When I look back at what I've written on this blog, I'm struck by how much is related to being gay (especially if you ignore the poetry, which is what most people think poetry is there for). Having long considered myself post-gay—i.e., it's just one part of who I am—I don't generally obsess over it. But the last post mentioned my partner, my love for AbFab, and dressing in drag!
I'm feeling sensitive because the topic I've been wanting to write about is one that you probably have to be gay to relate to. Or at least it's worse for us.
I worry that Adam and I look and dress alike. This has been a problem—in my mind, not Adam's—for years, when I bought new glasses that evidently looked like his, though the frames were darker. Friends kept asking if we had the same glasses, and Adam would chortle, because he knew that it bugged me.
The glasses made me aware of the fact that we dress similarly: We have the same coloring, and we're therefore drawn to the blue, gray, and brown clothes. We both have fairly traditional styles, leaning toward jeans, sneakers, and dress shirts. We shop at the same stores. I try to be vigilant about not matching, remembering to ask Adam what he'll be wearing, but then he'll go and change his mind.
People love to point out that we're dressed alike—it's funny, I get it—but I have zero desire to become Viktor & Rolf. If a straight couple passes by in matching sweatsuits, you think, Was Costco having a sale? But if you're gay and you look like your lover people might conclude that you're a sexual narcissist, someone who wanted to marry a mirror and settled for the next best thing. (Madonna reference!)
About a year ago, Adam decided that he could no longer go without buying new brown shoes for work. I told him he should try John Varvatos, because I had found a pair of timeless brown loafers there. I made him agree, however, not to buy the same shoes. When we got to the store, he found nothing that he liked—except, of course, the loafers I had bought. He was moaning about how he really, really needed new shoes, and since we don't work together, or even in the same neighborhood, I caved and said he could get them. I joked to the handsome clerk, "Great, now we're one step closer to dressing exactly alike."
The clerk looked us up and down, then replied drolly, "Is that your goal?"*
No! Not at all! In fact, this summer, while on a JetBlue flight to California, when the chipper flight attendant taking drink orders asked if Adam and I were twin brothers, I was visibly aghast—so much so that she apologized. It's one thing for people—our friends' young daughter, the owner of the doggy day care, waiters everywhere—not to be able to tell us apart. But twins?
Adam is adorable, so it's not that I mind looking like him. It's that I mind looking like anyone else. I love having a partner but not if it comes at the expense of losing my own identity. I suppose that's why I've always admired the wedding tradition in which each half of the couple uses a candle to jointly light a new candle, leaving the original candles burning as symbols of their own selves.
Things may be looking up. Last weekend, at the gym, I was still on the treadmill when Adam, who had been running next to me, left to lift weights. When I was finished, I went to find him, and he pointed at his shirt, then mine. We were wearing the same T-shirt, in slightly different shades of blue: souvenirs from the marine gas station on Balboa Island in California. The shirts have a huge orange-and-white Union 76 logo on the back. Adam was horrified, but my first thought was that people might think we own the gas station, or at least a boat.
* Too late, I remembered AbFab's "Death" episode, when Eddie dismissed a clerk by saying, "You only work in a shop, you know. You can drop the attitude."