Stereotypes?

This chick I dated in high school found this photo in a stack of old love letters and sent it to me. It's the cast photo from The Foreigner, the fall play my junior year of high school.

I only read for it because a Drama teacher said it would be good practice. To my shock, I got a part, Owen Musser. Learning experience, big-time.



The scowl (I'm the one in the back) was a matter of being in character.

What strikes me about this picture now (besides how ridiculously young everyone looks, considering at the time I would have described the lot of us as basically adults) is that three of the five guys in the picture are gay.

I'm not outing anyone here. One of them came out in 8th grade. It was a brilliant move in terms of getting girls excited about him; the pitiful thing was he was the only guy in sight who didn't care if the girls were excited. I was so jealous, I tried to pass myself off as bisexual in hopes of drawing some of these girls off. One in particular. But then I got semi-put up to kissing guy by way of proving my status, and I chickened out. She was adorable, but I couldn't quite get myself to kiss a boy in hopes of kissing her.

It's one of those 'wish I was queer so I could get chicks' things.

Another of this cast came out in high school. What shocked everyone about it wasn't that he liked guys, it's that he was also a Republican. I saw a bit about him in the paper awhile back during an election cycle, talking about the Log Cabin Republican thing. His boyfriend in high school was even more of a square, the kind of kid who wore ties to school and got excited about gubernatorial politics.

I think the third came out in college. And way out, cover of the newspaper marching with his parents in the Gay Pride parade. I think they still called it Gay Pride back then; these days they just say 'Pride,' I guess because if you don't know what they're proud of, you can't come to the party.

Come to think of it, the fourth guy (aside from me) in the picture, I'm trying to remember if I ever saw him with a girl...

Thing is, I hate stereotypes. I totally don't believe in them. And yet here we have the cast of a play in a school with a massive Drama program, and I might be the only male cast member who doesn't putt from the rough.

I wish I did go for guys, though. It would make me a babe magnet.