And in short, I was afraid. 1 My father liked Chris because he could tell she wanted me to fuck her, but when I wouldn''t she left me for someone who would; I think she held out two weeks. Becky was next. She waited nearly a year for the same thing, and if I hadn''t left for college I''d probably still be trying to work up the nerve to go to second base. In college there was Martina, who called me Spike, and Lisa, who was fat, and Shilpa, who always dated guys who turned out gay, and then there was Joy. We dated the summer after our freshman year and I wrote a story about that. Kelly was my last girlfriend. She was the hot freshman when I was the "bisexual" junior, and she liked the way I danced.

At a gay disco--Traxx, RIP--I managed to knock her out cold with a well-executed but badly timed spin on the dance floor, and the bruise on her chin lasted longer than our . whatever it was. Franois was Brian''s ex. Brian wasn''t interested but      Franois was, and he invited me over for Christmas; I stayed three days. A month later he passed me off to Marek, whose kiss had a chemical tang--not my thing. Brian (a different Brian) had been a professional masseur, and the massages were better than the sex; soon enough, though, his hands grew tired and my dick grew restless. Jean-Claude and I made it through all four seasons of the year, starting in spring and ending in winter. He broke up with me during my lunch break--oh, the drama!--but we got back together, and then I broke up with him on Thanksgiving day.

He came over covered in fake blood from an ACT UP demo, showered, and then we sat on Tasha''s bed, he naked, I clothed, and ended it to the sounds of side two of Who''s Afraid of the Art of Noise? , which scratched melancholically from Tasha''s old record player. Later we went to Bruce and Roger''s for turkey and Jean-Claude left in the middle of the meal, in tears; Bruce never forgave me for that. Damien was one of those shaved-head ACT UP clones who look simultaneously like a neo-Nazi and an inmate at Auschwitz; he told me he''d had sex with Terence Trent D''Arby in the Ramble, and that he, Terence Trent, had an enormous cock. Derek and I fucked almost every night for two weeks and then he went to Amsterdam; a few weeks later I was at David''s apartment having my hair dyed pink when Derek showed up: David''s mohawk was blue and Derek''s was green, and his roots didn''t need a touch-up. Dan lived with Charles and was having an affair with John; I was number three on that chain until Dan couldn''t take it anymore, and one by one broke it off with all of us. Dennis was the fourth D in four months: he lived opposite the Hells Angels clubhouse on East 3rd Street, and the lamp on his night table was shaded with X-rays of his skull. Then Eric: after two months during which we both gained weight, he took me to Film Forum to see Sunset Boulevard for my twenty-fourth birthday, and then, over gelato at Raffetto''s, he said, Well, Dale, it looks like our friendship is becoming a friendship. Patrick''s the only one I regret, but Tasha insisted we looked good together: his skin was so coated in freckles it was orange, like his hair, and orange has always looked good on me.

Eventually I took him to the Bar to break up because I didn''t want to have sex first, went home that night with Frank, who''d also broken up with someone earlier in the day. John turned out to be the oldest (although Franois never told me his age); he had hair everywhere except his head. Barry was a palliative care nurse from Australia who just happened to be the first person to test positive Down Under--he''d helped design the nation''s pilot program. Scott was British, here on an internship, and when I made out with him on the subway he flipped. A fan of cottaging, he''d had sex in public restrooms and parks and at least one cemetery, but he''d never held hands with another man on the street, let alone kissed someone on a train. Will couldn''t eat food if it was served on a blue plate. That wasn''t why we broke up but it was still, you know, weird. A month later I went to England to promote Martin and John ; met Robbie; ended up spending two out of the next three years in London.

When I finally gave up and moved back to New York I had the sense that there was less of me than there''d been before. I was, what? twenty-seven? twenty-eight? If you''d told me it would be another decade until I''d meet the man I was going to marry, I''d''ve probably slit my wrists.      Because this was how it worked: before I could have sex with a man I had to believe I could love him--forever. This wasn''t just fantasy, it was foreplay. The particular way a man looked and the first few words he said provided me with more than enough material to manufacture a life together. These visions, depending on the length of acquaintance, could be revised or abandoned; sometimes they turned into journal entries, sometimes stories; usually they were forgotten after I came. Looking back, I realize they were mostly a way for me to pretend I was looking for The One when what I was really looking for was The Next One. That sounds like residual Christian guilt and who knows, maybe it was, but I think it had more to do with the fact that, for a gay boy ten days shy of his fourteenth birthday on July 3, 1981, sex would forever straddle a nebulous line between meaninglessness and metaphor.

"Sex with abandon": that''s what Allen Barnett eulogized in The Body and Its Dangers , and that''s what I wanted. Sex that was anonymous, inconsequential, and available whenever and wherever I looked for it. But I knew I would never have it, and not just because of AIDS. Promiscuity had become a homosexual corollary around the time I was born, and by the time I reached puberty it was practically a moral imperative. But by 1991, or ''93, or ''95, it had devolved into a kind of last stand against the epidemic, and everyone and everything it had taken from us. It was all we had left. Oh, we had new things, sure. We had ACT UP.

We had visibility. We had, God help us, our pride, and the targeted marketing campaigns from alcohol manufacturers to prove it. But sex was all that remained of what we''d had before. What we''d been before. Sex, a few books and even fewer plays, some pictures and paintings, a handful of movies; and as a consequence every back-room blowjob, every hookup, every flushed condom and sticky-dicked walk of shame was a refusal to renounce the behavior that formed the core of our personal as well as cultural identities.      Still, for my first two or three years in the city, I obsessed over the status of ex-boyfriends and tricks, took an anxietyridden, morbid, but very real comfort in the fact that no one I''d slept with had died yet. Yet : though I never acknowledged it, a tiny voice at the back of my head was always asking: Who will be first? But once that question was answered, and once it happened again--and again and again--a more terrifying prospect raised its head:      Who will be last?.