Georgetown is a spooky place, with Gothic buildings lurching over graveyards and old cobblestone streets lit by lantern light. It’s particularly eerie in the fall, when the darkness sets in earlier, and the rustle of leaves and shadows of barren trees suggest something sinister lurking around the corner.
It was this spookiness that made Georgetown a perfect setting for The Exorcist, which was written by a graduate, William Peter Blatty. His time on the Hilltop sparked his fascination with the dark Catholic rite.
When I was at Georgetown, students would jog up and down the legendary Exorcist steps, which are made of narrow stone and incredibly steep. In the movie, a priest gets thrown to his death down them.
Jogging anywhere, including on those scary steps, is terrifying, and the thought of doing so chilled me to the bone. There was a liquor store at the bottom of the steps, though, so I did take semi-frequent, careful walks up and down them to buy kegs for parties.
When fall came around, I looked forward to the annual screening of the movie on Healy Lawn, as well as the traditional performance of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” by one of our school’s dance troupes, Groove Theory. And Halloween parties, of course. One year, I dressed as Thurston Howell III. Another, I remember two of my blacked-out friends showing up at my townhouse incoherent, clutching big black dildos. (“Dick in a Box” was big that year.)
The most terrifying thing about Georgetown when I was there, in the mid-aughts, was its proximity to the ongoing horror show that was the George W. Bush administration and the Republican Party, which held both houses of Congress. Georgetown was a hub for DC power players, who lived in its red brick townhouses and shared gossip and made deals at neighborhood hotspots like Café Milano and Lutèce.
There was a cheap Chinese restaurant perched across from Café Milano, Hunan Peking, where my friend Elle and I would eat egg drop soup and sesame chicken and watch the political figures come and go.
We saw Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld get swept into black cars and driven away. We saw Bill O’Reilly trying to hail a cab. We saw Condi checking her BlackBerry. One time, we even saw Joe and Hadassah Lieberman on date night. I know he’s not technically a Republican, but I mark that sighting as the most frightening of all.
The president’s nephew, Pierce Bush (who looks mighty like Alfred E. Neuman, the kid from the cover of Mad magazine), was a classmate of ours, and W.’s daughters were regulars at a Georgetown bar called Smith Point. It was a preppy place owned by a homophobic douchebag who was also a classmate of ours. I didn’t go there often, but I did drop in a few times to chug gin and tonics and count the popped collars. I mostly followed what went on there through this social media site, Late Night Shots.
Late Night Shots was an allegedly “exclusive” social network, and it detailed news and gossip from the Georgetown and larger DC social scene. It was dominated by the polos-and-Nantucket-red-wearing, prep-school-going, summering-in-Montauk types that I went to school with.
Although I dressed preppy, this was not exactly my scene. I was more of an Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise type at that time in my life. I had a large crew of French study abroad student friends who I called The French People. We would chain American Spirits in my university-provided housing and listen to David Bowie and The Velvet Underground into the early morning hours.
But still, I wanted to know what Jenna and Barbara were up to.
By the time my senior year arrived, the most terrifying and difficult thing in my life was coming out. I had started experimenting with guys during my semester abroad in London, but I wasn’t ready to come out yet. I was still wrestling with a lot of internalized homophobia, and turned off by what I had seen of the gay scene in DC — tight V-necks, EDM, tiny dogs, drag queens, the whole rainbow milieu. I thought I would keep experimenting, but keep it to myself for a while longer.
Except one late night, after one too many beers at the Tombs — the de facto campus bar that was the inspiration for the Brat Pack classic St. Elmo’s Fire — with Seamus, a gay classmate I had a crush on, I blacked out and came out to — and then on to — him. He had to tell me in the morning, because I didn’t remember it (or a hookup, either).
Knowing that my secret had been let loose in the world sent a shiver of panic down my spine. Even though I wasn’t ready to come out, I decided in that moment that I had to. I didn’t want my friends to find out through the rumor mill. Seamus said he wouldn’t tell anyone, but he had already outed another classmate — a Billy Joel–playing grill master who bragged about having six different colored pairs of boat shoes — to me the previous week. I wasn’t going to risk him blabbing.
What followed were weeks of one-on-one conversations with my friends, all of which went better than I could have hoped. My friend Ryan thought I was bullshitting him, which was kinda funny. Another friend of ours had to tell him I was for real before he believed me. But the anxiety of facing homophobia in the larger world weighed heavily on me, leading to a severe depression that lasted most of that fall, and left me with a ghostly pallor.
