How We Find Each Other
Last year I took a Japanese class. I wanted to speak an asian language and that one seemed like a good choice. Mostly this was decided after Eric's mom's girlfriend tried to demonstrate the different tones in Canotonese to me. She said the same three sounds (to my western ear) and then told me they were very different. In fact two of them mean "horse" and "mother". That's not a mistake you want to make. Imagine this sentence. "Hey, Bill, I'd sure love to ride your Mother." Someone explained that it was a bit like singing. That the tones were like notes. At this point I gave up ever learning Chinese. Anyone who has heard me sing understands why.
So instead I started learning Japanese. There are no tones. There are two verb tenses. It seemed like a dream. It's been great fun. When I was in the first course, I put my name on a website for language exchange. It's simple, you meet someone who knows the language you are learning and wants to learn one you know. A couple times a week you chat in various languages and thereby improve. This week (after a year) the ad got a response. I got an email from someone who wanted to meet. So I arranged a coffee date and away we went. I was too polite to ask what gender the person was (you can't tell from Japanese names any more than you can with English ones - not unless you already know). The day we were to meet, I googled the name and found out it was masculine. Yay a japanese boy :) We met a Starbucks near my work and began to chat. As I haven't cracked a book in nearly a year, we were chatting in English. After some getting to know you stuff, I told him about not knowing what gender he'd be. He understood, and mentioned that he had intentionally picked my ad because he could tell from my email address that I am male.
A while later, we're doing the "do you live with your parents" type questions, he explained that he doesn't (I was suspicious). Then he asked, after seeing my ring, "oh, are you married?" and I replied "yes, but not to a girl." He looked a bit hesitant for a second and I pointed to myself saying "okama� (gay). His face brightened up and he said "ohhhh. me too!"
I took him to Woody's (his first gay bar in Canada) later that night.
I love how we manage to find each other, how the most invisible minority on the planet can still manage to seek and find each other. It's in moments like that where I feel some kinship with my fore-faggots who had to find each other that way, who couldn't be out. And instead they relied on a way of dressing, a way of moving, or just pure instinct to find each other for companionship, sex or even language exchange.