Snatch Game

When I first started coming out, I made a very intentional language choice. I was not telling my friends and family that I was “gay,” but rather, “queer.”

This felt important to me, because I was not yet ready to declare an exclusive sexual attraction to cis gay men.

I had happily dated girls throughout middle and high school, and was only as a college sophomore starting to reckon with my gay desires. I was not subtracting women from my purview of possible mates, I reasoned, but adding men to the mix.

Perhaps “bisexual” would have been the more obvious choice, but at the time I was uncomfortable with the baggage of that term and its implied (though inaccurate) 50-50 split of attractions.

So, I was queer, I told myself and others. Even as men became my primary fascination, I skated through the remainder of my college years with a lingering attraction to (and occasional involvement with) the other sex.

That all came to a screeching halt after I graduated and started exclusively pursuing penis-owners for all of my romantic and sexual adventures. In fact, during the intervening decade, my behavior has hued quite neatly to the traditional definition of a gay guy, and that term has become my default descriptor.

But nothing is ever that simple. I still recognized a very, very faint whiff of attraction to women every now and then. I might see a particularly beautiful body and imagine it naked, or strain to remember what it felt like to have sex with naughty bits that were different from my own.

One day this summer, I was lounging on a naked beach with a gay friend I’ll call Roberto. We’d wasted no time playing around with each other, but during an intermission, Roberto mentioned that he also enjoyed having sex with women.

This wasn’t so unusual. Newsflash: bisexual men exist! But it still surprised me, and got the wheels turning in my head. Maybe it was time I stretch out into the roominess of the word “queer,” and rediscover the pleasures I’d forgotten long ago.

I had absolutely no clue where to start. Me, a professional faggot, seek out a woman?! The mere thought of it felt patently absurd.

When I mentioned this desire to my boyfriend he, after overcoming his own shock, suggested I might find a woman by winking at passersby in the gym. Needless to say, he would not be the right person to guide me on this side quest. 

The idea of using a dating app felt completely out of the question. I wanted sex, nothing more and nothing less. I needed a type of Grindr for heterosexuality. 

When I consulted my friend Roberto, he pointed me in a clear direction. There was an Italian website, a sort of more-modern and less-creepy CraigsList, that he often used to arrange his encounters with women.

Naturally, I made a profile. I took Roberto’s advice to butch it up and hide my own queerness: Though I could have selected “bisex” as my orientation, I chose, instead, to declare my complete heterosexuality. Doing so felt more transgressive than any blowjob or fist-fuck I’ve ever given. I was behind enemy lines, and it felt utterly taboo.