Free What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman

of me, twenty pounds heavier, in some nice Midwestern boy’s arms, looking caught and squinty-eyed, lipstick smeared across my round, stuffed-pizza-stuffed cheeks, maybe a nipple or two accidentally poking out over the strapless dress I’d borrowed from my thinner roommate … So, not the classiest. But here in this gay club in London, squeezed in between about a thousand men with their hands on each other’s Disneylands (happiest places on earth), I could quietly hump this stranger’s leg and still come across like one of the daughters from
Downton Abbey.
    I found more evidence of my relative sense of decorum when I went to the bathroom, and had to squirm my way through the sea of humping men. It reminded me of when I was a kid and we would go play in the waves at night when the grunion were running. We’d scream as we ran across the sand covered with millions of slimy, squirming, mating fish, slithering all over each other and our toes … Crossing this dance floor was like that, but with more boners and bronzer.
    Anyway, I made it to the women’s bathroom to find that the door had two signs on it: one that read WOMEN , and a second that clarified WOMEN ONLY ALLOWED IN WOMEN ’ S RESTROOM!!!
NO MEN!!!
Once I pushed that door open, which was difficult due to the fact that the room was filled wall to wall with men, I found two stalls with signs of their own on the doors: ONE PERSON AT A TIME IN STALL!!! Each stall had two to four sets of male feet inside.
    I managed to beg my way to a moment with a toilet,and peed amongst the smell of cocaine and sounds of coupling/throupling, then made my way back to Emma and Sally, who sat with our Mauritian friends. Nicolas and Raj, the young gay New Yorker, talked to two older white-haired-and-jeaned gentlemen nearby, while Raj’s older sister, Leoni, watched in amusement.
    “Poor Raj,” she said. “These guys won’t leave him alone. And that one could be his father.”
    Raj was whispering into the older man’s ear, and smiling. Whatever he was saying was making the old man smile, too.
    One of the Mauritians leaned over to Raj’s sister: “Leoni, I don’t think he minds.”
    Leoni looked confused, and turned back to watch her brother, an idea slowly dawning. And that’s when we understood that not only did she not know her brother was gay, which was sort of like not noticing he had two arms and two legs, but the entire reason we were here tonight was so that her friends could help him come out via the fascinating approach of making out with old men in front of his sister. We had stumbled into a Mauritian coming-out party.
    Leoni started rocking back and forth, trying to self-soothe by saying things like, “I’m in the ocean surrounded by dolphins, I’m in the ocean surrounded by dolphins,” as she threw back her margarita and watched her brother grind on the hot, tan grandpa.
    We whispered among ourselves how incredible it was that she hadn’t seen that this obviously gay boy was gay as he and my date got pawed by the silver-haired men. I gotup to grab Nicolas, who had been ignoring me completely while he was wing-manning for his friend … really well.
Like, he didn’t seem to mind it at all, actually.
And then I realized that I, too, was not noticing that someone had two arms and two legs.
    I slept next to Emma that night.
    Sally, though, brought home a barrister. They got a second room for the two hours we had before we needed to wake up to catch our train to Paris, and Sally stumbled into our room to pack one hour and fifty minutes later. Realizing she had lost an earring in the other, now vacated, room, she called the front desk demanding to be let back in. But the room was under the barrister’s name, who had already left.
    “You guys, what was that guy’s name?” she called to us irritably, still on the phone with the front desk.
    We, too, did not know the name of the man with whom she had just had sex, so she yelled at the front desk for a few more