Others people's online dates that connect to my offline dating lesbian stories

I decided to write this story as this week was the 4th year anniversary of it...  I don't usually remember dates or years but on this occasion, I will never forget... It all begins at a bus stop with someone else online date...

As I wrote in the previous post, in September of 2008 I was very close to a very handsome Spanish gay man named Pedro. He was THE MASTER of online dating, he had met most of his long-term boyfriends in the cyberspace...

At the time, he had a long-distance boyfriend but kept his profile active as he was also 'new in town' and wanted to meet gay people to go out... He contacted this guy who slightly reminded me of a young Michael Jackson (before he turned white) due to his fantastic hair and face shape.

He and Pedro were supposed to meet that week for coffee but they recognized each other at the 25 bus stop at Sainsbury's on Lewes Road and introduced themselves on the spot. The situation was a bit uncomfortable for them, meeting a future online date sooner than expected, and for me as well, as I was there too...

Because Pedro had a boyfriend, Chris and him became friends and so we started to hang out... For about 2 years Chris was part of our lives...

The three of us used to go out to Revenge, went for long walks in the countryside, or just bumped into each other on campus and spend the evening together in Falmer bar playing Jenga.... we used to have long conversations about homosexuality, coming out, love and life in general...

Chris and I were both in the 'accepting our sexuality' phase and, in a way, we understood and supported each other... He told me a couple of times about a lesbian friend of his that I needed to meet because we would probably like each other.... but unfortunately, he never introduced me to her.....

One summery day on June 2010, he decided to terminate his life and hanged himself in the woods at the back of Sussex University Campus...

Two days before he did it, we bumped into each other on the 25 bus. It was Friday and I was going to Falmer Bar to work a long shift, so I told him that I will call him that Saturday or Sunday so we could hang out before leaving Brighton...

When we said goodbye I had a very strange and powerful feeling, and the words: "this is the last time I'm going to see him" crossed my mind... I thought that I was not going to see him again because I was moving out of Brighton in a few weeks' time and he was going to Swaziland for the summer the following week...

We both had uncertain futures so I thought that crossing paths again was going to be difficult... 

When he got off the bus, I took a "mental picture" of him while he was waving me goodbye..... he was at the same bus stop where we met 2 years ago, looking at me with his big sad eyes.... and I unconsciously perceived that there was something wrong...

That Sunday night, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought that I needed to call Chris... I was feeling bad because I said to him that I was going to call him to hang out, but I didn't in the end as I was very busy with my dissertation and work...

I was taking a lot of shifts at the bar at the time because I needed the money for the summer... so I forgot to call him... The morning after it was already too late to make that call...

When I got the news, I was shocked, in a way, I always thought that Chris and I were very much alike... we both were struggling with our sexuality and coming out but, we both believed in finding someone, probably as a consequence of watching too many Hollywood films. We were also both gay and single and didn't have that much luck in finding love in the past... So, in a way, I related to Chris's state of mind...

I didn't know what to think... He had given up in life... just like this... I didn't know how to react... In 2010, I have to confess that I was also having a tough time myself.... without noticing, I started to slowly isolate my self from the world and that's probably why I didn't notice Chris' depression at the time,

I was in an odd place, I was feeling very lonely and vulnerable... I wasn't happy with my life at the time, but I never considered giving up...  his defeat was a big hit for me.....

After his funeral, we went out to Revenge as it was what he would have liked us to do... His whole family was there, his mum, his brothers and sister, his friends and I finally met the 'lesbian' girl that he wanted me to meet... We didn't talk, she approached me on the dance floor... I was covered in tears... she grabbed me and we started kissing...., we didn't talk.... just kissed...

I was drunk as Chris' brother kept buying Tequila shots for everyone... We kept on kissing for a while and I ended up at her place... we talked for hours about life and death and the darkness that we all have inside while sharing a spliff and more booze.... we cuddle for a bit and then went upstairs to her bed and..... (you know I never give details....) Finally, I fell asleep in her bed after several days of insomnia due to Chris' death.......

The morning after, we exchanged phone numbers. We met up that week for an afternoon coffee that turned into a night out at Revenge.... but then she moved back home for the summer and I left Brighton a few weeks after.... so it faded away after that very intense connection that night, probably because of the circumstances...

Nothing good can ever start from a drunk night after a funeral... I know through Facebook that she is now engaged to a guy... I guess that she was one of those "college lesbians" who hung her lumberjack flannels shirts and Dr Martens boots after Uni and paired up with a guy from her hometown to live happily ever after...

I don't really know if this story has any moral... I guess some experiences in life are difficult to understand and I'm still trying to make sense of Chris' death..... But what is clear is that the pressure that society puts on minorities to become who they are hasn't had a big role in Chris' death...

