The 2000s Made Me Gay by Grace Perry

Author:Grace Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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If eighth grade was the straightest year of my life, my junior year of college might’ve been my gayest. I had yet to understand how queerness exists as an entity unto itself, and felt the only way to validate my existence was by having a girlfriend. The other larger and louder part of me really wanted to have sex on a regular basis. Whatever the impetus, I started my third year of college with Olympic levels of determination to make a girl fall in love with me.

I met Ella at a pre-Paris dinner. We were both doing our school’s semester abroad program in the French capital, and at that dinner, I decided I wanted her to love me. I instantly had a crush: she was tall (my height, even!), a dancer, with big, brown doe eyes. She wore 90 percent ModCloth and studied English. Her French was very good. I could always spot her across campus in her bulky, green over-ear headphones, likely listening to the Decemberists or Bright Eyes. This was the girl, I decided, who would teach me how to be in love. We bonded on a TGV to the Loire Valley in early January, over both knowing a large portion of Nicki Minaj’s “Monster” verse. After a highly tactical footsie campaign I rolled out over the course of two weeks, magic happened: we got drunk and made out. It’s strange, looking back, that I don’t remember the first time we kissed.

We started kissing semiregularly (not on the métro). Ella hadn’t been with a girl before, so we kept the whole thing under wraps. We’d stay out late at bars near the Bastille, then head back to our host families, and sneak up to her chambre de bonne, a little room on the seventh floor separate from her family’s third floor apartment. But gayer than actually making out with a girl was the Gchatting. Neither of us had smartphones in France, and we had to pay for every text we sent, so we chatted on Gmail whenever our fingers found a keyboard. We’d start out making plans for what to do in Paris (“yo. assiette au fromage, rue mouffetard.”), or about classwork, or what we missed about home (“ALL I WANT IS MEXICAN FOOD”). Then most conversations would slip into the stuff of newfangled, adolescent intimacy:

it’s like. you know when you realize your parents aren’t superhumans? like, they’re just people doing their best, but they suck sometimes. in the same way we suck sometimes. not sucking monumentally, just sucking the normal level. it’s just that.

I was shocked she wanted to chat me back, but there she was, each night, chatting me back. A codependency was forged within a month, intimacy at warp speed, the rate at which all my college friendships seemed to move. Considering how little romantic experience I had, I was floored that a girl I’d found cute instantly upon meeting her wanted anything to do with me. That had never happened before. Because

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