The Boyfriend as Groupie

by Gwen Cooper — May 11, 2007

From Las Vegas, Robert and I head out to Los Angeles on an obscenely early-morning flight. My book has thus far received an enthusiastic response among gay readers, and so my reading in L.A. is at the gay indie bookstore A Different Light, in West Hollywood. The majority of my friends have always been gay men, but this is a side of me that Robert hasn't fully seen yet. I've found in the past that some men tend to be uncomfortable around my gay friends, and it's with a certain amount of trepidation that I look forward to Robert's seeing me in my, er, natural habitat.

Robert is an editor for a high-profile entertainment industry magazine, and he's done a great job at spreading the word among his contacts in L.A. That, combined with the store's efforts and my own, has drawn a large crowd. Many friends from my South Beach days now live out here, and they've turned out in force--more, I suspect, to get a peek at Robert than to actually hear me read.

This is both my first book and also the first serious relationship I've been involved in many years. There are friends of mine who've darkly predicted that Robert would get very tired of all this very quickly. Any new relationship is difficult enough, they tell me--but expecting Robert to be entertained traveling around with me for weeks on end, essentially as "Mr. Cooper," is, perhaps, unrealistically optimistic.

The thing that they don't know, and that I've only learned in the past couple of weeks, is that Robert has all the makings of a groupie. It turns him on--on a purely physical level--to see me up there, reading from my book and speaking to the crowd. Even the borderline inappropriate behavior of my friends as we're having drinks after the reading--making fake passes at him, or telling cringe-worthy stories about, "Gwen's last serious boyfriend; he was a heroin addict!"--seems to produce an amused response in him more than anything else. The pattern that we appear to have settled into, as I get more of these readings under my belt, is that the evening begins with him saying soothing things to assuage any pre-reading jitters, and ends with the two of us in bed and him begging to go down on me.

And, of course, I'm happy to oblige...it really is all about the fans...

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.