He was a mix-race gay boy living in Swaziland where he was not white enough for the white upper-class parties but not black enough to hang out with the other half... He was also an extremely sensitive gay man trying to find love in the superficial gay men's world in which muscles and one-night stands are the currency...

I know that suicide among the young lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender community is higher than among the general population and Chris was just a victim. I myself briefly thought about ending my life when I realized I was gay, the thought of not following the rules of society, not living up to society's standards and the idea of living isolated because I was following my heart, put that thought into my mind, but fortunately, I never considered it seriously as an option as after all, coming out was more challenging in my mind that what it actually was at the end.....

I can tell you for a fact that: "It gets better" and only with little changes we can aspire to create a society in which minorities of any kind will feel safe to express themselves and to love freely who they want without being judged...

I would like to dedicate this post and picture to Chris as he would have enjoyed crossing the street in this new rainbow that they have painted in Brighton :)!

My offline dating lesbians stories - My first "one night stand" story

I decided to write today an offline story... not that I've run out of online dating stories yet... but I feel that the ones untold yet are either too long or too boring for a Sunday afternoon.... + this story follows in time "My 'I'm new in town' story"... so in a way, it makes sense to fit it here in the blog...

One Halloween night in 2008, just after moving into Brighton and meeting the PhD student lesbian student, I went out with my new Spanish gay man's kick...

I have a tendency to always have a gay man as a best friend in my life, and in 2008 it was Pedro, a very handsome Spanish guy that was always super positive about life and completely open about his sexuality and me, that I was still struggling a bit with mine, his company and guidelines through the accepting process was very appreciated...

 We used to go out to Revenge every weekend, sometimes it was just the two of us... but some other sometimes we dragged some other people along with us........  anyway, back to my story...

One Halloween "Girls on Top" Thursday at Revenge, I went out with my Spanish gay friend to dance... Since I was young and working in a bar, my tolerance for alcohol was slightly higher than these days... so I think that at least I double the number of recommended units...

I lost my friends and I ended up dancing with this gorgeous-looking blonde girl dressed up as a feminine version of Tom Cruise in 'Top Gun' with a pair of RayBan aviator sunglasses and baggie military-looking pair of dungarees...

We danced and kissed and.... the next thing I remember....  we were on the bus to my place...  It was a fun night with a stranger whose name I quickly forgot the morning after... We exchanged numbers but we didn't contact each other again...

I bumped into her again a few months later at Revenge. She told me that a few days after we met a friend of hers threw her phone on the Thames River... so, she lost my phone number...

Really...? flying phones that end up in the Thames is a common thing that can happen and I should believe her....(?) Well, I was 23 so I did have faith in humanity and I believed her...

We exchange phone numbers again and we meet up the day after for drinks... My friend the zombie M&M from Canada was visiting me that weekend so she decided to invite another gay guy for a double date...

They were both very good-looking, he was a model in London and she was a very attractive photography student at Brighton University.... But we didn't have much to talk about, unfortunately...

My friend the zombie M&M's described the date as Ernest Hemingway meeting with a Bimbo Blonde on his side and I felt a bit the same way... they were not even able to situate Spain in a map and their favourite movie was "The Goonies"... They were not very intellectual material but they were beautiful...

The gay incredibly handsome guy ended up vomiting in the toilet and the pretty blonde had to walked him home as the doorman at the "Pav Tav" kicked him out... and that was the end...

She send me few messages after that night.... but, I was secretly in love with a colleague at work that of course was not gay and showed no interest in me whatsoever... but well... I always seem to choose the wrong person to have a crush on...

Do we choose who we love?

My "I'm new in town" story

This is the story of my second online date....

At the end of August 2008, I moved to Brighton for the first time. I have moved to Brighton twice now... I guess that I can't stay too far for too long from this city...

When I first arrived, I got a room for few days on Sussex campus, but soon I moved into a room that an Italian guy was subletting for the summer on the top of the pub Thomas Kemp in Kemptown...

The flat had three rooms, I was in the biggest one, another very quiet guy was subletting another one and a half- British half- Israeli guy was in last room next to mine.

For a brief period of time, the half-Brit-half-Israeli guy was the only person that I knew in Brighton.... I didn't know anyone here before I moved in so, soon I found myself hanging out with a 24 years-old, frustrated saxophonist, that fitted perfectly the stereotype of an early-twenties stoner: baggie clothes from his teens days as a skater, a general scruffy appearance from someone who has recently moved out of his parents house and still struggling to keep up with laundry duties and cleaning chores.

He had an incredible messy room that looked as if a hurricane had passed and had thrown all his belongings on the  floor. He was really funny, one day, I saw him staring at a painting from the Italian guy that was on the wall for about half an hour because he was super stoned...

Another day, he made an attempt to cook me an uneatable English baked potato with beans while he was high as hell as a payment from all of the food that he was stealing from my fridge on his regular night munchies... He was very funny and nice, but after hanging out with him for a couple of days, I realized that I needed to meet some new people...

