The Other Man

Husbands by Austin Bunn-2

After six years living with my boyfriend, I accepted a fellowship in Louisville to write and teach while he headed to graduate school in Texas. Though I still cared for him, I didn’t want a long-distance relationship, didn’t want to pine or pretend that I would be faithful. So I moved to Kentucky a single man. “My leap year,” I thought to myself.

I met my first husband the first week. For exercise, I ran the loop in Cherokee Park, the city’s rolling, verdant sanctuary, and one morning, I got cruised by a walker, a man with a blustery Teddy Roosevelt stride and a gold wedding band. In the humidity, his damp T-shirt stuck to his chest. It looked like a breastplate of armor. We sat on a bench and he told me he’d been married for twenty years and owned a horse—his daughter’s actually. It was the kind of topic you land on when you’re in free-fall. “I’ve never been with a man before,” he said. I put my hand, slick with sweat, on his impressive thigh. “Not here,” he said, “I know too many parents.”

I gave him my telephone number. “Tomorrow,” I said.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

The next day, when he didn’t show, I was naive enough to think that he was sick or busy. For weeks, I looked for him, moving through irritation, bewilderment, and finally, a sense that I had come on too strong, that I needed to recalibrate my game for spookable Southerners or Midwesterners or wherever I was exactly. I gave up, stopped running and started yoga.

I learned quickly that my new bachelorhood came with a sharp loneliness. Soon, I circuited the city’s five gay bars, shopping for a place to feel at home. Louisville is a major regional city, the largest in the state, and a catchment area for gay men. Though two of the bars were nearly empty, the third, The Connection, was a gigantic nightclub complex with multiple themed bars and hourly drag shows playing to packed houses. I found myself most at home at Tryangles, a wood-paneled pub with an interior porch, pool tables, and music low enough for conversation. I found that Louisville was, without a doubt, a stylish, gay-friendly city. I could live here. You could too.

But I noticed that the majority of the men at the bars and clubs in town were either much younger or much older than me. At thirty-four, I felt like a category of gay men was, for the most part, missing: professionals from their mid-twenties to forties. I suspected that, as with other areas of the South (and regional cities everywhere), gay men with ambition were trying out the big city. They sowed their wild oats in Chicago or Atlanta or D.C. They came to Louisville for college and returned when they wanted to buy a house and settle. That gave the city a sense of continuity and warmth; many people you met were from here, which you couldn’t say about Los Angeles or New York. (In the four largest American cities, four out of five men who have s*x with men are not from there, according to a 2006 study in the Journal of Homosexuality. And I’d spent my twenties in New York as one of these men.) This also meant that the available men that stayed in Louisville fit four types: men newly out of the closet (one guy I knew had just finally exited his second marriage), travelers driving through, terrible spellers I couldn’t abide, and non-strivers who never wanted to leave. This may have been a harsh assessment and there were certainly exceptions. But this had been my experience. So of the stable, articulate, self-respecting men of my type, a good number turned out to be married. Nine months after my arrival, I had met and “known” more married men than gay men: a chief researcher at the public health office, the boss of an automotive business, a lawyer, a pastor, and a professor at a Christian college.

I was also late to the lessons everyone else had learned about meeting men, especially online. The word “discretion” was code for married. ALL CAPS or having no picture meant married or technologically medieval. And truthfully, if I discovered someone was married, I didn’t write him off. Every gay person had a closet and some were more spacious. Besides, in my experience in Kentucky, the percentage of husbands who read books and knew that “What u up to?” wasn’t an opener, far, far exceeded gay men. Husbands learned seduction theory. Their wives made them.

Many husbands had even cracked gay code. It was hard to distinguish one well-adjusted gay man from a husband on the down low. Husbands called themselves “bears,” “daddies,” or “uncut” tops, never “husbands.” They knew the triggers, the lingo, their niche in the market.

In November, I met one husband for a drink. His profile headline read: Athletic-Professional-Masculine—Hairy-8.5 Man Meat Clean Cut.

I didn’t know he was married, but “man meat” should have given it away. He described himself as “6'1, 210, 8.5LC, TOP, 46C, 35W,” which didn’t quite reflect the hyper man in flip-flops I met in person. Flip-flops are not really a first-date option. He wanted badly to be liked, even after I made it clear I wasn’t feeling it. When I got home, I emailed him to wish him luck. The email bounced and his profile had already vanished. A week later, it reappeared. In lower-case.

Soon enough, I was spending a lot of energy on husbands. When I lived in New York, I don’t think I’d met a one. What was it about me, or them, or here that brought us together? Many of my friends openly wondered what I was doing or what I saw in them. I started to ask myself, What was it doing to me?