Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

by Chuck Klosterman

I wrote this story on a laptop computer in Austin, Texas. I was staying in the downtown Omni Hotel, and—after finishing the last paragraph—I went up to the hot tub on the roof and drank a beverage. There were two women with me in the water; they were very athletic, very married dancers from some kind of traveling theatrical troupe passing through east Texas. They ignored me completely, but I wordlessly listened to them have an intense (and completely serious) forty-five-minute conversation about (a) which gay male dancers in their theatrical troupe were most physically and intellectually attractive, and (b) whether it would count as cheating if they somehow convinced any of these gay guys to have casual heterosexual sex. Weirdly, their conclusion was that it would only qualify as infidelity if the encounter involved oral sex, since the gay men might then fantasize that they were actually getting blowjobs from other males (which would thereby make the physical exchange “reciprocal”). Obviously, this has nothing to do with Steve Nash. But it just seems like the kind of information people need to know.