By David Amsden
The man sitting across from me would like to tell me his name, but doing so is against his rules. He could tell me a fake name, he says, though not the one he typically uses when meeting a man in the middle of the day, since he has been using the same fake name for so long that it is almost real. Revealing it now would open him up to the potential of recognition, and, frankly, just imagining a scenario like that makes him wonder why he agreed to meet in the first place. He knows how he comes across. So shifty and paranoid. But he is not apologetic. Because when you live two separate lives, as he does, and when you have been maintaining these two separate lives for twenty years, as he has, coming across as shifty and paranoid is something of an inevitability.
I will call him William Dockett, for clarity’s sake. Over the past few weeks, William and I have been e-mailing regularly. This is what I know about him: I know that he is in his early forties and that he lives and works in Manhattan, earning around $200,000 annually in a job he wishes he was more passionate about. I know that he is a registered Democrat who grew up in a nearby suburb. I know that he has been married a decade and that he is the father of a small child. And I know—here his life gets complicated—that when he is at work, and things are slow, he goes to Craigslist and, with a familiar mixture of guilt and resignation and excitement, clicks on the “men meeting men†section of the personals.
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Gallery Carre
