Cruising at 18

You have to understand there was no way to know but that look, that glance back, so I had become really good at it, because bored teenagers in suburbs have nothing but time. Not that I actually followed up to the first contact much.

There were no mobile phones, no internet. Yeah, there were only toy home computers and no network, no WiFi, no mobiles, no phone data, no apps, no wiki, no nothing. Life could be unbelievably boring unless you had brought a book or magazine in your backpack, because that was all the portable entertainment there was if you suddenly had to wait for something, and there always was a lot of waiting for everything in the eighties and nineties. You never knew whether the bus was actually coming or the trams were on time. You couldn’t look anyone up online, except their phone number in a big book if you had their name, or called Directory Assistance who were people who could look things up in their big book if you weren't home with your big book.

Some of the toy home computers might be able to network on forums if you were ready to pay a buck per minute because landlines were still metered, and no teen was ready.  No apps to cruise on, no forums to grow up in, no websites to see sex or find others or even find out what it meant to be gay, just TV shows and movies gatekept by straight society invested in either seeing you suffer or being magnanimous in giving you a tiny place in the sun, and a lot of books by and for and about tortured adults. Oh, and all kinds of porn, that you had to go to special stores for you could not enter, and the top-shelf skin magazines in bookstores which also had guys. If you were in the right country. I was.

So, the look. You see a guy approach on the street. You look him in the eye, briefly, but a beat too long. Straight men are so acculturated to not make contact that they aren’t looking, or look very briefly, afraid to start a fight. If the guy looks just as long and direct like you do, it’s a cruise. You take two more steps, and turn around to see if he’s looking back as well. If he is: bingo. Contact.

And I was a cliché barely eighteen, in June of 1988, staying with a relative in Amsterdam, because I was looking for housing since I would move there in September to study. Already tall, still blond, baby fat in the face, walking down the Overtoom, one of the longest streets, in the late evening from wherever I had hung out. He walks towards me with someone else, another guy. We exchange the look. A few steps later we both turn to see the other is looking. I keep walking, and sit down on the steps of one of the townhouses.

He approaches me alone, and asks if I want to go for a beer.
I say no.
He apologizes, he thought I looked at him.
I say I did. I just don't drink beer.

And so that night I end up in my first gay bar (April) and on my way to have —eventually — a boyfriend, all before I even had a place to live or started uni.