“Are you Trying not to get laid?”

Damn it. Sometimes I wish people would start rumours about my sexual orientation.When I first started college, my friends and I would always hang out together and poke fun at each other. Two of the common staples involved the hidden gayness of every guy and the promiscuity of all of our collective mothers.

I, being as good at taking verbal abuse as I am at giving it, was always the subject of the random gay joke. I’d do things that were random or odd and my friend Fernie would say “Jeez, are you Trying not to get laid?”

For the first few semesters, these jokes were commonplace and we’d all laugh at them, though I would secretly resent them. Just because I wasn’t trying to get every girl, I thought, didn’t mean that I was gay. Not that I’d expect anyone (with the possible exception of Clay Aiken) to understand.

Now, though, looking back, I realize that it was just us messing around and having fun. And the reason that people made fun of me, apart from being perenially single, was that I was such an easy target. They made fun of me because it seemed like a possibility, but they all knew it wasn’t. After all, if they thought that they were really offending me, they wouldn’t joke about it.

Then.. the jokes all stopped..

Suddenly, it all seemed so plausible. And that scared me more than anything else. I tried to liven up the situation by joking about myself, but that just made things worse. And I realized then that the joke was on me.

Nobody wants to joke about something that could be true. I mean, wasn’t that the reason we stopped joking about Fernie’s mother?

Damn it. Sometimes I wish people would start rumours about my sexual orientation.When I first started college, my friends and I would always hang out together and poke fun at each other. Two of the common staples involved the hidden gayness of every guy and the promiscuity of all of our collective mothers. I, being…