The Best Date of My Life Began in the Gay Section of the Bookstore
We really jumped past the small talk!
Last summer, I went on a date with a lovely ginger fella at an outdoor wine bar at the Grove in Los Angeles. When I found him in the promenade of the shopping center, he said it was a tradition that whenever he met somebody there, he always bought them a book from the Barnes and Noble.
So we strolled into the fluorescent bookshop predictably overflowing with literature from every genre imaginable, and I was immediately seized by the paralysis of choice — I had no idea what I was going to pick.
We rode the escalator to the second floor and suddenly we discovered a little square table that was clearly the “queer literature” section. While I admit I’ve never been as much of a bookworm as I’d like to be, the riches on that table brought forth so many memories and stories from me.
A few years earlier, I had been doing a Terrence McNally play in Austin TX with an actor friend who was a voracious reader, who inspired me to finally get back into reading novels — I mostly read plays and poetry back then.