Some of us have to come out twice — once as gay, and then again as gay geeks.

Whenever Comic-Con rolls around, I realize what an awkward and ungainly social path I tread. Geekery is still thought of as a heterocentric — and exclusively male — subculture that’s the antithesis of urbane gay culture: an underworld of homebound, social anxiety-ridden malcontents who have virtual girlfriends and chronic asthma.

Shiftless. Graceless. Sexless.

That stock character from an ’80s teen comedy is seeming old hat as of late; as geekdom moves aboveground, we now know that there are cute geek girls who look like twee Anime characters and typical suburbanites who desperately want to spread for vampires and werewolves, while the mythological gay geek has been revealed to actually exist as he walks camouflaged among his more standard-issue homo brethren.

It’s a tough scene to navigate, but gay geeks — and especially, hot gay geeks — are getting a bit easier to cross paths with. I’m talking about fit guys with great hair and Buddy Holly frames who can fill out an Ultraman decal T and function as adults while harboring their secret dork obsessions.

Whenever I spot action figures or lobby cards in a Lurid Digs tableau, I know I’ve met one of my own. A few months ago I had a hot-ass maintenance guy go positively giddy over my pristine original Battle For The Planet of The Apes one sheet. At a comic book store some weeks back, the sexy geek with great shoulders behind the register practically quivered with arousal when I put Saga of The Swamp Thing down in front of him, and when I opined offhandedly that I found the plant-man weirdly attractive, he asked me to marry him, and judging by the intensity in his face, I don’t think he was being completely facetious.

Context in a gay geek’s sexual fantasies tends to be more of the literate and allusive variety, and if a certain stratum of heterosexual male is turned on by the sight of scantily-clad women wielding heavy-duty firepower, then our variation is something every gay geek stiffens at attention for:

Babe-like men brandishing medieval weaponry.

I won’t lie: in a perfect world, I’d be doing it regularly with a loincloth-clad barbarian, sylph-like warrior elf, or some battle axe-bearing berserker in a game of Dungeons & Dragons gone wondrously awry.

I’d also have a unicorn, but not a girly rainbow one. I want a total Clydesdale.

Maybe it was too much in the way of Kull The Conqueror and Elfquest in grade school, but Speedos, gym bunnies, and porn tats do nothing for me when up against broadswords and brawn. All of our most beloved sexual playgrounds of the mind are, I would argue, the most infantile and silly, which is why whenever a Sword & Sorcery porn spoof — thank you, Rage of Bonan — appears on the scene, I feel compelled to indulge.

Even the spate of Me Decade barbarian movie entries I encountered as a kid still offer me delights I can’t really find anywhere else. I’m talking about erstwhile Tarzan Miles O’Keeffe asking his father with clear-eyed earnestness if he can have permission to marry his own sister in Ator, Rick Hill forcing himself on a hermaphrodite in Deathstalker, or Lou Ferrigno as Hercules losing his shit and hurling a grizzly bear into the stratosphere. I didn’t just become a Geek Cinema connoisseur by chance; I honed my craft from a young age.

The clearest indication that gay geeks are now a burgeoning demographic: male booth babes.

Traditionally, booth babes are female glamour and fitness models (and porn stars) employed at comic, gadget, gaming, and other “theme” conventions to act as window dressing to help sell products, and it’s only been in the last few years that men have been turning up on the circuits to attract the hetero female and gay male audiences.

This year’s Comic-Con was especially replete with male beef poured into flesh-baring costumes, offering up something of a gay geek extravaganza that — I hope — signals that the leering Boy’s Own culture of comic, gaming, and movie fandom is starting to give way to a hipper and more with-it pannsexual mindset.

That’s fine by me, because A) we’re just so much more naturally adept at irony than het men, and B) I’m positive I could do the job with little or no coaching, and if that just increases the chance that a moonlighting Thor will windsurf into my life, then by Odin’s beard, I’m all in.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com