Long story short, I'm still single

We had already met, driven to the restaurant, sat in a booth, and ordered dinner when I finally asked him what he actually did for a living. He had mentioned on the phone something about moving back here from New York to get involved in local politics, but I didn't know the specifics. Naively, I figured I should leave a mystery to him, you know, something to talk about over thai food. It was a blind date in a sense, a Friendster Flirt. We had talked on the phone a bit, and I was looking forward to the unknown.

So when he replied that he was currently raising money for the Republic Party here in Minnesota, I could only sit there silently--this was a lot I myself had partly drawn.

You could call me partisan. Let's just say I have a particular world view which doesn't leave open the option of raising money for Republicans. And I find it hard to agree that our governor Tim Pawlenty is 'cool' considering how he once denounced myself and my coworkers from the capitol and tried to censor us, all for political gain, before he became governor. Raising money wasn't something my date was particularly interested in, and he spoke of his hope that he could get on the Mark Kennedy senate campaign, a guy who just may well consider his budding little campaigner a radical threat to traditional marriage:

It is alarming that a small minority has been successful at using the courts to advance a radical political agenda that undermines these values, including the sanctity of marriage. That's why I am a proud cosponsor of a Constitutional amendment that upholds the traditional definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Furthermore, to prevent the courts from being corrupted by radical activists, we must have judges on the bench who will interpret the Constitution, not rewrite it.

It's one thing to hang out with a gay republican who works at Target or General Mills or something--they're usually quite fun to talk to and honest about the reasons behind their affiliations--but it's quite another thing to devote your working hours to the party. I could have done many things--asked him about the hypocrisy he reported between his apparently open and accepting fundraising office, where he was out and proud, versus the homophobic and fundamentalist face and constituency of the party. I could have argued with him about his own interests as a gay man within such a party. We could have parsed Andrew Sullivan. I could have cried. I could have called a life line. I could have thrown my gaeng in his eyes in the name of Katrina victims.

Instead, I found I just didn't care. I smiled. I nodded. We had earlier talked about the difficulties of engaging with Minnesotans, and I found myself adopting the same tactics we had decried. What's that you say? Economics will set the world free? "Oh? Yeah. Really? Uh-huh." I really just did not care.

From pick-up to drop-off was an hour and a half tops, which makes it the shortest date ever (beating by ten minutes the previous record: the date with the guy who looked like a younger version of my dad and, like Edmund White, never shut up talking about times he had before I was born). This was facilitated by the fact that he ate very quickly and I took half mine home. The last topic we touched on, after I declared to him that I was anti-religion, was the strong values of Martin Luther. I guess it's nobody's fault...no one anticipated the breach of values over dinner.

I suppose I was just a bit sad (and totally bored by) the absence of a guy here in town who can be on my team with me.

See also: Divided America: No more anonymous sex with Republicans