My Very Worst Date was with I guy I had been with for a few months. Let’s call him Andrew. We met through training seminars that we had regularly at work, and although he lived a few hours away, we got to see each other at weekends and we chatted on the phone a lot.

I bought a ticket to a concert in his city that I was dying to go see. I asked if he wanted to go, but he had his friend’s birthday dinner that night and besides, he wasn’t familiar with the band. We agreed that I’d stay at his place for the weekend and on the we’d get together after the concert.

The weekend came and the concert was amazing, then I sent him a text to let him know I’d meet him at the restaurant. Timing was perfect as they were just finishing up dinner and getting ready to leave. Some of the people at this dinner were also good friends of mine so we all decided to go out. Andrew was really desperate to go to a gay bar. The two of us were the only gay people in the group, and I myself am not really a fan, but it was the closest place so we followed him.

The bar turned out to be quite nice. I was catching up with the people who were at the dinner when I saw Andrew talking to another guy, that we’ll call Bruce, as if they were old friends. I went up to Andrew and he introduced me to him. Bruce was nice and we chatted for a little while, but I still didn’t really know who this guy was. Andrew took me to one side and said “Look how flirtatious he’s being! I think he likes me!” I laughed a little and said he should tell Bruce who I was.

I started to feel a little uncomfortable about how much time Bruce was spending with Andrew, but I trusted him and continued chatting with our friends. Andrew storms over to me and says, in front of everyone, “So, on a scale of one to mad, how mad would you be if I kissed him?” I would have thought my death-glare would have given him some idea, but he repeatedly asked me and the opinion of my friends. The friends, understandably weirded out, all left and I was left watching the guy I had came in with all over someone else. It soon became clear that Bruce was in fact a total stranger whom he had just met.

Bear in mind, I was staying at his place and had nowhere else to go. I asked for Andrew’s key so I could go to bed. Andrew threw a hissy fit about how he wanted to stay and how he wanted me to be there at the club. He thought it was really funny and cute that I was mad and again, kept asking how mad I was “on a scale of one to mad.” I told him that I wasn’t going to stay, so I took his key and went back to his place to sleep. When I woke up I started to gather my stuff together to get the hell out of Andrew’s house. He woke up beside me and asked why I was leaving. I told him he must have been really stupid if he didn’t know why and I had to spell it out to him. “Oh… that…,” he said.

He told me nothing happened once I left and just stood around alone for a while, and that he felt so bad afterwards and blamed it on the alcohol. I was still pretty mad, but I said I would take some time to think about us. Taking this as forgiveness (?), he did an about-turn and said “Well, actually, I went back into the club to find Bruce to make out with him.”

The saddest part is he genuinely thought I would have been OK with this and he believed he didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t understand how I felt humiliated in front of our friends, how much of a scene he caused or how he ruined my and other people’s evenings.

Unfortunately, we had to see each other repeatedly because of our mutual friends as well as work. He made me feel uncomfortable when we did meet because he would ask my friends why I was being off with him and putting everybody in an awkward position. I began to realise how lucky I was because he became very emotionally unstable at times and developed a real Jekyll/Hyde personality.

Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold. I suffered months of having him undermine me, but the last straw was when I heard him brag about his big promotion with double the salary. I built up a dossier of all the misdeeds he told me about while we were together and ones that I discovered afterwards, and sent it to his superiors.

Let’s just say he has a lot more free time now to spend hanging round bars.

I was a 21-year-old gay man in Los Angeles–and had recently gotten out of a really awful and abusive relationship. I’m going to try to pass of the following as a lapse (or multiple lapses) in judgement due to desperation but i’m not quite sure if anyone will buy that.

I had started up a Match.com profile as a way to meet supposedly normal, relationship-minded gay men–as opposed to adam4adam or manhunt, which are purely focused on hookups (as one friend once said, “you’ll never meet your future husband on manhunt”). I had noticed a very handsome man we’ll call C. C was southern, educated and sculpted–three things that always turned me on. So I paid the $40 for a month of communication and we struck up a friendly convo, mostly about how we felt as gay men from small towns who recently relocated to LA and the associated frustrations.

