A Weekend in D.C.

A self-indulgent essay on The Prettiest Star, sexuality, and travel

1.

I start to cry as the train crosses the Virginia border. The tears have hovered on the corners of my eyes for the past two hours, threatening the action they’ve finally decided to take. A moment of catharsis. A moment of embarrassment. The woman next to me is kind enough to let concern for me show in the crinkled lines of her forehead, but not kind enough to ask if I’m okay.

Carter Sickels’s The Prettiest Star sits on my lap. Two-thirds of the way into the book, and I still can’t quite believe the writer who put this story to paper is my teacher. Will soon be my peer. I was worried about the sadness in “every line” of the novel, but it’s not necessarily the subject matter that has me bawling. I have read novels about the AIDS crisis, studied that period of time in classes led by professors who watched friends die, and written stories of my own in an attempt to think through what it must have been like. The Prettiest Star, unlike so many of the other things the internet and booklists market to me as “tear jerkers,” does not hide, and by extension does not let its reader hide. Brian, the novel’s central character, carries a camcorder with him wherever he goes. His boyfriend told him to record “everything.” He cannot hide. His family cannot hide. And I cannot hide. Me with my baggy jeans, Doc Martens, and slightly too big tank top in a bright, firehouse red that I bought for fifteen dollars at Urban Outfitters.

I am on my way to Washington, D.C. to see a friend. She lives near Dupont Circle, an area the Grindr Explore page tells me has a high concentration of gay men. We will most likely go out dancing when I arrive, spinning and grinding with people who have never had to worry about watching friends and lovers waste away. People who don’t know the Donna Summer song thrumming from the speaker was first enjoyed by men who might have been dancing in the empty space beside them if it weren’t for homophobia, government negligence, and the seemingly always too slow pace of medical breakthroughs.

2.

My first afternoon in D.C., my friend takes me to a gay bar in her neighborhood for happy hour martinis. I am too nervous to say that I have never had one before and that I am not sure the combination of alcohol and olive juice will sit well after six hours on a train.

It is only 5:30 pm, and the bar is packed. A waiter seats us beside a trio of gay men in their 70s. I am staring, but I hope they know it is out of interest and camaraderie. I cannot really remember the last time I saw a group of gay men that age. My friend talks about the older gay men in D.C. the way my parents talked about stray cats and dogs in Santo Domingo: plentiful, constant. What is it like to have a gayborhood only a ten-minute walk from your door? To see gay men older than the invention of PrEP walking hand in hand past the front porch of your walk-up?

Over the course of the next hour, as I swallow more mouthfuls of martini, my apprehension about getting caught staring fades. Partly because it is clear they are listening to my friend and I catch up. If I am guilty, then they are guilty too. How silly we must seem to them. Drinking on an empty stomach, leaning across the table to sip our drinks rather than lifting them to our mouths and risk spilling. I could turn to them and ask for recommendations, perhaps they are experts on the city’s cruising scene, but I don’t. And they don’t join our conversation either. We’re each happy to observe. To consume.

3.

I redownload Grindr for my three-day stint in the Capitol. It’s common wisdom on the internet that appearing on the grid in a new city is a surefire way of securing a one-night stand.

The gay men in D.C. are all twenty-five, white, and in an open relationship. At least in the parts of the city I found myself opening the app in. One man was searching for loads in the African American History Smithsonian. I hope he got some.

One of the profiles close to me on the grid has chosen the name “Blow Jobs for National Guard.” A moniker that is funny if I assume good faith and irony on the part of the fifty-eight-year-old man who made it his screen name. The National Guard is everywhere in the city. Nearly as common are the “Free D.C.” flags and signs. One of the men who reached out to me on Grindr has one in his profile picture. There is a baseline level of political consciousness here that is downstream of living so close to the seats of national politics, but also from simply being in a dense, walkable city. Everything happens two miles from you. Every day effect of something such as the occupation of D.C. by the National Guard is unavoidable. The relationship between community, politics, and sex is on the surface here in a way it isn’t in Raleigh, Evanston, or League City.

4.

Our Friday night plans are cut short by the alcohol content of the martinis we drank at happy hour and the wine and ginger beer concoction my friend created before we got in the Uber to her favorite Ethiopian restaurant. We are out with one of her friends from college, N. Though he and I take her home, she insists we continue the night without her, handing me her keys.

N takes me to one of the gay bars my friend had penciled into our itinerary. A nice cocktail bar with outdoor seating and the lilting voices of gay men in their thirties. N and I spend an hour talking. He is kind, attractive, and too worried about my friend to stay out. I understand, but I am also more than a little put out. Perhaps it’s because our relationship to her is different, but from the moment she crossed the threshold of her apartment, I stopped worrying. I have heard stories of worse nights over the phone. Who is the better friend, N or me?

By the time I arrive at my friend’s apartment, it is eleven pm. A small part. ofme had wondered if N and I would hookup, or, at the very least, make out. It’s what gay men, especially in D.C., do. With that possibility not coming to fruition, I turn back to Grindr.

As slow and agonizing to use as the app has become (I was too young and closeted to be on the app during its heyday, which millennials have told me was 2018-2020). It’s as comforting a presence as it is an enraging one. For every bot asking me to send them pics of my feet, there is a man who wants to have sex with me because he swears I am the hottest person he has ever seen. Then, of course, there are the men who are drunk and horny and simply want quick sex with the person closest to them on the grid. I’ve been there, too.

As I am sitting down on the edge of my friend’s bed, having already taken off my contacts, a boy my age, with no profile picture, asks me if I want to “have some fun.” There is a world where I say no. A world where I live in a city like New York or Chicago, and the idea of someone wanting me so badly they are willing to pay for an Uber and clean up my vomit when I double over in their sink seconds after arriving at their apartment is a regular enough occurrence that it doesn’t feel like a deleted sketch from Emma Seligman’s movie Bottoms. A world where I have had a boyfriend. A world where the comfort of a mattress appeals to me more than the thrill of a stranger’s mouth.