I remember sitting on Healy Lawn one late fall afternoon, drinking a chai tea latte, trying to warm up, consumed by shame and fear. There was a chill in the air, and my friend Maria approached me with a concerned look on her face.
“You look like you’ve been through war,” she said. She wasn’t entirely wrong. There was a monstrous battle raging inside me, one I felt like I was losing. But I told her I was just stressed about a paper, exchanged a few niceties with her, and went back to the solitude of my latte. Those lattes always seemed to go cold so quickly, just like my coming-out journey did. It was less euphoria and more despair.
That winter, my lesbian theater professor, not knowing that I was going through the coming-out process, but perhaps sensing it, picked me to play Roy Cohn in a class staging of parts of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America — also a great HBO miniseries with Al Pacino and Patrick Wilson.
I remember practicing the scene where Roy first meets Joe, the Mormon lawyer he is trying to recruit to some Republican Party judicial sinecure, while working the phones and offering Joe sandwiches like a doting mameshi.
“I wish I was an octopus, eight loving arms and all them suckers!” was the line.
I thought about Roy Cohn sucking a bunch of cocks out on Fire Island. Then I thought about him having tea at the Plaza with his fellow cocksucker, Nancy Reagan. And I thought about what it would have felt like to have to lead that double life, to keep that secret, so that it didn’t end up on Page Six, or worse yet, in The Washington Post.
At least now I knew that wouldn’t be my fate. I would die an out gay man.
But a proud one? It was yet to be seen.
As the year progressed, I slowly became more comfortable in my own skin and with my identity as a gay man, but I was still uncomfortable with the gay community — or the gay community as I perceived it, at least.
This meant I wasn’t having any sex. I wanted a guy who looked like the guys I had grown up with, with a boy-next-door quality, who was masculine and had a deep voice like me. I wanted a guy on the way to an important job and maybe even some power in the world. But I wasn’t finding him.
I did not want an effeminate boyfriend or a gym rat boyfriend or, heaven forbid, an activist boyfriend. (Does anyone want one of those?) Mostly, I didn’t want to be a stereotype. I didn’t want to feel like a faggot. That terror sloshed and bubbled inside of me like the toxic brew in a witch’s cauldron, double, double, toil and trouble.
As Roy Cohn said in the play, gay men had no power in the world. Gay men, at the time I came out, had just lost state after state in gay marriage referendums, which Bush’s (closeted gay) campaign manager had generated to drive up social conservative turnout in the 2004 presidential election and help re-elect Bush.
Cohn didn’t see himself as gay. He was powerful. He was an important man, one who just happened to have sex with men. I wasn’t capable of such self-delusion, and pitied Cohn for the shadow of a life he lived, but I still feared that to fully embrace gayness would leave me vulnerable, discarded and a total nothing in the world.
It was awful to imagine, and so, when evening arrived and my friends started pairing off and making booty calls, I fired up the internet and sought out similar, repressed types. Grindr wasn’t a thing yet — smartphones barely were — and so I would take to Craigslist, which used to have a personals section, with categories like casual encounters and men seeking men.
The Craigslist personals section was a distinct vibe. There was some scary stuff on there. It was like the cantina from Return of the Jedi. Even if you found someone halfway decent on there, there was still a good chance they would flake, or that they were catfishing you, or that they were totally fucking psycho and on drugs. A lot of them smelled like incense, too.
I don’t think I ever found the kind of guy I was looking for on Craigslist. But I did find him one night — by accident — on Late Night Shots.
Perusing its message boards on my MacBook while eating my dinner of Chicken Madness, I saw a post from some woman who purported to be a friend of this guy called “Brady.” The name was a pseudonym, but he was allegedly a clean-cut, straight-acting, professional guy, VGL (internet parlance for very good looking), not into the scene, and looking for someone similar.
The post went on to tout Brady’s many great qualities. It was probably written by Brady, not some yenta girlfriend, and I knew that. But I didn’t care, because Brady as advertised seemed absolutely perfect for me. I messaged the alleged friend, and before long, I had Brady’s email. We exchanged a few messages, sent each other some nudes — no face pic from Brady — and talked about where and when we might meet up, before he stopped responding.
