When I was in college, my professors warned us from opening papers with grandiose blanket statements like: The world is enormous. There are billions of people on this earth, doing a million different things at once. Or, we are all extremely interconnected despite being in such a large
space. And while my professors would have cringed at my opening, I stick by it.
We are all extremely interconnected.
I’m sure you’ve experienced it. Your new boss used to golf with your uncle when they both worked for that marketing company for a few years outside of college. Your best friend from grade school shows up as a mutual friend for that hottie you hooked up with last weekend. The list goes on. The world is tiny, but with gays and lesbians, it gets even smaller.
It seems, sometimes, that this community is more like a web than anything else; it’s intricately woven, overlapping and crossing over the river and through the woods. It’s sturdy, and takes a lot more than a strong wind to blow it away. But above all, it’s sticky, and sometimes lingers even when we forcibly pry ourselves from it.
The gay scene can seem kind of like a big high school where everyone knows your name and where you sit at lunch (and who you’re sleeping with). When you’re continuously visiting with the same friends, and going through the same motions, we all know who to expect to see certain faces on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. We know who we’re going to bump into at Pride in the Street.
But six degrees of separation gets a whole lot worse than that when you factor in sex, relationships, and the drama that follows. It seems like, these days, no self-respecting gay woman can come around without someone knowing her for some reason of interconnectedness. She’s your ex’s ex, the one she always cried and woe’d about, who you hated by proxy. Or she’s the one who got away, who’s dating your best friend’s lesbian twin. I’m sure everyone has heard of the “my ex left me for the girl I cheated on her with” or something equally as wild.
To prove a point, a few friends of mine were drinking during a rainy day on vacation at the condo. We were bored, couldn’t beach it, and decided to get a little creative. Two of them volunteered to go first, and for the sake of this article, their names have been changed. The chart started off like this: Two names and a sloppy little line between them.
After a few beers jogged everyone’s memory, the chart quickly grew to:
And then, after a few more drinks was:
Amanda and Maria couldn’t really look at each other afterward.
Cue the cesspool jokes. (How funny are they?) I mean, they’re true. If you think about the girls you’ve slept with, who have slept with other girls, on other girls, on other girls. That’s not really all
that funny at all. It makes you feel like you may need a shower, in hydrochloric acid.
I’m certainly not judging. My name had its fair share of lines and swatches to women who I’d known or could be linked to in one stroke of the pen or less. What I took from it, though, was
how easily connections are made and broken, but how much they actually remain in this community.
Sticky, indeed.