This hookup with a boy whose name I never learn is the first time I have had penetrative sex in almost two years. It is not my first hookup in two years. The majority of my hookups simply involve everything but penetration. Gay men derisively call this “side” play. I have no skin in the game of what forms of sexual expression are valid. The truth is that I am simply too lazy to bottom for strangers and topping ranks near the middle of the road in terms of what is most likely to get me off.

I share this because my infrequent forays into penetrative sex mean I am currently not on PrEP. By admitting this, I am inviting chastising messages from every queer man I know. All my friends are on it. My past situationships are on it. I was on it once. There isn’t a great reason for my current abstention. If I had to provide one, I would say that while I am out and proud in every other aspect of my life, one of the main stigmas that still lingered in my head as an undergraduate was explaining to my parents why I needed a prescription for a drug to prevent HIV. When you think about it, this shame is stolen valor. Unlike the protagonist of The Prettiest Star, my existence as a gay man is not seen by society as inherently tied to a crisis everyone believes I caused. Sex is not associated with fear for me because I live in a world where the deaths of a generation of gay men spurred people to find preventative measures that prevent transmission and make the virus undetectable. Men like Brian died hoping for a drug that I have continued to put off renewing my prescription for.

Though I am not on prep, the boy who ushered me into the bathroom and rinsed my mouth with Listerine before pushing me onto his bed is. Still, we confirm each of us has been tested recently and has not had sex with someone who has not been. In total, the conversation and the sex last about an hour. Afterward, we lay in his bed, and he launches into a description of his job on Capitol Hill. When I reveal I’m from Texas, he asks me if I voted for Jasmine Crockett or James Talarico. I tell him I am no longer registered to vote in Texas and slip my vomit-stained tank top back on. Tired, tipsy, and unable to see due to the fact that I took my contacts out hours ago, I trek back to my friend’s place at two in the morning, listening to Addison Rae’s “Headphones On.”

5.

Saturday, Grindr leads me to the home of an older man whose husband is out of their apartment for the afternoon. Stacks of books fill every corner of the bedroom. He is an English professor and his husband is a religious studies professor. On the walk from my friend’s place, I passed the Irish embassy. These queens are living the life I yearn for.

Hours later, my friend, N, and I reconvene in her kitchen for our second attempt at a night out. Gathered around the kitchen counter, drinks in our hands and clothes of varying degrees of sluttiness clinging to our bodies, I can almost pretend I’m in Evanston again. The feeling grows stronger with each bar we visit, peaking at a lesbian bar/club that my friend simultaneously refers to as Pitchers and League of Her Own.

I love many things about Raleigh and the triangle but it has never been able ot give me the rush of bodies pressed close to mine, sweat sliding down my chest, and a margarita in my hand. Nights like this one, where I do not care that the sex I’ve had this weekend was subpar, or that I have no job lined up for after my graduation from my MFA program in two weeks, are rare. The last time was in the summer of 2024 with this same friend in another lesbian bar, though that one was in Chicago. If the song that cemented that weekend in history was Lorde and Charli XCX’s “Girl So Confusing” remix (released the same day we heard it in the club), then tonight it is the remix of Rhianna’s “Disturbia” and PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson’s “Stateside.” The pure faggotry that runs through my veins is what I imagine Brian and other gay twenty-somethings felt in the seventies and eighties listening to Donna Summer. The dance floor was their refuge long before it was mine.

6.

I spend most of Sunday, my last day here, walking from my friend’s place to Columbia Heights—a forty-minute walk in each direction. I make the trek to see a friend whom I have only ever interacted with online, despite the fact that we both attended Northwestern. Being able to traverse a significant stretch of the city on foot is another reminder of what I gave up to pursue my MFA. To arrive somewhere walkable in the triangle, I first have to drive there.

Walking through D.C. presents a clearer picture of its charms, but also the wealth disparity between neighborhoods. I walk over cracked sidewalks and past overgrown lawns and schools, the council members whose re-election posters are plastered across every available lamppost have promised to reallocate funding toward. Like Raleigh. D.C. has a significant population of Black people. Their history in the city is long and filled with pain and triumph alike. And like Raleigh, depending on how you move through the city, you would not see them. But on my walk to Columbia Heights, I move through many of D.C.’s immigrant communities. The “Free D.C.” signs are as plentiful as the ethnic grocery stores. Down the street from the coffee shop where I am meeting my friend from Northwestern is a shop whose roti my other friend swears is what she misses most from when she used to live in Columbia Heights herself.

7.

I miss out on achieving three days in a row with a hookup due to scheduling conflicts. A couple wanted me to come over for a threesome, but they were online when I was catching up with my friend from Northwestern, and now that I am nursing a Guinness across from my other friend (we split the G on our first try, by the way), they have gone silent. I don’t need to have sex again this weekend, but I am disappointed that it is the threesome in particular that fell through. Both because the couple was extremely attractive and because I’ve never had a threesome before. I like to think I would be good at it.

8.

On my Amtrak ride home on Monday, I crack open a copy of the Paris Review and loop Jensen McRae’s new song “One More Cowboy.” As I retrace my path across Virginia and North Carolina, I can’t help but also turn back to The Prettiest Star. Brian’s return to rural Ohio was final. My return to Raleigh is not final in the same sense. It could never be. But it does have a sense of finality all the same. I hope it is the last time I have to go on a trip to find someone on the Grindr grid who wants me. The last time I need to leave the city I live in to find a city I can walk across. To quote McRae: “Mama, can I have just one more cowboy?”

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