Love Letter to Forty-Nine Dancers
June 12, 2016
I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written primarily for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.
This post is part of Love Letters, an ongoing series about people I know, people I’ve loved, or people who changed me.
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To each of you,
I’m sorry, I was not paying attention. Someone at a gay campground in Tennessee said something had happened; he had a radio, and the men were bent over by the bar, listening in. But I was busy—doing what? Probably prowling through the tents or around the pool, looking for sex, closed off in my little hunt, avoiding the drama of the men who took me to this clothing-optional campground in the middle of the woods, without any cell service. I was fully dependent on them—they were my ride in and had to be my ride out—and things weren’t going well between us.
Without any cell phone service, nobody knew where I was. As we drove back to Atlanta the next day, texts came in. My sister wrote: Alex, did you go to Orlando? Then: Alex, please answer me!
At some point, someone turned on the radio. At first, they said 30 were dead. Over the next few hours, the number rose to 50, then finally 49.
We arrived in Atlanta at dusk. The men were Josh, my occasional lover, and his pack of boyfriends, some of whom did not see eye to eye about each other or, for that matter, about me. That evening, as we unloaded our stuff, I looked into Josh’s sad, stricken face, his eyes turned down, and knew without us saying anything that this was our end—that this attempt at a group relationship was over—and that he had chosen the other guys over me. I imagined they had pitched it to him as a bullying ultimatum: If you stay with us, Alex has to go.
I can’t say our breakup—if that’s what it was—was a direct result of the Pulse nightclub massacre, but I link them in my mind. I could have been in Orlando. It wasn't too far away.
