Short Stories

TNG Contributor Corey submitted this post.

I am around five foot six or five foot seven. In my family, this makes me pretty tall. In the rest of the world, it makes me somewhat of a munchkin.

I never really noticed my height (or lack thereof) until I went to get my driver's license at the age of sixteen. I asked my mom how tall she thought I was when I was filling out the paperwork, and after pondering for a moment, she replied, "I don't know. Maybe around five foot two?" Looking down at my mother, who is under five feet herself, I whispered, "Mom, I think I'm a little bit taller than that."

"Fine," she replied, suddenly flustered, "then why did you ask me?!" Not wanting to upset her further, I decided not to alter her estimation by much, which is why my license still today notes me as being 5'3. Somehow, in that moment of exaggeration and confusion, I became acutely aware of the fact that I was short.

During my days as a closeted "hetero" guy, I always imagined that my height would be less a factor if I came out as gay. Height was inevitably an issue in the world of hetero dating; as stupid as it is, the rule that the dude has to be taller than the dudette probably isn't going away any time soon. But in the world of gay dating, I naively imagined, how could it matter? One partner would always be taller, one would be shorter. Without the archaic gender laws, what difference could height make?

I soon realized how wrong I was. It's not that gay men are height-obsessed, or that I'm all that self-conscious of it myself. In fact, it's still something that I normally don't think about. But every once in a while, there are moments when it suddenly becomes an issue, moments when I wonder if to my friends and people I meet I am usually identified as "the short guy."

I first thought this when a friend was trying to set me up with someone I hadn't met before. Our discussion of this particular match ended with him saying, "Don't worry - he's not super tall or anything." That had been the last thing I would have worried about until the moment it was said. Suddenly I couldn't help but wonder, as our conversation concluded, if the primary matching criteria had been that both me and his friend were short and - therefore - might as well move to my home in Connecticut and get married.

I tried not to think about it, but a few days later something even weirder happened. I was walking home from a bar with a gay friend who, for whatever reason, decided in his drunkenness to start attacking me. This friend is not as strong as me, and he also happened to be a good deal more drunk than I was, so when he started horsing around I tried to take it easy on him. Still, every time I half-playfully swung back at him following his attempted assaults, he would (literally) cower in fear, put his arms over his head, and scream. Alcohol does weird things to people.

We carried on like this for a while, as he refused to stop trying to hit me despite his immense fear that I'd hit him back. Finally, when I still wouldn't let him get his way, he started screaming, "YOU CAN'T HIT ME!! You're fucking short! Know your place!"

I'm sure it was in part his Gin and Tonics talking, but at the same time this was in perfect keeping with his general views of "gay culture." I was shorter than him, and was thus permanently subordinate in the social hierarchy. I knew that said hierarchy was important to him in all sorts of ways that it wasn't to me - in terms of looks, weight, wealth, popularity, and social status, all things that I could care less about, especially amongst friends. However, the difference was that all of these factors were at least somewhat earned. That was how I imagined he justified his beliefs. If someone didn't like the way he treated them, they should get better clothes, make more money, lose some weight, etc. That didn't make it right, in my opinion, but at least I understood it.

But height was different. Aside from eating your veggies and drinking lots of milk, there was little you could do to affect it. It was a permanent factor and, thus, a matter of permanent subordination. Cornered on the street, vulnerable, drunk, and angry, he had resorted to it as an unchallengeable statement of his superiority, wrapping it around his five-foot-nine-and-a-half frame like an impermeable shield.

I'm not sure if there's a greater implication to this. The minor concerns of being short hardly seem to matter - the difficulty in finding clothes that fit, the inevitable shoulder in the face when some people hug me, the feeling at TNG mixers that I may grow old and die before the bartender sees me through the crowd of tall men... These things are tiny concerns in the grand scheme of life. Hardly anything to lose sleep over.

And I'm sure that it isn't necessarily an issue in finding a guy. Everyone has things that they are fussy about and things about which they are more open minded, and besides, what is too short in some contexts might be just the right height for other purposes.

Still, I wonder: Do people look at me as their "short friend"? Do taller folks - especially other gay men - see their height as giving them some kind of power over me? Have we escaped the cavemen days, or in the jungle of the single gay world, is the biggest bloke still king?

I'm as short on answers as I am on inches, but I hope that less-than-tall people everywhere at least stand up for themselves. Maybe on a stepping stool of some kind.