The Desirability Politics of Dobby the House Elf
Sometimes to feel hot is to dress up like a creepy little CGI dude. And sometimes to feel hot is not enough.
I love women. For many queer boys, our first friends and protectors are our older sisters, female friends, and English teachers named Deb. They stand up for us while we are closeted offering a comfort and safety we both benefit from. We are unready for relationships with other queer people— lest that place us in further danger, and possibly never with straight men (an acquired taste for even the bravest of God’s children.) For our female friends, we offer male companionship without pesky sexual undertones. That being said, I hate going to clubs with women.
I am on edge at straight clubs: feeling like that one Trisha Paytas war video fighting for my full damn life while Evan, the 5-foot-7 Irish Catholic leers at us. If my friend is interested I end up dancing alone to the cacophonous call and repeat of Sugar We’re Going Down, while the two make out. If they are not interested, suddenly I am expected to perform the Oscar-winning role of Fruity Boyfriend who Fights Good.
(Note: I have never gotten into a physical altercation, but once I got road rage so bad that I almost jumped out of the car. To do exactly what, the world will never know.)
As you can imagine this is not exactly my idea of letting loose.
On occasion, my female friends will go with me to a queer club. This can be fun, especially with my more dance-oriented friends; the ones who used to choreograph routines for their aunts to announce sleepover plans. As endearing as that may sound to you Dear Reader, the harnessed hard-bodied men of these clubs don’t always find choreography from The Cheetah Girl’s Strut a huge turn-on. Their loss.
So when my gay friend suggested a Ptown Halloween trip, I needed very little convincing.
I had never been, but had two conflicting points of reference. One was from the worst woman I had ever met, who described Ptown as “fabulous and quaint.” I am fairly certain I am the first gay person she had ever spoken to, but she had watched Modern Family, so she basically got it. My other point of reference was Dick Dock, which depending on who you asked could certainly be considered “fabulous” but probably not “quaint.” I think if someone ever described my oral skills as “quaint” I would just hang the whole thing up.
My first order of business was deciding what my costume would be. I see Halloween a little differently from others, in that I believe it is the most important holiday of the year and an amazing opportunity to wear something sexy. I am the first person to ever have this thought. For me, when I think of sexy, I think of the creepy little CGI dudes from films in the 2000s i.e. Gollum, Yoda, and of course Dobby the House Elf. What can I say, I have always had a thing for bug eyes and liver spots.
When you look through the aisles of Spirit Halloween you can usually find a Sexy Little Red, Sexy Nurse, Sexy Susan B. Anthony, but very rarely Sexy Dobby. In my opinion, this is a failure of the Halloween Industrial Complex. Of course, I would not allow this to stand in my way. In a queer Maria Von Trapp (see Sue Sylvester) surge of ingenuity, I created my own costume from the curtains in my bedroom. Ptown was not ready for this cataclysmic serve.
Things are very rarely exactly what you expect. I would say my trip to Ptown contained a little of column A and a lot of column B. My friend and I certainly got into some quaint cutie-pie mischief: going for a beachside walk and shopping at a fudge store that missed out on the objectionably perfect name— Fudge Packers. But we also were met with plenty of the DDE (Dick Dock Energy) as well. When we checked into our Airbnb our host revealed to us that our shared bed was brand new so “feel free to break it in boys.” He told us this through the tops of his eyebrows, staring us down like a horny Randall from Recess and truly licking his lips between each and every word. As the night progressed, the energy of the beach town veered more heavily into DDE. Gone were the few families we had seen before and in their stead were dozens of jockstrap-clad men with hats and tees with pithy witticisms like: “top bunk” or “father figure.” There was a tangible, and dare I say, olfactory feeling of fuck in the air.
This was not going to be like the nights out with my girlfriends. My Dobby costume took me from quaint to taint, and I was ready to release the wiggle, and my DDE.
It was immediately apparent from the smell (some may call it musk) that we had chosen the wrong club. The Vault, which is known as a “cruise and kink” club, was probably not the right place for our silly costumes. But we were still committed to having fun. You see, we had made a few minor miscalculations and booked an Airbnb about three miles from downtown, and no Ubers went out that far. Usually, this would not be a problem, but Ptown does this very fun and unique thing where they don’t actually have any streetlights. So, Dobby and his partner-in-crime, a demon Rodeo Clown, had to walk for an hour along the freeway in the pitch dark. It was freezing, and a curtain and a jockstrap don’t offer much by way of insulation from the late October New England chill. Which is why we embraced the heavy dark pulsing heat of The Vault and all its gyrating men so readily.
I—and I cannot stress this enough, felt hot. My hardly-there curtain dress hung loosely from my body and the bottom cleavage of my butt played peek-a-boo all night long. If that sounds hot to you, please DM me, because the men at this party were less than enamored. In fact, a better word for it was that they reviled us. I caught multiple men staring at us with the specific disgust and hatred you only find from racist Vietnam War vets on a public bus. A man in a Native American headdress (don’t worry, he was dressed as Lana Del Rey) came up to make a move, but upon seeing our ghoulish faces and bald caps, quickly turned around. I heard him say to his friend (slutty Mystique from X-men) “What the fuck are they doing here?” and truly, I had to agree.
I wanted attention, wanted to feel seen and desired, and all those things that we pretend we don’t need. I wanted to feel like I belonged and thought I would finally fit in more, wrongly blaming all those nights I was ignored on the friends who had come along with me. And as much as I wanted to redirect my blame, I couldn’t.
As the lights turned back on, and the harsh realization settled in I saw it didn’t matter if I went to a club with women, or if I went to a club with gay men. It didn’t matter if I wore what I wanted, or what I thought men wanted. It didn't matter if I was looking, or just looking to have a good time, the results were always the same. The type of men who largely occupy these spaces, the type of men who I unfortunately crave approval from and want to desire me most of all, will never see me as anything other than Dobby.