Gay Soup

A Gay Buffet Exclusive Excerpt from Eliot Glazer's The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay

Eliot Glazer and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay - Instagram

Hello friends and happy Wednesday!

I have something really special and exciting for you today from my dear friend Eliot Glazer, well-known for his performance as Eliot, the brother to his real-life sister Ilana Glazer on Broad City. Which, if you haven’t seen Broad City, you are missing out! But wearen’t here to talk about TV!

His book The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay just came out, and you can read an exclusive excerpt here on Gay Buffet that you can find nowhere else on the internet! I absolutely tore through the book and could not stop laughing. But Eliot and I wanted to choose this particular excerpt below because it tackles an issue that many of us feel: not quite knowing how to fit into the gay tribes we may be assigned to.

So, without further ado, please read this incredible and exclusive excerpt from The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay.

And then go buy it here!

Gay Soup

Excerpted from The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Gay by Eliot Glazer. Copyright © 2026 by Eliot Glazer. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

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First love came late for me.

It wasn’t my childhood crush, although she was quite a dish! (She’s now a very handsome professional welder, which feels correct.)

I was 22 and living in Brooklyn when I was struck by Cupid’s arrow. Rich was a college transfer, brand-new to New York from the Pacific Northwest. With milky-white skin, hair like Poe’s raven, and enough freckles to make my preference for them feel obscene, Rich was essentially the hot lifeguard in a Judy Blume book I’d always daydreamed about. And not unlike a crush in a Judy Blume book, mine didn’t start small. It was an immediate cavalcade of nonstop bliss -- enchanting bike rides, spur-of-the-moment picnics, and enough sex to make up for what I’d missed in high school and college combined.

I felt like a teenager again, only this time, there was an actual live person there to help me masturbate!

Inevitably, like all good things (naps, sandwiches, videos of brawls at crab-leg buffets), our relationship came to an end after a few months. Devastated, I quickly slid into the dark recesses of my first breakup. All my inner angsty tween wanted to do was write cryptically emo scribes on LiveJournal and play Fiona Apple on repeat. Meanwhile, Rich didn’t miss a beat in moving on, which I knew only by compulsively tracking his every move on Facebook.

In the process of my light stalking, I noticed a pattern: Rich was exclusively spending time with a new group of gay guys whose silhouettes were virtually identical to his -- wide shoulders, broad chests, all beef. Ski weekends, tropical getaways, massive group hangs at swanky apartments -- everywhere Rich went, he seemed to be merely another dumpling in a big, piping-hot bowl of gay soup.

I liked soup too, but not that much.

Clues about Rich’s changing identity kept falling into place. Eventually, they crystallized when a mutual acquaintance described him as the self-appointed “Zac Efron of the bear scene.” The who of the what? Zac Efron the actor, grizzly bears the animals, and Rich the ex-boyfriend: three elements in one Venn diagram that made my brain short-circuit. How would those circles ever overlap?

I soon learned that the “bear scene” referred to burly, bearded, scruffy-to-fuzzy-to-hairy gay men who generally leaned toward the traditionally masculine end of the gender spectrum. They lived within a taxonomy that also included cubs, otters, wolves, pups, twinks, twunks, sharts, ferrets, and li’l goobers.

Fine, I made up those last three, but how would you know, since all those words are equally silly? Before I realized this entire taxonomy was just common knowledge, I had no idea that gay men had so enthusiastically embraced an approach that was so...zoological.

And Rich had fashioned himself the fresh meat. The more bear-y the guy, the more drawn Rich seemed to be to him, like a magnet hopelessly pulled toward beards, brawn, and chest hair—anything remotely lumberjackian.

How I could’ve overlooked something that now felt glaringly obvious? Personally, I couldn’t relate, since I didn’t have a predilection for bears. But I didn’t necessarily think I had a type, either. It’s not like I dated Rich only because he had eyelashes like a cartoon cocker spaniel and his family crest tattooed dead center between his rock-hard pecs, which automatically made me feel like a self-hating Jew in very hot, deeply problematic Viking-themed porn.

Those were merely two hot things about my hot boyfriend!

I’d never stopped to consider whether we looked alike, either. He was fair-skinned, smooth-faced, and had jet-black hair; I was olive-skinned, bearded, and legally blind without my glasses. But by the time we broke up, Rich had grown out scruff too, and started wearing glasses, virtually transforming himself into an amalgam of his friends, lovers, and -- as oddly narcissistic as it feels to say this -- his ex-boyfriend.

And if the signature markers of beardom were what Rich ultimately found attractive, where did that leave me? Was I part of his metamorphosis, and did that make me, by association, a bear too?

Historically, I’d never identified as one, but it turned out that others did it for me.

My picture appeared on websites and social media accounts devoted to “hot bears.” My agent forwarded me a casting call for a part in a low-budget movie about bears for which they were seeking “an Eliot Glazer type.” (I passed.) And at one point, a Twitter user thanked the Broad City account for providing “bear porn” after I appeared shirtless onscreen.

I was so unnerved by the involuntary categorization that I feigned ignorance within the thread, pretending not to know what a bear was. I was being paid a compliment, and yet I couldn’t help but throw an immature, passive-aggressive hissy fit in which the conversation became a game of me playing adamantly naïve, which only pissed off the other commenters. It even caused its own momentary uproar (up-woof?) in the gay blogosphere, where I was accused of being so uncomfortable with the term that I was clearly projecting my own self-loathing onto others, thereby body-shaming the community.

And they were right.

I did mind being called a bear, after all.

With time, therapy, and an unsettling amount of self-reflection, I eventually realized why I shuddered at the thought of being called a “bear.” My defensiveness predated coming out, rooted in a family ethos of diet pills, anorexia, and fat-shaming. I’d failed to see that a term like bear could also be a survival tactic, a way for gay outsiders to find a path into each other’s lives. Labels like that can both empower and confine -- a shorthand that helps us belong, even as it boxes us in.

After he moved back to the Pacific Northwest, Rich returned to visit New York for a weekend, almost a decade since we’d dated. At this point, we were occasionally DM’ing on Instagram, so he thoughtfully invited me to an outdoor picnic. But I felt a flutter of nerves, not just because I was seeing Rich again but because I was stepping into a circle of people whom I was positive had their own yearslong bond. Essentially, I figured I’d be considered the outsider, the nervous picnic-basket-carrying hiker to Rich’s sleuth of bears.

When I got to the park, I took in the scene, unsure where to find the group. And as the ranger crossed by me, sensing the confusion in my face, she offered help, saying, “Your friends are right around the bend.”

Unsure whether to be insulted or flattered, I followed her directions, rounded the bend, and there they were: Rich was holding court among a gaggle of bearded, brawny, barrel-chested dudes. The symmetry of the scene hit me like the rain that had left me looking like Charlie Brown fronting a shoegaze band.

Even though these were probably lovely people, I couldn’t bring myself to approach. Sure, I would have blended right in with this group. And I genuinely wanted to catch up with Rich and reflect on our puppy love. But suddenly, fitting in didn’t feel like a gift. It felt like a test I hadn’t trained for. The same old existential question lingered: were we supposed to be friends just because we were gay guys with facial hair?

With my social anxiety ringing at an excruciatingly loud decibel, I knew I had to turn around and leave. And as I did, I knew exactly what I really needed at that moment: real, good-ass soup.

Something with dumplings.