To put it mildly, I was infatuated. we set up a date to meet up at a Thai place close to his apartment. I was thrilled.

So imagine my discontent when I glided into said Thai establishment to see an older, less sculpted version of C than I was expecting. However, he was still hot and still Southern, so I decided to not think much of it. As we talked and ate our pad thai, he kept getting text messages–from hookup buddies. He would read them out loud to me, in full detail. People who wanted his ______ and they wanted him to do _____ to them and he was so hot and blah blah blah.

In hindsight, I am still struck by my idiocy in staying through dinner. but, I was a shallow young buck, and I thought my charm and wit could win anyone over and bind them quickly into an exclusive relationship. In short, I was completely deluded and possibly mentally challenged.

As the night carried forward, he asked me back to his apartment to watch a movie. Aas naïve as i was, i still had not figured out that phrase was code for “I’m going to get you drunk and we’re going to hook up.” I was overjoyed! I had made it to level 2 of date 1! I was good at this!

We set foot into his giant and empty apartment. “My partner broke up with me a week ago,” he said. “All of the furniture was his so I really only have a tv and a mattress. Don’t judge me!” i ignored all the red flags and watched, mesmerized as he took his clothes off to change into sweats and a tank top. We drank coors light and watched half a movie while also getting hot and heavy. One thing lead to another, and we ended up rounding second base–when he decided to put porn on his huge TV, stopped paying any attention to me and finished so loudly that I imagined the neighbors across the street were like “Wtf was that strange guttural noise?” After trying to play it off as “hot” and asking me if I liked what I saw, he promptly passed out.

Two days later, he called and said he was in my neighborhood and he wanted to see me. I was thrilled. yes, dear reader, I was that dumb. He walked into my apartment, clad in workout gear that was so tight it left little to the imagination. I tried to begin a conversation, but he wanted to look something up online. He then explained he had to meet up with a few guys later. Yes, he was treating my apartment like an internet cafe. after checking manhunt for messages, he hands me my computer with an open credit card application and asks me to fill it out. I asked why and also why his name was in the “secondary authorized user” portion of the application. He told me that he needed a credit card and that it would bring us closer together as a couple. Thank god, I displayed some forethought and told him “I’d think about it.” (I didn’t do it.)

After helping him move two weeks later, and a series of drunken almost-hookups, I finally got rid of C. The final straw was when he invited me to an orgy, saying that his friends wanted to ‘meet’ me. I didn’t go, and I went to see my therapist the next morning, and for several months after that. My friends still talk about this string of terrible judgements of mine, and I still check my credit report frequently–just to make sure.

After exchanging a few emails via a dating website, this nice looking man and I arranged to meet for cocktails. Fifteen minutes past our designated meeting time, I texted him because I couldn’t find him at the bar; he responded that he was mistakenly at the place next door. As I eagerly watched the front door for him to enter, a 5’7” man sashayed in and my gaydar went off in a major way. I recognized his face from his profile photos, but they obviously purposely excluded a full-body shot. When he opened his mouth to say hello, his voice was reminiscent to Nathan Lane’s in The Birdcage. His nicely coiffed hair, waxed eyebrows, and glowing skin didn’t help persuade me much either. My head started reeling and I was trying to quickly figure out what the heck was going on – was I on a hidden camera show?! It was obvious that this man preferred men and I, if you hadn’t guessed, am a woman. My manners trumped common sense and I found myself ordering another beer for myself and a Jack and Diet for him. He then divulged that on his last date the girl questioned his sexual preference within the first 20 minutes. He was telling me that he was shocked and hurt, so of course I had to concur that it was awful and rude.

There were several awkward silences throughout the date and it didn’t help that the bartender was chuckling the whole time. When my date got up to visit the restroom, she and two customers at the bar exclaimed that he was clearly gay. Upon his return, his main topics of conversation included the following: he’s a season pass holder to Disneyland and likes to go down a few times a month to trade collectable pins with the cast members; he collects Star Trek figurines and really thinks people who keep them in their original packaging are lame – they are meant to be taken out and played with; and, he has outfitted his apartment with his female guests in mind – he bought a special shelf with hooks just for their purses.

