Welcome to the fourth and final part of Savage Love’s very special “How Sleaze Is Lived in America” series, Sleazy Anonymous Gay Meetings. (I would like to thank the Pulitzer Prize committee in advance for their consideration.) This week we hear from gay men who met their true loves in bathhouses, in porn video booths, at jerk-off parties, and in toilets at the late, great Penn Station. But before we begin this week’s column, I would like to thank my friend, colleague, and former college roommate, Ann Landers. It was Ann’s series of we-met-cute columns that inspired my series of we-met-sleazy columns. This one’s for you, Ann!
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I met my lover in the men’s room at Penn Station. The sordid details aren’t really suited for print, but you may find them amusing. He stood next to me doing the usual thing men did in such times and places, and got himself off standing there. I assumed he was some sleazy type, and to blow his mind I said, “Gee, that was a terrible waste.” I was all of 25 at the time; he was 41. It turned out we caught the same train and exchanged phone numbers. Before the year was out we were together permanently. The relationship lasted five years until he died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving me a widower at age 30. –Penn Station Memories
For me, what really was so great about this sleazy encounter was that it settled the question of my sexual identity: I was gay. Within two months, I outed myself to family and friends and began losing 15 pounds of self-loathing/self-pitying fat. We waited about 18 months before offically moving in together. Nearly seven years later, we still lust after one another. –Dial XXX for Love
I met my lover 12 years ago in a video booth in a gay porno store. He was 33, and I was all of 17. I was an aspiring musician, he was an aspiring partner in a law firm. I blew him, he blew me, he took me home, and I never left. Twelve years later I am a successful musician playing for a philharmonic orchestra and my lover is a senior partner at his firm. We have both fathered two wonderful boys who are half brothers thanks to the good offices of our best lesbian friend. The grandmothers are over the moon with joy and fight over whose turn it is to help us out. Our dear bike-dyke birth mother has visitation rights and lives in the basement apartment of our town house.
