Don’t ask, Don’t Tell (or Do)

Published May 8, 2007

by Henry Melcher

It was a mess: a dark haze where I didn’t even know her name and it was like moving underwater. The condom broke and it was terrible. A shaking and sinking feeling set in as I woke up from my dream beneath thin motel sheets in the Berkshires. Though the $50 room was clean and spacious – similar to how I imagine an airy, upscale trailer parlor from 1976 – and mostly satisfactory, the carpet bore a residual dampness, or coldness.

My eyes adjusted to the day’s brilliance, and it sunk in. Then I had another realization of awfulness: that my dream, no matter how satisfactory, had occurred within hovering distance of my great friend and ultimate Frisbee colleague, Dave. You see, we have to share beds during these disc tournaments.

I hoped to God he did not understand that I had just had a wet dream. After skulking to the bathroom for a rinse and mop, by the time I padded back over, everything seemed to be normal. People were sleeping.

Yet the lingering notion I could not outthink remained: why now? I could shrug off the happenstance as a reassertion of my virile masculinity, I thought to myself. But I could not help but raise an eyebrow at the fact it occurred within striking range of Dave.

On the colophon page of Dave Eggers‘ – not the same Dave – Pulitzer Prize finalist debut, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” he rates his sexuality, “with 1 being perfectly straight, and 10 being perfectly gay” a “3.”

My first instinct upon initially reflecting on Eggers’ sexuality scale was that I was “definitely a two, at most,” which would put any chance of my wet dream having originally been churned by a subconscious attraction to the person I shared a bed with out of the question.

I mean there is no way Dave Eggers is gay, he’s married to Vendela Vida, and she’s dope. This first instinct, however, reveals a negative bias, no matter how suppressed, toward homosexuality; instead of shrugging off the possible norm-transgression, I questioned and attempted to justify my actions within the given context.

As if there was anything to justify! I busted a dream-state nut, and yes, upon waking up, I was next to a dude. This was weird for a second. But what’s more weird, even disturbing, is that even people like me who come from liberal and intellectually-active households still harbor provincial and damaging biases against “the other.”

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