I went back to my account on GaydarGirls that I hadn't opened since my first online dating story. I was determined to expand my social circle in Brighton that at that moment consisted only on a very stoned guy that enjoyed to play the saxophone at 4am in the morning since he had no concept of time whatsoever due to the fact that he was constantly stoned.....

I send a couple of messages to few girls that seem nice and approachable on the site. All of the messages started with something like: "I'm new in town and I would like to meet some new people ...". We all have send or received a message from someone that is new in town... it is a nice strategy to approach people on an online site, in stead of just sending a message because you are miserably lonely and want to get laid.... which sounds desperate, you now have an excuse.... you are "new"... and as a newbie, you have an excuse to approach strangers on the Internet without being judged....

Unfortunately, the excuse only lasts for the first few months that you are new in a city....

Since I barely use GaydarGirls and, I haven't edited my profile's headline in the past 6 years, I think that I am still using the tactic of "I'm new in town" as the headline on my profile... Oh well..., considering that I have moved a couple of times in the past 6 years... Is not that I've been lying all the time.... (mental note: change your status in the 'old' lesbian online site of Gaydargirls..., just in case.... New phone online dating applications not always deliver quality dates, at least this old site had provided me with some fun dates on the past.... )

Back to my story...., so I send few messages and one girl answered me saying that she was also new in town and that she would love to meet up for a drink. It all went very quickly... We meet up that Thursday for a quick drink but we ended up spending almost the whole weekend together.....

We both had a lot of time on our hands and too little contacts in Brighton... She had just moved down from Edinburgh to start a PhD in Sociology at Sussex in September. She was using the last few days of the summer to settle down into her new place and getting around in the city.

She was 27-years-old, very tall and slim, Scottish (without the accent....) with big blue eyes. Her conversation was very intellectual... she talked as the aspiring academic she wanted to become and I, at the time 23... found very attractive the idea of hanging out with a doctoral student. I've always been a bit of a sapiophile... 

I didn't know at the time that I will ended up becoming an academic myself, so in a way, it was like looking at me in the future... She was who I wanted to be when I "grew up"....

We had few night dates and few day ones..., I remember one afternoon that we were hanging out in my room and we were about to watch a movie when my stoner housemate came in his underwear and sat in the middle of the sofa with a spliff ready to watch the movie with us...

No one invited him, but I didn't want to kick him out since he himself did not have many contacts in Brighton either and he was probably as lonely as the two new lesbians in town... So I let him staying and watch the movie with us....

When the movie finished, he left to his room... The day after he confessed that he was hopping to have a threesome with us....  Of course a very typical straight male thiking, they meet two "non butchy" looking lesbian and instantly they think that they are in a porn movie and that we are going to act accordingly.... of course the threesome never happen... but I don't blame him for trying.... you need to act on your fantasies... but sometimes your fantasies are not others people's fantasies.... Anyway, he was a funny character.... I wonder if he still around Brighton...

The new lesbian in town and I had a brief thing for about a week or more, but soon after September came, we had to wake up, Greenday style.... the summer was over and the academic year began....

I started my courses and also, I started to work at the Student Union bars at freshers week. My routine went from having all of the time in the world to not having a minute to myself.... I spend the first week of term working everyday serving "snake bites" and "Jagger bombs" to a thousands of new University party hunter students. It was fun.... I met a lot of new people, new people from the new house I moved to, new people from the bars where I was working, and new people from my courses....

I went from having only a couple of numbers on my phone to have a pretty busy social life.... the bright Phd student was not my only "normal" contact in Brighton anymore...... and also, probably for her, my role in her life shifted to the background too... after the term started, it was not easy to meet up anymore.... we both had different social commitments and after trying for a while to arrange a next date without any success, she ended up telling me on the phone that perhaps we should take sometime off... which considering that we spend a lot of time together too fast, it was a very sensible thing to do...

We are still friends on Facebook and I have seen her around Sussex campus from time to time... She proof read few of my essays that term.... (she offered to do it....) but we didn't properly meet up again or kept in touch apart from the occasional 2 to 3 minutes conversation on campus every once in a while... I knew from the begging that she was not going to be the love of my life, but I was new in town and I wanted to expand my social circle.... and perhaps, I was trying to find a new adventure while waiting for the academic year and "reality" to start...

I enjoyed the time we spend together but, I knew that we both were in very different places in our lives and that we were not going to work once the academic year began... but it was a nice "I'm new in town" + "end of the summer" story.... Is it true that we are more likely to fall in love and have more stories when we first move to a place?

According to research we are more likely to fall in love during holidays and during times of change in your life since we have apparently a more open mindset..... Should I move to a new town again just so I can pull off again my excuse for contacting people online without the desperate lonely smell that an dating website message always has hoping that perhaps, this time I will find the love of my life....????

Naahhh.... I love Brighton too much to move out....