I wanted the date to end so badly. I kept trying to think of an out, but he kept ordering drinks (for himself) and I was stuck in “be a nice person” mode. After nearly two hours, I announced I needed to be on my way. To my horror, he insisted on walking me to my car. Being that is was a bit chilly outside, he whipped out a bomber jacket that he had cleverly hidden up until this point. In large letters on the back it read, Tales from the Crypt and had some fancily embroidered character on it. On the front, where a name might be, was an assortment of Disney and Star Trek pins. He leaned in for a hug and a kiss, so I gave him a quick side hug and bolted.

MVWD was with an ongoing boyfriend. We’d been dating for about five months. This particular month, a convention was going to be in a nearby city. Since we both usually went, we decided to go together.

We booked a hotel room together for four; me, him (“Danny”), a friend, and my best-friend (“Lanna”). We arrived at the hotel the day before the convention “Day 0″ as it was commonly called.

Danny told me before we left that he was going to pay for the hotel–he had enough money in his account, and his mother (who has special red-flags placed on his credit card to prevent overspending) agreed to let him do it. Over the phone, the hotel manager told us the room would be one price, but then when we arrived it was nearly twice as much. Since the credit card wasn’t approved for that high an amount, it was denied. He called his mother to try to get the allowance upped, since he had enough in his account to pay for the higher amount anyways. She screamed at him until he handed her to the hotel manager. It was humiliating, so I grabbed the phone away from the manager and agreed to pay for it instead with the terms that she’d pay me back the original amount that Danny was going to pay. I appologized profusely to the manager. Lucky for Lanna and the friend, they were off watching our luggage and didn’t have to witness any of that. Humiliation #1

So we got the hotel room keys and unloaded our things then rushed to the convention hall to pick up our tickets. As expected, the line was about a mile long in the hot summer sun, all full of cosplayers and antisocial pale-as-ghost people. Lanna, the friend, and I did our best to amuse ourselves by singing or pointing out cool costumes, but everything we did got Danny to yell at us for being immature. A nearby bodyguard asked us if we needed any help with getting Danny away from us. Humiliation #2, having to admit that the guy yelling at us was my boyfriend and not a random other convention-visitor. I took to ignoring him after that and went back to having as much fun as I could waiting in a line, in the sun, while wearing a period accurate Victorian-era corset.

Day One went by without a hitch, but on Day Two, Danny decided he wanted us to walk together the whole day. He told me that he saw someone photographing me on Day One and felt worried that I’d leave him for a perv with a camera. I didn’t really care if anyone photographed me, since we were in public and I was dressed up crazy-like. Photographs come with the territory, and I told him as such. I spent an hour trying to convince him how I enjoyed getting photographed and didn’t mind people sneaking a picture here and there. So we were walking and I told him there weren’t any events I wanted to see, so instead I wanted to spend the morning shopping at the merchant’s floor for good deals on used comic books. He suggested we go to the Game Room instead.

For those of you who don’t know, the Game Room is a large, stinky room filled with fat, underbathed menchildren who go to a convention to play XBOX fighter games. Not a fan of RockBand, sexual harassment that I usually get for being a girl gamer, or Mortal Combat, I reminded Danny that he has those games at his house so we could play when we went home. But apparently, that wasn’t good enough for him. So I headed to the line to enter the Merchant’s Hall. It was so long, it went utside and down the street. I told Danny that he didn’t have to wait with me but he insisted. A surprisingly short while later, we were back inside the convention hall and about to enter the doorways to the Merchant’s Hall where he suddenly decided that it would be a great idea to pull me out of line to go where he wanted to go, because he was bored to death.

I pulled my arm out of his grip and asked him what he thought he was doing, he told me we were going to the Game Room. “You can go, but I waited in this line and I’m going to go buy stuff. We can meet up after then, in like an hour?” I smiled, trying desperately to assure him that there was no chance of any of his paranoid fantasies coming true. But again, even as I try to be the negotiator, it only made him angrier that I wasn’t complying. He grabbed my arm again and I shoved him away. He raised his arm in the air as though to hit me, and screamed “FUCK YOU, BITCH!” so loudly, that everything else in the entire convention lobby (4,000+ people) went quiet. He noticed the silence, drew his hand back, and ran off. Humiliation #3, as everyone stared at me. I shrugged it off somehow at the time. A couple of people who were in line near my took me under their wing to show me some great deals (they probably felt bad for me having such a shitty boyfriend).

