i'm not much of a dancer, but my girlfriend is.

i read a book that said that all gay people dance in public, which bothered me somewhat. i don't dance in public. i've taken dance classes, and i know every move to every ABBA song ever written, but i'm certainly not going to dance in front of a bunch of strangers. i always thought that the message that this sent to the rest of the world was simple and clear: i'm shy, or even i'm afraid to make an ass of myself in front of people. but all this time, perhaps everyone else reads the message as something more like: i'm not really gay, no, even though you might think i am, i'm clearly not, because i'm not dancing.

the book was even written by a gay man, so i can't just curse those pesky straight people and pretend that the whole thing is one grand stereotype (which it is, but some stereotypes have a basis in truth!) and a culmination of sheer oppression. i ran through my mental list of all of the gay people i knew, and to the last, they dance in public. and i know a lot of gay people. hundreds, if not thousands. seriously. but the one thing that sets me apart from the rest of them is this: every last one of them dances in public, regardless of whether or not they can dance well. hell, i've seen some horrible dancing in my day, and a great deal of it was by well-meaning gay people. but at least they got out there. at least they danced, as if to brazenly tell the world that they couldn't care about their idiotic standards and social pressure. they were out and proud, and damn it, they're going to dance anywhere they darn well please.

but i still don't dance.

and in retrospect, i wonder if this is perhaps the cause of no small amount of undue tension in my life. perhaps this is why men grow strangely attached to me, no matter how many times i voice my preference for women. it's like they don't believe me. and perhaps this is why men approach me in bookstores or libraries or on a dance floor with what i can only assume is an attempt at conversation, but usually more closely resembles an off-putting statement showing a total lack of insight into what i happen to be doing, or, more importantly, who i am. once i was standing in an unnamed corporate bookstore reading a copy of the new ellen degeneres book, wearing doc martens with rainbow shoelaces and wearing a soccer jersey, and it happened. the slow glance around the corner. the approach, subtle at first, as though they're really looking for a book in the russian history section, then the contact. i see this happening a mile away. sometimes i run and get coffee and try to hide behind magazine racks, all the while sporadically blinded by flashbacks from Jaws.

and the problem, really, is that i'm too nice, and that i'll usually talk to people for a while if they seem particularly pathetic and desperate, all the while searching for an exit, and populating my conversation with comments like "that's really amazing, have i mentioned that i'm gay?" no one ever seems to believe me, though, and i know well enough not to attempt conversations about sports or cars or hardware or anything at all remotely stereotypical, because i'm quickly made out to be a complete fraud. i have a stunning lack of passion for all things mechanical, though i can talk for hours about flowers and cooking and animal rights. for these reasons, i try to avoid talking to strange men at all, because apparently, unless i'm dancing down the aisles of the bookstore while i'm trying to read, i just won't be sending the right message.