Straight men from Mars, women from Venus, gay men from…

It’s a known fact: gay men can dance, straight men cannot. Some straight men try, but they look like fish dangling on the end of a hook, flopping around. Mr. Waste has a little routine called his Straight Man Dance. He jerks around on the dance floor, out of time and out of rhythm. It’s flawless and spot on.

Many times when I am dancing at the club into the wee hours of the morning, I will yell to my dance partner, “I wonder what the straight people are doing tonight?” In my imagination they are at home leading rather boring lives.

My good friend and author, Jill Connor Browne, says women need five men in the their life. One to fix things, one they can talk to, one to buy them things, one that they can dance with, and one to have sex with. Only one of these men has to be straight.

We can dance, shop and listen. As for fixing things, well, we can fix some hair and fix a good cocktail. In my house, that’s all the fixing I require.

Why are gay men and straight men so different? Sure, we are attracted to opposite sexes. But the differences run so much deeper than the person we want to sleep with. Growing up, my younger straight brother had a thing for keys and engines. Today he fixes planes for UPS as a mechanical engineer. I had a thing for stuffed animals and paint-by-number kits. Today I design marketing pieces as a creative director. Our gayness or straightness permeates every fiber of our bodies. His fibers are denim and polyester, mine are cashmere and 100 percent cotton. Even before he was attracted to girls and football (for the game) and I was attracted to football (for the guys), our differences were quite pronounced. My brother built a go-kart. I made sure the upholstery was divine.

But even as a gay man, I did not get all the fabulous and creative genes. I can whip up a stunning company logo or prize-winning stilt-walking costume, but I cannot decorate a house for shit. The gay interior decorating gene is not in my repertoire, unless you count hoarding as a talent. Similarly, the gay hair styling gene cannot be found in my follicles. I can whip up a tasty Thai curry without using a recipe — but ask me to style a wig, and it looks more like road kill than Rhoda Kills.

If women are from Venus and straight men are from Mars, gay men must be from Uranus. All puns aside, the minds of gay men and straight men are clearly different. We certainly see the world through very different eyes.

That’s not a bad thing. In the Stone Age, someone from the tribe had to actually go out and kill the mastodon. And then someone else had to make it taste oh so delicious. Later, someone had to wrap the head of their enemy in burlap (inventing soccer), and someone else had to come along and say, “Oh, no honey. Those uniforms will not do. Put this on instead.”

Truly there is a place for everyone in the world. Looking at the world through straight or gay lenses gives us different vantage points from which to call the shots. Sometimes those shots are bourbon whiskey and sometimes they are peppermint schnapps. Either way, someone is going to get drunk and wonder the next morning who’s the stranger in bed with them.

So let’s toast to our differences whether straight or gay. The world would be a boring place without the other. Bottoms up! (Which can mean two very different things to gay and straight ears.)

Nuclia Waste, the triple-nipple drag queen of comedy, is Out Front’s radioactive cultural columnist. See more columns at ofcnow.co/nuclia or contact her through her website at NucliaWaste.com.