It took several hours, but I eventually started to cry over it. And I couldn’t stop crying, either. It was one of those painful and uncontrollable-type crying fits. I couldn’t even see enough to make my way out of the convention and back to the hotel room, so I just sat in a corner away from all the people I could. Worst of all I couldn’t call Lanna or the friend to come get me, because my phone had no service. I started hyperventilating and around then someone picked me up and carried me to the staff room, because they were worried that I was going to stop breathing (apparently it looked like I was having an asthma attack). A staff member called Lanna for me and she walked me to the hotel room and held me while I cried.

I broke up with Danny that night and slept in the hotel’s closet so I didn’t have to be next to him. He spent every moment we were in the same room together afterwards apologizing. I hadn’t cried because of HIM, I cried because I lost the ‘spark’ of chemistry we had and it hurt that I had broke up with him, but it hurt even worse knowing that I had such bad taste in men that I’d managed to pick another abuser. My self-esteem was at an all-time low, but I managed to stop crying by the third day and continued to have a great time WITHOUT Danny nearby. Whenever he was around, he was such a downer. All he could do was apologize and bemoan his actions, even after I told him to drop it!

On the fourth day, Lanna told me a secret she’d kept from me. She told me that she was a lesbian and that she was always trying to be so close to me because she wanted me to go out with her. It’s been almost two years since that day. Lanna and I are still together and we couldn’t be happier. We’re celebrating our second annual anniversary at the convention, which Danny no longer attends (or if he does, he avoids the hell out of me like I prefer he would).

So thank you, Danny, for introducing me to the love of my life.

My Very Worst Date was with an alumna of the women’s college we both attended.  We were friends while I was still an undergrad, but I was often very busy with schoolwork and an internship in another state.  If I told her I couldn’t hang out due to an assignment or work, she would show up at my dorm with bizarre “care packages”–packs of smokes, bottles of Gatorade, strawberries and champagne, and once an entire ice cream cake.  She would get angry if I wasn’t appreciative enough of her gestures or tell her how cute and thoughtful the creepy messages she left under the windshield wipers of my car were.

I made excuses for her and brushed off the red flags for several months. On the fourth of July that summer, I was interning in Providence and she was 90 minutes away in Massachusetts. We agreed to spend the holiday together.  Everything was going great when I arrived, and we went out to a local Mexican restaurant for dinner. We had a few too many margaritas and shots of tequila, and ended up stumbling towards our old college campus. We were climbing up some scaffolding on one of the academic buildings when I dropped a few hundred dollars in cash from my pocket.  We were drunk, but I wanted to find the cash so I could get home in the morning. She told me I should just wait, and we’d find it later. I drunkenly agreed.  Up on the roof, we ended up having sex until Public Safety showed up. We could hear them walking around the grounds beneath us, so when they left I suggested we climb back down and find the money before they came back.

When we climbed down, I found the bills, but saw her stuff one into her pocket.  I didn’t say anything, and she started running. I called out to her, but she never slowed down. I still had her shoes (she was barefoot by then) and iPhone in my bag, so I walked back to her house to retrieve my car.  I dumped her belongings on her front porch and was ready to drive away when she stormed out of her house and jumped onto the hood of my Explorer. She screamed, “If you leave now, I will never speak to you again!” so I said “FINE!” and opened my car door. She grabbed the door from me and began to slam it on me repeatedly. Then she threw a lit cigarette at me, burning me.  I jumped in the car and drove all the way back to Providence, probably a bad call in my condition, but I was terrified. She sent me dozens of text messages ranging from “come back!  please!” to “i wipe my ass with hundred dollar bills and you fucking ruined everything over money.”

The next morning, safely in Providence, I woke up to more text messages saying things like “I hope I didn’t hurt you.  I think we both could have done a better job expressing what we were thinking and feeling last night.” Since I had been having a silly, fun night up until her strange money melt-down, I still don’t understand where things went wrong or why she suddenly became so angry.

