Gay guys have a skill called ‘cruising,’ that I wish women would adopt as their own.  I asked a lesbian friend if she knew the meaning of “Cruising,” and she said, “It has something to do with picking up, or a movie with Al Pacino?”  She was basically right.  Cruising is when a homosexual man checks out another guy using an intense connected eye contact that exceeds a straight man’s comfort zone.  Straight guys do not maintain eye contact comfortably with other men for more than a split second.  Nor do they check out a dudes package, ass, or abs.  Okay, maybe the abs, if they’re really competitive and like to wrestle with other guys as a manly act in private, …gay.

So gay chicks don’t cruise.  This is probably because straight women do cruise, but the straight-girl-cruise is a totally different animal than the gay-boy-cruise.  The straight-chick-cruise, if studied from an anthropological vantage may appear sexual, but upon further observation you’d find what they’re really doing is checking each others outfits and bodies, trying to evaluate whether the other girl could pose a threat, rival her own beauty, and potentially steal her man.  Of course, I’m generalizing, but without generalizations I may as well be a nematode, and their tube within a tube characteristic should be a sufficient explanation why it isn’t an existence to which I would aspire.

Luckily, lesbians are aware of the false-straight-girl-cruise and it’s benign implications, or else we’d find ourselves sucked into uncomfortable situations, or on the flip side exciting sexual surprises.  I once took the risk of cruising a woman in a fromagerie in France, probably because the French are so sexual, gorgeous and almost all bisexual anyway.  This French silhouette stopped dead in her tracks, speaking to me in her native tongue and challenging me to follow my flirtation with action and throw down somewhere.  We ended up grappling and grinding behind the shop until it became clear the language barrier might pose a problem if later she were to introduce me to her husband.  We both parted sweaty, frustrated, and wreaking of cheese.

If lesbians learned to cruise, Whole Foods Market would be the new bar scene.  A softball game would be the equivalent of a circuit party, and any dog park would morph into a Dinah Shore event.   But alas, gay girls don’t cruise so they have to meet through friends, online, or in bars.  When’s the last time you were walking by someone’s house in gym shorts and we’re invited in for iced tea and a quickie?  For a gay guy, it was one thirty this afternoon.

Perhaps women didn’t hone their cruise skills because they tend to be less sexually adventurous and more nest-y than men, due to the potentiality of motherhood always looming.  Maybe now that more people are becoming comfortable being Out and proud, Lesbians can finally tweak their mannerisms toward cruising rather than waiting for evolution to eventually dictate that behavior.