who’s the man?

My boyfriend, Mike, and I both work at the same restaurant gig downtown. Nothing fancy, nothing overtly spectacular, but a quaint little spot with a considerable amount of traffic, and enough dollars to keep both of us going back. It’s where we met, in fact – the first night we crossed paths, he discovered my secret love for licking the knife after it was used to cut a piece of cheesecake – essentially, the key to my heart.

On Valentine’s Day this past year, I was working and he came down to visit. At this point, it was getting late, there was only myself and another server, Kay, out on the floor. The last few romantic stragglers had set up camp with wine and candlelight and we were prepared to wait a fortnight for them to be satisfied. The three of us began a little chat, and while our relationship was still budding, our freshly fertilized romance faced a myriad of inquisitions from Kay, and somewhere between desert and departure, she decided to pose the following question, under the never-pleasant prefix of ‘now, don’t take this the wrong way…’

“So……which one of you is the man?”

Honestly, I was floored. It was like a power outage made a victim of our restaurant, and all the peripheral noise had stopped all at once. On so many levels, I couldn’t believe what I had heard – I mean, I realized that Kay was a slightly older woman, who may not be as aware of what is and isn’t an okay question to ask a gay couple as her younger counterparts, but still – what?! Who’s the man, as in who is more masculine? Who has the bigger balls? Who gets fucked and who does the fucking? Who enjoys football more? Any of those meanings are still interpretted in the same way – she simply could not comprehend how our relationship worked. We couldn’t BOTH do man things – one of us HAD to take on the role of the woman in the house. Where to even begin?

Personally, I know how a gay couple works. Other gay couples know how gay couples work, and even gay singles know how a gay couple works, or at least, how it should or will work. There is no questioning to be had – I am a man who is attracted to another man, the end.

However, we are consistently forced to define our homosexual relationships into terms that are easier for heterosexuals to understand. We have to put it into relatable terms, make parallels, as though the logistics of a gay couple is the riddle of the sphinx. Why, under what circumstance, should any of us be required at the whim of another, to allocate pit gender roles, role play and transform our gay relationship into something it isn’t – a straight one?

Let’s break it down into simple math. A straight couple is one man and one woman, correct? A gay couple, is two men…eureka! The mystery is solved! They aren’t the same thing at all!

Now, I also realize that not all non-gays are as perplexed by this equation as my co-worker apparently was. And I’m sure that in her mind, it was a completely legitimate and honest question, which she was certainly entitled to ask. However, to the best of my knowledge, I do not own a vagina, I don’t cross-dress, nor am I in the middle of the transgendering process (because that one’s a bit of a gray area in the ‘who’s the man’ debate), and until any of those things comes to pass, I will continue to be a man who is in a loving relationship with another man.

Being gay doesn’t restructure the bare bones anatomy of a relationship. The fundamental principles of a straight couple still apply. But our genders don’t change to conform to those roles. We’re both the man. We’re both men.

The next time Kay enters a relationship, you can rest assured that I will most definitely ask her which one of them is the man.

~ by glamnesia on June 17, 2008.