I’m writing this because I’ve seen a few complaints in the comments about how the only LGBT dates published on here are the overly sexed. I thought I would share my recent attempt at a “normal” gay date

I met a woman online, S, and we chatted for about two months before we both finally had some free time. We chose a cute, gay-friendly restaurant by my place. S was about 40 minutes late. When she got there, S wouldn’t look me in the eye. I thought, “Maybe I’m not as cute as I thought.” I left to use the restroom for a few minutes to freshen up. When I walked back, the waitress tried to slip me her number on the way to my table. She complimented my dress and heels. “OK”, I thought, “It’s not me.” Then the reason for S’s shyness became clear to me. At the table, I started to ask her questions about other people she had met through the website. She was using non-gender specific pronouns. I decided to be a bit more direct with my questions. During the conversation, I found out several things that she had never shared with me during our daily messages:

1. I’m the first woman she’s been on a date with.

2. She has a 13-year-old daughter that she needed to get back to (She’s 30, mind you. It was just very surprising.)

3. She and her daughter live at her parents’ home.

4. She does, in fact, believe that biological warfare could actually cause the zombie apocalypse. (At first I thought she was joking. When I realized she was serious, I explained to her rationally why that wasn’t possible and she changed the topic to SARS being a test by some government.)

5. She is currently sleeping with a man (and was angling for a threesome with this man) that she has 0 interest in because he’s “so nice.” Nice = Deserving of Sex?

After hearing 1 and 2, I had pretty much checked out. These are both pretty important things that should have been shared during our two months of messaging back and forth. I only found out about 3-5 because food service is incredibly slow in Canada.

At the end of dinner, I told her that I needed to go check in on my dog. When she got home, she called me to let me know she made it home safe (I hadn’t asked her to do that) and then tried to start an overly sexual conversation on the phone. She asked how my “oral skills” are and told me she “couldn’t wait to try them.” Keep in mind that there was no point of the date where I spoke in sexual way. Even when she spoke of her “fun guy friend,” I quickly changed the topic. I hurried her off the phone and just said I was busy.

S tried to IM me a few times after that, even after I told her that I thought we didn’t have any chemistry. Her response being “But, I’m really attracted to you…” I blocked her after she started IM’ing me with messages like “What are you wearing?”

MVWD happened when I was 18, a freshman in college, in a new city where I didn’t know anybody. I’m a big fat nerd, so immediately I homed in on the local comic bookstore; the first time I went in, they didn’t have the comic I was looking for, so I had the cute guy behind the counter order it.

Desperate for a job, I also fill out an application.

A few days later, counter-guy finds me on Facebook, telling me that he often uses FB to inform customers of their orders coming in. Great. Fine. Then he starts IMing me. Bored, I go along with it. Then, he asks me out and–not looking to date anybody right then–I decline. He keeps asking. I keep declining.

Finally, he tells me that my comic will be coming in on X day, so when X day rolls around, I bus down to pick it up, only to have him say: ”Your comic’s not here yet, but I get off work in five minutes and I know you’re free. Wanna do lunch?”

Hesitantly, I agree.

Immediately out the door, he mentions that there might be a position opening up at the store, and I ask if he’d put in a good word for me, since I really needed a job, and would love to work there. His reply:

“I would, but I really don’t see how you’d have time to have a job, since you don’t have time to date me.”

At my appalled look, he tries to play it off as a joke, but the damage is done.

Then he orders two beers with his lunch. At noon.

I decline to let him drive me back to my dorm and afterwards,  immediately block him from all my contact lists, studiously ignore his calls, and start buying my comics online

MVWD occurred during my first semester of college. I worked in an organic grocery store which attracted a number of strange customers, one of whom was a rather nice gay man, P, who was a favourite of all the cashiers. I was 18, and I closed the store by myself most weeknights, a time when P would come in and buy his favourite chocolate milk. After seeing him nearly everyday for a while, we got to talking and he mentioned his exotic Asian travels. When he gave me his Facebook information, I didn’t think anything of it.

