Gay Men

choi

Andrew Rannells, The Tallest Man I Ever Loved; When manifesting a boyfriend, don't start with a physical, or date the competition. New York Times, Mar 3, 2019 (in the column "modern Love").
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/ ... ls-tallest-man.html

My comment:
(a) I thought for several days whether this is good story. Maybe not. What the author said is her boyfriend left him when he landed a coveted job and appeared to be successful.
(b) But this is not what I appreciate this article. When I came to US to attend graduate college at Univesity of Illinois at Chicaho, my roommate was a first-year medical student. Both are heterosexual. One day he mentioned that he had once visited London, and commented about a park where gay men would walk a pattern as a secret code to advertise themselves as gay. Dor decades many American men (all white) hit me up, saying they were gay. I was puzzled  what they gave me a pass. After reading this article, I guess gay people do not know whether another is gay, unless the other person says so. (As for my experience, my guess is American gay men are bolder, just like many other -- but not all --  Americans.)
(c) The verb manifest has the usual definition.

manifest (v): "to make evident or certain by showing or displaying"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/manifest

A librarian says the subtitle is badly written (by editor, of course). The subject (he-- the boyfriend) is omitted, though it is a different subject from that of "don't."  In other words, the boyfriend manifested himself, after the author had daydreamed.