Candidates Will Be Judged On Their Appearance And Their Completion Of Sexual Activity

The following is a creative essay that examines my personal reaction to having sex with people who are physically “out of my league.” It theorizes what would happen if this elite group of guys were given gold star membership to an imaginary society somewhere between the prison dreamscape in The Cell and an eternal stag party.

The Goldstar Club hasn’t seen any new members since April 2013, when a bartender from a restaurant in the Warehouse District was initiated; his headshot framed and nailed to the wall next a photograph of a 22-year-old boy with the most beautiful smile the world has ever seen.

This bartender, a former gender studies major with hair the color of sap, was inducted under highly unusual circumstances that should be noted upfront, and not buried under lesser details. The first being that he gained membership before having sex with the Membership Chair, and the second being that he was involved in a committed, long-term relationship with another man on the night of his installment as a life-long member of The Goldstar Club.

Both of these details are anomalistic because all fellow members of The Goldstar Club were single throughout candidacy, and had engaged in relations of a sexual nature with the Membership Chair before installation. From this information, you can assume the bartender had attributes that the Membership Chair deemed valuable enough for inclusion into the exclusive association for supremely attractive men, with whom he’d slept.

Though the décor is expensive and the architecture resembles that of a 19th century English gentleman’s parlor, the Club itself isn’t luxurious in the traditional sense. Sure, there’s the humidor and the crystal decanters, but these things go unused for the most part. Members typically bring their own bottles of Svedka or Crown Royal from home and drape themselves across plush chaise longues under the dizzying rotation of a Kelly Rowland song. The nice ones will sometimes talk to one another or discuss the various taxidermy, but everyone mostly keeps to himself. After all, none of these men have anything in common besides supernatural good looks and the fact that they’ve individually slept with the Membership Chair, who also happens to be the President, Founder, and Sole Proprietor of The Goldstar Club.

The organization is lean by circumstance (not design); six members in total, including:

1. The bartender with hair the color of sap
2. The boy with the most beautiful smile the world has ever seen
3. A systems analyst with perfectly symmetrical stubble and hands like baseball gloves
4. A guy with a fleur-de-lis tattoo across his perfectly puffed-up chest
5. The Membership Chair’s exboyfriend, who is the thickest of the group, but has the sculpted facial features of a Nordic television star
6. The organization’s first honoree; a stocky blond Zoologist whose crystal blue eyes and bubble butt caused the Membership Chair to create The Goldstar Club in the first place as a way to honor the men who he considers to be “out of his league”

To say these men are sexy is like saying macaroons are faggy.

They hang around The Club and sometimes they speak, but for the most part, they just bask. Why would they need to do anything else? In the real world, they might have smarts, or chops, or savvy, or talent, or ambition, but that doesn’t matter at The Goldstar Club. Here, they don’t have to be anything but winners of the genetic lottery. So they become more like extensions of the furniture than patrons. The boy with the most beautiful smile the world has ever seen sits wordlessly in a well-worn chesterfield armchair while the Zoologist studies a stuffed bobcat. The scene always looks like a well-blocked fashion ad. One of those two-page spreads you see in GQ.

But the new guy — this bartender — he just stares at the photograph of his smiling face on the wall. Every time he stops by, he plants himself before the portrait, his hands in his pockets and his eyes following the sweep of his hair from brow to cresting wave. He examines the olive and rose tones in his soft skin and the emerald storm clouds in his eyes. Every now and then, his gaze will wander to one of the neighboring pictures. The boy with the chiseled, Nordic face or the man with the symmetrical stubble, but he always returns to his own.

Back home, his boyfriend is making dinner, so he needs to get going. On his way out, he makes sure to shake hands with each of his cohorts. One-by-one he says goodbye to them and each time he registers their vague understanding that he, the bartender, did not get to The Goldstar Club like the rest of them. But he certainly belongs there.

By the door, he catches his reflection in a gold cup the size of a toddler. He runs his fingers through his hair and checks his teeth for errant food particles. He gives himself a smirk and waves one last time to the other five before slipping out the front door and into the the real world where he can be anything he wants to be.