A few weeks later, he commented on one of my status updates about my craving for pumpkin pie and asked me on a ‘pie’ date. I was thrilled, an older gay guy (he was 34-ish) wanted to take me out? That’s awesome! We agreed to meet at the store I worked at was it was near my house and a safe place to leave my car. We met, and naturally, things got awkward fast. I realized the second we started driving to the sushi place he’d picked that not only was he a lot older than I had thought but we’ve got absolutely nothing in common other than he shopped where I worked.

After an uncomfortable and rather expensive dinner, we invited me back to his place, to eat the pie he had lured me with in the first place. Agreeing, more because I was too uncomfortable not to agree, we went back to his place where he proceeded to provide me with alcohol and (badly) attempt to seduce me! What? I thought he was gay! I was surprised, but in retrospect, I know that it was my mistake for assuming.

After two hours, he finally agreed to take me back to my car. I was relieved and immediately ran inside the store and hid in the bathroom until he was gone. For the following six months after the date, he sent me invitations to parties, events, marathons, etc. Finally, my last communication from P was on my birthday, a very detailed and graphic discription of his desire to “eat” at my “restaurant,” if you know what I mean…

I was on a long cross-country trip with a relative one summer when this guy, M., who’d found me online somewhere and started writing to me. I had sort of a mentor-ly feeling toward him as he seemed somewhat inexperienced. He apparently felt more of an attraction to me and since he seemed nice, I agreed to go out with him when I got home. He seemed especially excited when I half-joked about never missing “The Golden Girls” on Lifetime. Perhaps he was hoping to demonstrate some gay street cred.

I had arranged for us to go to a moderately nice restaurant, so I was bemused upon climbing into his ratty, fry grease-smelling car to find that he was dressed in a stained t-shirt and shorts. He also hadn’t seemed to have showered for a week. He acted extremely happy to be out with me, judging from his breathless, awkward attempts at witty repartee. I tried to reply politely, but I was distracted when he reached around to the back seat and put his cavernous, hairy crack in full view. At dinner, he ordered chicken fingers off the kids’ menu and loudly dropped F-bombs into conversation as often as possible, despite the presence of actual kids at nearby tables. I ordered a couple daquiris to help see me through that and the movie afterward.

Despite having grated my teeth down to nubs by the end, I was unfortunately not stern enough when he made his next suggestion –  he’d took my comments from the other day as an invitation to go back to my place to watch “Golden Girls”. So there we were, him with his smelly arm around my shoulder in my place. I was just too nice a guy to tell him to get the hell out, but at least the antics of Sophia et al served to stifle conversation and whatever “moves” he may have planned to make.

Then, the cable went out. I had to endure the next 20 minutes with him snuggling up to me—literally rubbing his head against my shoulder like a cat—cooing that he’d never done this before and how great it was to finally “be with a guy.” The cable finally came back, the Girls finished their adventure, and I pleaded tiredness in order to shoo him away. I accept part of the blame for my awful night—I’ve learned my lesson and will be much more direct the next time I’m stuck with a horrible date!

I hadn’t been on a date for a while, so I agreed to meet a guy from an online dating site for coffee one afternoon. When he greeted me at the coffee house, I immediately noticed he had thinly plucked eyebrows, which were not apparent in his photos. He was also much shorter than his purported height of 5’9. We had never spoken on the phone, so imagine my surprise when he began talking and had a thick foreign accent. He told me he had only been in this country for two years. Again, this had not been apparent from his emails because he did not write in the same way that he spoke. I started wondering if someone else had been writing his emails for him.

On top of all this, I noticed that he was very metro in his style, right down to his perfectly manicured fingernails. While he was speaking, he was exhibiting very effeminate mannerisms and I started to wonder what I was doing on this date. More so, what HE was doing on a date with a woman. I really knew it was going badly when a homeless guy sat down nearby. We were sitting outside and I had my sunglasses on, so while my date was speaking, I found my eyes wandering over to the homeless man and I completely tuned out my date. I started checking out the homeless man and thinking he was actually super attractive under all that dirt and facial hair. I knew then that the date had to end immediately, so I said I had to go. As I drove off, I don’t think I had ever felt so relieved to end a date.