I didn’t hear from him again until a few weeks later, very late at night. I had thrown a party at my townhouse, the theme of which was French vs. Flannel, where people were asked to dress either like they were a courtier at Versailles, or a lumberjack. It was a great excuse to get shitfaced and play the soundtrack of the Sofia Coppola movie Marie Antoinette, which had just come out.
I was very drunk, and at about one o’clock in the morning, I pulled up Craigslist on my laptop, only to hear the ping of an email from Brady coming in. He was seemingly in the same state — drunk and horny — and wanted me to come to his apartment right away.
It truly felt like now or never, so within minutes, I was in a yellow cab and on my way to the neighborhood near Capitol Hill where he lived, in one of those gigantic, soulless white brick apartment buildings that house the city’s young professionals.
When we pulled up, I got into an argument with the cab driver because he wouldn’t accept 20 euros as payment in lieu of a 20-dollar bill. I tried to explain to him that the exchange rate was in his favor and that he was throwing away money, but he wouldn’t take it. So I fumbled for a credit card, leaving my cell phone on the seat in the process, and then stumbled out under the porte cochère.
I couldn’t figure out the door code or how to ring Brady, and was now unable to call him, so I ended up having to scale an eight-foot brick wall like James Bond, and enter the lobby through a back door.
By the time I got to Brady’s apartment, I was covered with leaves and scrapes and cuts, but apparently, I still looked hot, because he immediately lunged at me and gave me a deep, sloppy kiss.
He looked like his photos and was handsome, although not VGL. He was clad head to toe in Brooks Brothers (they make a great non-iron shirt — just ask a store manager), and the alcohol made his skin look pink and shiny, almost porcine. But like, a pig that was kinda hot.
We immediately made our way through all the shit on his floors — dirty socks, ties, newspapers, takeout containers, all strewn among Ikea furniture — and to his extra-long bed. I started quickly unbuttoning his shirt as we kissed, gradually moving my lips to his neck and shoulders. He tasted a little salty and a little like honey. I liked it.
I soon got his shirt and undershirt off and leaned him back on his bed, kissing him all over, nibbling on his nipples and flicking them with my tongue, scratching him with the scruff on my chin. I buried my face in his armpits and inhaled his musky scent, my nose dampening with his sweat, before ripping off his boxer shorts and grabbing his hard, pink cock.
I had only touched another guy’s cock a handful of times before that, and it still felt new and exciting. I slapped my face with it, stroked it up and down, slid my tongue and lips down it. Thanks to a girl named Jackie C. who told our whole sixth grade class about blowjobs on the bus ride back from a field trip to Old Sturbridge Village, I knew not to use teeth at all. Thank you, Jackie C.
Brady demanded I strip down to nothing, and I did as I was told, throwing my black Lacoste polo to the ground, and feeling my cock bounce as I slid off my underwear.
Brady grabbed my underwear and took a long whiff of it, then pinned me against the headboard and facefucked me underneath a Reagan-Bush ’84 campaign poster. I was thrilled to be having the classic DC experience, hooking up with a closeted Republican staffer. And I loved the smell of him and the feeling of his cock filling up my throat.
Who he worked for was a mystery, but closeted Republican hypocrites were nothing new. There were tons of closet cases in the Bush-era Republican Party, like Bush’s campaign manager Ken Mehlman, Senator Larry “wide stance” Craig, Miss Lindsey Graham, and Mark Foley, the congressman from Florida who was caught sending inappropriate messages to, and making passes at, underage male pages.
My sophomore year, when I interned for John Kerry in the Senate, I used to exit the Metro at Capitol South in the early mornings, and would see Foley jogging sometimes. He gave me these lascivious looks when we passed each other, and these interactions, plus his gayface and shorty-shorts, left me uttering, “Yup,” when his scandal broke.
Now, I had my very own closeted Republican.
Brady shot his conservative load all over my face, and I grabbed a big, wet wad of it to lube up my cock. Then I jerked myself off while he held me tight and kissed me, and I came a ton.
We were both eager to call it a night after that, and I started to make my way back home. Somehow, I also got locked into the building when I tried to leave, so I had to exit via the same side door and scale and plummet down the same wall that I did when I entered. (Whether you’re in or out — of the closet, or an apartment building — life is full of hurdles.)
I began visiting Brady regularly that winter and spring, usually under similar circumstances — late at night, drunk, and horny. I always felt like I had to sneak off, or invent some excuse to get away, even though there was no real need for it. I clearly still felt guilty about it.
