." The tone is confiding, conspiratorial, and, though I didn't know it at the time, queeny.

I didn't know anyone gay, it seemed. Unless you counted Bugs Bunny. Bugs was my first gay boyfriend. I just wouldn't know it for a while.

town of Holland. Early every May, when the endless winter was finally over ... annual Tulip Time Festival arrived. ... never-ending, riotously colored tulips - five million blooms is the town's most recent claim.

Despite Grand Rapids' social conservatism, or perhaps in response to it, the city has cultivated a thriving underground queer community.

There was no hell in Judaism, J's dad explained to me one evening as the Shabbat candles burned down.

Once you feel like an outsider, everything becomes a confirmation of that fact.

... you couldn't throw a ball without hitting a "house of worship"

devout and poky place in a nation undergoing seismic social changes, earning it the nickname "Little Jerusalem," "the City of Churches," and in an especially inspired bit of waggishness, "GRusalem."

Grand Rapids, MI ... The sky and the ground were the same unrelenting gray every day from November until May (at least it felt that way), with seemingly endless snow and sleet due to something called "the lake effect," weather blown to us from nearby Lae Michigan.

The more myself I was—loud, wisecracking, moody, opinionated—the more he seemed to love me.

Straight guys liked me best in jeans and sweaters and Wayfarers. The message was: Tone. It. Down. But there was nothing relaxing for me about toning it down, visually or otherwise. Relaxing was being as out there as you wanted, without fear of judgment or reprisal. Relaxing was letting go of the worry—of going to hell, of being judged and found wanting, of being too little or too much.

My gay boyfriends were like girlfriends, only guys, but guys without the accreted, distorting layers of straightness and all that came with it—bravado, bluster, brusqueness, BS. Like straight men, they had a horror of many things feminine—our periods especially. But with sex out of the equation, they could see us and celebrate us for who we were.

Unlike straight men, G and L didn’t care if their girlfriends were overweight or gawky or plain. They cared whether you were clever, whether you got how special it was to be part of the relationships between straight women and gay men. If that ecosystem was where you wanted to live, if you saw its value, you were golden.

I had made the biggest mistake a girl who loves a gay man can make: not understanding and accepting him as he is. I had tried to twist his admiration and warmth and affection for me into something else. I had squandered it by trying to change it. It was something I’d never do again.