One Saturday night this past winter, I was riding the bus downtown in my standard outfit – fluffy woolen mittens, a black coat and a Sherpa hat straddled by dangling braids. I sipped from my Sprite bottle filled with a very un-Sprite-like orange liquid as two ‘bro’s’ waited next to me. We hit it off right away and discussed everything from baseball to potential parties that evening.

Inevitably, however, due to the fact that at no point in the conversation did I start physically groping one of them or lip-syncing to Lady Gaga, they assumed that I was straight.

Here’s where things get difficult. I’m not straight, so how do I handle this situation? I ask the question because this event tends to echo and rematerialize in various incarnations in my daily life. My dentist, for example, enjoys taking advantage of the fact that his patients can’t respond while he’s lodging metal appliances up their mouths, and thus tinkers with what I like to imagine is his aspiring stand-up comedy routine. I waited for the ending of one story, mouth agape by necessity, as he explained with expert punch-line prosody why his son and friends didn’t want to go to a musical with him. “Because Dad,” he concluded, “We’re not gay.” I could almost hear the laugh track cut in while he subconsciously manipulated my mouth into an appropriate laughing formation.

So what to do in these situations? I could go back to being 17-years-old and smile and laugh, perhaps slipping in a slightly defiant comment such as, “Yeah, well nothing wrong with that ha, ha” – all the while allowing him to believe that I was straight in order to keep the conversation and laughter flowing smoothly and easily. Another option could be making some joke along the lines of “well, if I was your son I would go to the musical with you, because I’m gay,” and then hope that the conversation somehow continues without any additional awkwardness.

The problem with a less cartoonish version of the second, more aggressive option is that a felicitous conclusion doesn’t normally happen. People are so accustomed to gay meaning the “gay stereotype,” that when someone doesn’t think that you’re gay and you casually tell them that you are, normally a moment results where you’re being spoken to in a tone as if you had just revealed some painful, personal tragedy. “Oh I’m sorry I didn’t know … We’re totally cool with that man, it’s completely fine if you’re gay” is the common reply, usually accompanied by a hand on the shoulder to signify solidarity – and that even though you’re gay, they’re still willing to make physical contact with you. It’s great that we’re at that point where people don’t want you to feel bad about being gay and want to make it clear that it doesn’t bother them. But just imagine that same conversation if you replaced “gay” with “out-of-state student.”

It would seem completely absurd – why would a student feel embarrassed about being an out-of-state student and why would the other student accept his embarrassment as natural, and then feel the need to reassure him that there’s no problem with him not being from Massachusetts? Whenever you’re not sure if a comment is homophobic, misogynist or indicative of any other “-ism,” make a hypothetical comparison akin to the above, or make the comment racial instead, and see if you’d still feel comfortable saying it.

Clearly, in terms of accepted societal norms, being gay is negative, while being an out-of-state student or a non-white student is supposed to be neutral. Even the most progressive and open-minded student will generally take offense if you ask if he’s gay, because he’ll assume that he’s “acting gay” in some way. This is a reflection of the prominent popular belief in “gaydar.” If someone passes the “gaydar” test (meaning they appear straight), but turn out to be gay, it is assumed to be a rare phenomenon – and that they were fiendishly clever enough to fool you. I used to believe in this as well, but then I discovered that it’s actually not a rare phenomenon at all. Just look at the Craigslist personals and we find the huge paradox of gay life.

Or if online sex solicitations make you squeamish, just walk around the Recreation Center or Berkshire Dining Commons with my friend Tom, and let him point out the throngs of bisexual and bi-curious guys rumbling past that he’d met through these sites. And let me stress, there are a lot of these guys.

The Craigslist gay personals do not reflect what people see and know as “gay” at the University of Massachusetts by any means. The openly gay community at UMass is made up of a small number of kids who understand that sexuality is awesome and irrelevant and that you can love whomever you’d like to. They walk around campus holding hands and being couples – and dealing with the daily weirdness of living as a political statement and/or campus oddity. Being an oddity can suck. After Extravaganja, as part of a mass pilgrimage to Antonio’s, my boyfriend and I stopped (while holding hands) to pet a puppy and remark on how cute it was. I almost fled back to the festival due to how painfully stereotypical we seemed.

The much larger, true gay community of UMass is what you find on Craigslist. This is where the straight-acting, “tough,” “masculine,” and terrified gay and bisexual guys of UMass are hidden. These guys are “str8-acting,” discreet, and “looking to keep it that way” as one particularly aggressive faceless torso informed his fellow Craigslist dwellers. They don’t want to be labeled as a gay person and grouped in with “the flamers.” They’re looking for sex, not for an identity. These guys make posts commenting on how hard it is to find “normal” gay guys who like sports and other “normal” activities. They make proud comments about not identifying with the gay community, as well as memorable invectives directed toward the stereotype-reinforcing gays such as, and I quote from a formerly open, now closeted Southwest bro, “Ugh, I hate those.”

To this unseen population: The reason why is it so hard to find gay and bisexual guys like yourselves walking around campus is because you all hide out on Craigslist, and only tell a handful of friends (or no one at all) that you like guys. There’s nothing wrong if you like online hook-ups, but when you do it and pretend like it never happened, that’s when people start looking at homosexuality as creepy or clandestine. This is part of where the gay stereotype comes from, and it’s not until these guys start living confidently and openly that their sexuality will stop being a burden.

Steve Jango-Cohen is a Collegian contributor. He can be reached at [email protected]