That humans are politicians before being animals. That gray areas lead to madness and social atrophy.

As I drive through the barren, Arctic streets of downtown Milwaukee in one of those trajectories where all traffic lights seem to be evidently against you, I read on a nightclub’s marquee: “Thursday, Ladies Night.”

Thursday is today and there is something apocalyptically melancholy about coming across a night club during daytime, with its neon lights turned off, the doors so hermetically shut.

A post-doomsday kind of sadness that echoes attempting to resurrect a soft phallus when it seems more victim of its gravity than its inevitable urges.

I am on my way to a gay wedding on the East Side, a wedding that was surprisingly straight (except people had fun), but perhaps that was the whole point. Borrowing the cultural toolkit of “the other” so the reclaiming feels irrevocably official.

It seems that reading something while waiting for a red light incredibly speeds up the sensation of being stuck in traffic.

So in the absence of a crumpled up New York Times section laying around, I read the night club’s marquee once again: “Thursday, Ladies Night.” And it occurs to me, suddenly but also familiarly (like a prelude to a vomit), that a gay man’s sexual satisfaction will never be able to compete with the rejoice of having your very own state of prey be displayed in neon lights for busy downtown streets to see.

I have always thought that “Ladies Night” is one of the most evident proofs of a kind of blinding sexism that governs social relationships. But since both parties seem to enjoy it and take advantage of it, it seems to also prove that while it may be easy, or logical, to intellectualize sexuality as a discipline, actual sexual drives just cannot be tamed.

And no matter how much we try to infuse reason to sexuality’s boundaries, its animalistic, primal urges will end up finding their way. In the bedroom, or on a nightclub’s marquee.

This bitter reminder that for some women may seem unfortunate (their state of passive merchandise on display for hungry, chauvinistic eyes), actually feels like an incurable nausea to gay man’s lonesome sexual self.

No matter how many naively invented artifacts we come up with to infuse our sexuality with differential tools that could possibly satisfy the atrocity of wanting that which is physically unable to want us back, we will ultimately fail.

Whatever we fabricate to see a different kind of sexual syntax — one we may actually be able to annunciate — one that echoes back, we will always just hear the very synthetic reverberation of our most primal sexual pleas.

A gay man is stuck with a sexuality that has to be concocted and dreamt and planned out and carried out like a lab test. A photographic lie.

It cannot assume the interested gaze of the other at any time (except through proper inquiring) because it depends on an exterior freedom straight men cannot give. It depends on the unleashing and the shattering of a history of sexual misconception so brutal it has led a planet to believe that sex is social first, personal later. That humans are politicians before being animals. That gray areas lead to madness and social atrophy.

So when I dream of a lit-up marquee announcing to half a city’s laborers that tonight is gay men’s night, I dream of a night where looking for love doesn’t have to be a long, lethal guessing game of a few leftover players who accepted the extensiveness of their masculinity or who were just too faggie to attempt theatricalizing.

Women benefit from this beautifully taken-for-granted perennial state of erotic reference. A weak self-steem may leave them wondering the degree of desire they are capable of triggering.

But they are inevitably sure that someone wouldn't mind using their bodies for self-induced enjoinment. The innate erotic value that each of them holds is, in a sense, the prerequisite for the world to exist as it does.

As for gay men, the very notion that their bodies are good for something other than playing devil's advocate to the status quo feels questionable. One of gay men's sexuality's biggest disgraces is the fact that they inherently know not to fall down. No one will care to catch us. We will be bounced back onto the stratosphere of asexual gods only to resume our downfall mission.

Our strengths are so similarly bruised. Our limbs jagged on the same sides, to the same angles, by the same devices, the same sharp words, the same withdrawal. With the same kinds of scrapings and missing parts, we will never find a willing non-void to match.

Our horror is that the melancholy of being sexually null uniforms us into twin brothers — who keep painstakingly trying to find something different to stare at, to get intrigued by, to fall in love with — to no avail.

We end up having no way out of repeatedly falling in love with our own selves. And their multiple faux versions. Half-assedly. Like minimal, self-inflicted bleeding to make sure you still feel a thing.

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