Jerry Timms

Well be careful what you wish for I guess, because parts of last night were a little bit irritating and I thought I’d share to see if anyone else has had a similar experience lately.

I went out to Burn and Charlie’s with Rich, and for some reason (I think because the gay softball world series is in town and there were a lot of out-of-towners) I got hit on constantly throughout the night.  Literally every time I would leave Rich’s vicinity to get a drink or use the restroom, I would be confronted by someone who was introducing themselves and asking me a lot of questions.  While I normally like this, and who wouldn’t on occasion, some of them were rather aggressive to the point of creepily following me around and appearing everywhere I was during the course of the evening.

I  would often be dancing, and literally turn to one side to see someone staring at me, and turn to the other side to see the same thing.  Come out of the bathroom, one is there waiting for me.  Getting poked all night by passers-by on the dance floor (yeah it was weird).  I was polite of course, and enjoying meeting new people, but I really think that I wasn’t getting my point across that I wasn’t interested in anything more than that.  At one point someone gave me their phone number, but I was quickly uninterested when he told me that he was only in town for a couple more days and wanted to go out with me.  Delete.

So this all comes down to one of my biggest pet peeves, which is guys who don’t get the hint and are inappropriately aggressive when I’m trying to relax and have a good time.  I am a very casual and tenuous person when it comes to meeting new people (it often takes me some amount of time to warm up to someone) and I’m really turned off by the aggressiveness and rapid fire questioning that happens at bars sometimes.  I also find it really awkward when someone wants to ask you out at a bar, because I really don’t feel like I know them well enough (or sometimes that I am sober enough) to make a proper determination if it’s someone I want to know on that level.  Ha, several bad decisions in the past have certainly made me a lot more careful about giving out my number.  I’d like to be friendly to everyone, but I really resent the fact that sometimes I feel forced to be blatantly dismissive when someone gets out of hand and doesn’t want to take the gentle hints I’m giving them.  I’ve tried the honest approach before, where I may politely explain why I’m not interested, but that has usually only led to unwanted debate or arguing.

Of course there are exceptions to all this if I have a strong gut feeling that someone is a match, but that’s rare.  That’s why you’ll often hear of me making dates after online chat rather than meeting in person at a bar or club, because when you chat with someone online you have a chance to research them a bit through their online profile responses.

Now that I’m thinking about all this, I can see a sharp contrast to the dynamics that I usually experience at circuit parties out of town.  It seems like everyone is not as inappropriately aggressive at those parties and it’s ok to meet someone, talk for a bit, share a compliment or two, and then move on to enjoy the scene and the music.  Saying hi to someone at those events doesn’t seem to commit you to having them stalking you all night.  There are exceptions to that, but they are few and far between. Those who don’t know anything about that scene may think that the opposite is true, that everyone is really aggressive and the environment sexually overwhelming, but it’s not like that at all - at least in my limited experience.