Forget bed bugs. There’s a new parasite moving into apartments. This one has two feet, a sex drive, and travels with a duffel bag.
The now defunct williamsboard
.com called them “sex gypsies” — people who hook up largely so they have a place to stay. They’re not quite homeless, but they’d rather go to your place than theirs. And they’d like to stay for as long as possible. (And no, it’s not just a story line on “Girls”!)
Roland, a 33-year-old teacher from Bed-Stuy, claims he became a sex gypsy in 2003 when his roommate moved out and he could no longer pay the rent. He’d been couch surfing at friends’ places and spent a few nights sleeping on the L train. Then he met an attractive woman in a bar, went home with her and didn’t leave.
“Eventually I confessed to her that I was ‘in between’ apartments,” says Roland, whose name has been changed, like others quoted in this story. “She was a stripper who worked at some lucrative job in New Jersey. She had a nice one-bedroom in Williamsburg and was super sweet. So, basically I just stayed with her for most of the next couple of months playing debauched Ozzie and Harriet.”
He doesn’t regret it and says “It was fun and sexy! I suppose it felt a bit emasculating to be a ‘kept boy.’ Men are expected to take the opposite role in unequal arrangements like that. But, then, I was never much for convention and she was really cool about it, so that took away much of the sting. She had tons of money, was pretty hot and really generous, so that helped, too.”
Not every sex gypsy’s story matches Roland’s but lots of men are finding accommodations with accommodating women. Will their parasitic past scare off future partners?
Williamsburg blogger Lulu, 29, wasn’t surprised when her boyfriend told her he used to be a sex gypsy. “I already knew he’d gone through a period of drug addiction,” she says. “If that’s the worst thing you do when you’re a junkie, you’re doing OK.”
Lulu says that women often take in sex gypsies because, “women are socialized to take care of others, and dating in general is pretty stacked towards the dudes in north Brooklyn.”
Women may also take better care of their living spaces, and be more eager for a relationship. Taking in a sex gypsy beats adopting a cat if you need companionship.
Not everyone is easygoing about opening their homes, though, and not all sex gypsies are so straightforward.
Emily, 37, a scriptwriter from the Upper East Side, was upset that her actor boyfriend broke up with her, left for LA — and then sex gypsied her.
“He rekindled it a month later so he could ‘spend the weekend’ with me,” she says, “which I realized later was because he didn’t want to get a hotel room and had a bunch of auditions in NYC.”
The actor now has a show on AMC.
In general, a sex gypsy’s transient state seems to be . . . transient. Lulu says that her former sex gypsy boyfriend “has his own place which he is always trying to get me to come over to more. If anything I wish he were a sex gypsy, because I am lazy.”