“I remember watching her and thinking ‘There’s no way words can describe how much I want that.’”Īfter that relationship fizzled, Robinson dated another guy but eventually realized that he wasn’t gay. “I happened to see a female friend getting dressed,” he says. Although it took about a year to admit to himself that his Castro days were over, one incident stands out. Five or so years before that, Rothenberg was paralyzed by fear over the realization that he wasn’t actually gay. Rothenberg and Colleen Crabtree, both 35, met seven years ago. I don’t like coffee.” Fifteen years later, he sits outside a West Hollywood Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf reminiscing with a woman about his days as an out-and-proud gay man. A regular at the Stud’s disco night, he was known for starting off his routine at local comedy clubs by saying “I like my women like I like my coffee. A rising comedian in San Francisco, he spent his nights at clubs in the Castro, where he discovered, to his surprise, that he was “a bit of a boy magnet.” Rothenberg, then in his early twenties, was for pretty much the first time in his life finding hooking up with people easy. In the early nineties, Dan Rothenberg was having a gay old time-literally.
