Some names have been changed to protect the guilty

He runs his hands through my hair, a glint in his eye. Only an inch or so taller than me and fairly scrawny, he’s not my usual type. But then again, in a town this size, it’s hard to have a usual type. You pretty much have to take what you can get. His gray eyes have a sparkle and his thick-rimmed glasses slide down his nose as he tosses his shirt on top of his Chucks, which have been tossed on the hardwood floor of my room. We kiss deeply, and I moan.

“Mmm… I love it,” he says, grinning devilishly. “I love it when a boy says my name.”

I pull back and look him in the eyes, the light from the streetlamp bathing us in a yellow glow. “What is your name?”

“Grayson ,” he says, going in for another kiss. He isn’t fazed by my party foul at all. “And yours?”

“Skylar,” I say, making a mental note to submit this to FMyLife as soon as he leaves.

Awkward moments like this seem to define gay dating in Bowling Green. Not knowing names is a common problem; the majority of men I’ve dated since moving to town have been closeted. Like the guy who dumped me for Jesus, or the boy who lied to me about being an SAE, like that would impress me. (I would have settled for a Pike.) Or the boy who left his sleeping girlfriend on the sofa, took her car, and came over to meet up with me. Surely there had to be a better crop of men to choose from.

I became curious as to why I wasn’t meeting any quality men. I mean gay men have to be out there, right? There has to be more than closeted fraternity boys and secretive bisexual hipsters to date. Right?

When I first arrived at WKU in 2004, the Outlet Resource Center was open in McCormack Hall. A center focusing on outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) students, and I remember my time there fondly. Because of the level of confidentiality, the Outlet was a safe space for LGBTQ students, many of who faced prejudice and discrimination on a daily basis, to congregate.

However, Housing and Residence Life closed the Outlet in 2007 and now uses the space as storage. As if turning a gay and lesbian resource center into a closet wasn’t bad enough, WKU never bothered to find the center a new home, and the only place gay and lesbian students had to go ceased to exist. So where had all the gay boys gone?

Setting out to find this town’s mythical gay scene is a lot like setting out to find Atlantis: everybody has an idea of where it might be and what it’s like, all full of magic queens and dancing fairies, but nobody’s really ever been there. Dustin Bell, a senior theater major, says all he’s heard about the local gay scene is that it supposedly exists. That’s all Dustin seems to know about the gay scene. When asked how he meets men, and he answers bluntly: “I don’t.”

Ask any gay man or lesbian on campus and they’ll tell you there is a gay scene in town. They just don’t know where it is. There isn’t an official gay bar in town (the closest is in Nashville), though there is a monthly drag show at Ellis Place.

The lack of a local watering hole hinders the development of any gay community, according to “Mark” and “Bill,” a thirty-something couple I spoke to. They asked not to be identified because they are not out to their families. “We are just roommates to most,” Mark explained.

I met Mark and Bill on Adam4Adam, a website that, according to its homepage, aims to “help you find new friends and create new relationships quickly and at no cost.” Of course, it’s a site you don’t want to access in a campus computer lab, as the advertising that keeps the site free is mostly hardcore pornography linking to sites catering to any sexual proclivity you can imagine. Just ask the lab assistant who threatened to kick me out for looking at porn. (I insisted I was doing research, but understandably, she didn’t believe me.)

“We get cussed a lot because we are a couple,” Bill says. “People say ‘why does a couple come on here if they aren’t willing to hook up?’”