My friends and I were playing this song “Flavor,” by Girls in Hawaii, on heavy rotation in those days, and the foreboding buildup of that song matched the anxious jitters I would feel as my cab whooshed past the Watergate Building and the towering, phallic Washington Monument on the way to Brady’s apartment.
One night, after La Fête de la Francophonie, a party the French Embassy threw every year with food from French-speaking countries from all over the world and excellent wines from all over France, I made my way to Brady’s place in my Ralph Lauren suit and pastel pink skinny tie. I sucked his cock with my wine-soaked mouth, and let his come crust over on my chest hair while I played Serge Gainsbourg tunes on my iPod for him.
Another late night, I sucked his toes one by one as he jerked himself off and yelled, “You’re so fucking hot” at me over and over. I asked him to drop his balls in my mouth while I jerked off, and I shot all over my leg. I left it to dry there.
Our sex was hot, like a poorly lit Corbin Fisher video. Republican jock facefucks Democratic prettyboy. And when we were fucking, I could forget my fears about being gay for just a moment. But I never pined for Brady when we were apart, because we never really got to know each other.
I did figure out who he was one night, though. The last night we hooked up, actually. I accidentally caught a peek at his diploma, from Ohio Wesleyan University. Wesley Goodman. He saw me eye the diploma, and looked at me with these incredibly vulnerable eyes. I stared back for what felt like a long time, but was actually only a second or two. I knew not to acknowledge it. “Goodnight, dude,” I said.
As the months wore on, the terror of coming out faded, and the terror of graduating and having to face the 9-to-5 of the adult world grew. I focused on term papers and applying to jobs, and eventually got hired by a white-shoe K Street law firm on the Georgetown waterfront, in a building where Nancy Pelosi lived on the top floor. I was going deeper into the hellscape of DC politics.
I lost touch with Brady. Toward the end of the year, I started dating a guy named Doug, who was tall, handsome, Black, and the salutatorian of our class. (Many of my girlfriends were jealous.) Doug showed up at the door of my townhouse late one night to return some lost sunglasses that weren’t mine, and that I had not lost. He looked at me with his devilish grin and the most playful eyes, and that was all it took.
Although that relationship didn’t last long — and involved one painful aborted attempt at anal sex, the night before graduation — I went on to have many other relationships, and a lot of phenomenal sex, over the years. Overall, it probably took me longer to wrestle with my internalized homophobia than it did to adjust to anal sex, or to master being a dom top. :-)
And honestly, I still suffer from a bit of internalized homophobia. Jonathan Van Ness annoys me more than he should. But I know I made the right choice in being true to who I am and facing the world with honesty, rather than confining myself to the closet and the hypocrisies and desperate one-night stands that would have entailed.
As for Brady — or Wesley? I Googled him a few years ago. It turned out that at the time I was fucking him, he was working for a then-little-known congressman from Ohio named … Jim Jordan.
Yep. I fucked a Jim Jordan protégé. I might be the one who needs a fucking exorcist.
Wesley had obviously made some great connections in the GOP in the years since I had been sucking him off, as he got himself elected to the Ohio state legislature on a Christian right, anti-gay, “family values” platform.
Unfortunately for Wesley, though, Brady stayed a busy boy over the years, too — even after Wesley got married and had kids and got elected to office. He was eventually caught having gay sex in his office, and resigned in disgrace after it came out that a bunch of young, male Republican staffers had reported him for sexual harassment and inappropriate touching.
Who knows what he’s up to now. Conversion therapy?
When I think back to that time now, I can still feel the fiery lust and the tingle of danger and excitement in the pit of my stomach. The anxiety and trepidation of those late nights. The devastating depression. The time spent wondering if my future would be okay.
And I can still taste the Blue Moons with orange wedges that provided me with much-needed liquid courage for those late-night conversations and trysts. I remember worrying then for the first time that I was drinking too much, and thinking about that F. Scott Fitzgerald quotation, “First, you take a drink. Then, the drink takes a drink. Then, the drink takes you.”
Drink would end up taking me many dark places over the years. There was a lot trapped inside of me back then — bad as well as good — that needed to be exorcised.
The process continued long past Georgetown, and is ongoing, but today, I am incredibly grateful that I faced my fears and took those first steps toward honesty and the light, regardless of how scary it was.
Because the truly scary thing would have been ending up like Brady. Or Wesley, rather. Thankfully, the power of Christ — and my dick, and Blue Moons — compelled me in a different direction. ♦