TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

Oh, dang.

I wanted to hate San Francisco.  I wanted my Southern blood to turn to cherry-flavored freeze pops in the summer fog.  I wanted to be stuck at the fat kid table, intimidated by all the cool kids with their tattoos and popular side-swept bangs.  I wanted to eat bad fish tacos.  I wanted to get a swirly in a public bathroom.  Anything to hate the city and return to my sweet and easy life in Historic Downtown Carrboro (population 17, 931), with my balcony and my bucket garden and a roommate who will jazzercise to Jewel with me before breakfast.  Alas, I spent the week trying to lose my driver’s license so I’d have a legitimate reason to stay and send home for my silver vagina and my body pillow.

How could you not love a city that is so packed with gays that the sky over the Castro is rainbow colored?  A city where sitting in a park means watching polite black market entrepreneurs whispering ganja treats, ganja treats as they skateboard past you?  A city where Sean Penn knocks on your door to invite you to sled down the hill and into the Pacific to make underwater sand castles and tell whale jokes to bi-valves?

One of the highlights was Nightlife, a 21 and up event at the California Academy of Sciences.  Imagine this: drinking wine in an aquarium lit by phosphorescent sea things with eyes like lightening bugs and bodies you can’t see in the dark water and fish that look like screen savers and other fish that look like the sweetest high tops ever.  Walking in a spiral around an indoor rain forest with poison dart frogs that may be plastic but look so convincing and seem so polite for keeping still while you take their picture.  Brushing the butterflies off your shoulder before getting in the elevator.  A rooftop garden.  A planetarium that makes you dizzy in the best way.  Djs.  And all without the children who normally ruin culture and learning and self-improvement.  It was too good to joke about.

Of course, it wasn’t all sweet tea and swizzle sticks   One of my bigger issues when I lived in Portland was how lesbian sensitive everyone was.  I inadvertently (mostly) offended both friends and strangers with casual observations like, Look at that twink. I wonder how many herpes he collected on Vaseline Alley last night. What do you think, pitcher or catcher?  I bet he’s a bottom cause he’s walking like his asshole hurts. San Francisco also has a bit of the sensitive lesbian about it.  When a girl at the Lexington—the only actual dyke bar in SF, weirdly—asked me if I was Jewish, I was a little confused.  I have reddish hair and blue eyes and freckles.  Granted, I tell people I’m part Jew all the time, but I’m actually a plain old mix of Mick and Kraut.  Boring, I know.  Anyway, when recounting this incident to a new friend a moment later, I said, “I wonder if she thinks I’m Jewish because of all the 100 dollar bills sticking out of my pocket,” at which point my new friend looked at me like I’m Fred Phelps and revoked my invitation to share her blanket at the Michigan Womyns’ Music Festival.  The same thing happened when I referred to someone’s gay wedding in air quotes and said something about how I got married in kindergarten and the ring pops were delicious.

Another incident: I was talking to my Virtual Girlfriend (more on this later) and she said something about how her parents, who are older, went at a gathering of some sort.  Not exactly a party, she said, but something that old people go to.  And, not giving my brain time to catch up with my mouth, I said, “A funeral?”  Thankfully, VG has a sense of humor and didn’t cancel our avatars’ one-deminsional gay wedding right then.

A woman at a dance party a few days later wasn’t quite so amused when I pretended to be deaf.  It sounds more fucked up than it is.  Here’s the thing: although I have commanding virtual balls on this here series of tubes, I’m actually totes shy and soft-spoken in public, at least until we take shots and you laugh at my story about the teenage mime.  Anyway, I get kind of annoyed when people I don’t know are all, Why aren’t you talking?  Puma got your taste organ? This particular dance party gayelle was also bothering me because she was tall enough to smoosh me and I think she would have done so to pocket “Clare,” the friend I was visiting, so after she commented on what she perceived was my inability to converse, I told her that I was deaf and pretended to read her lips. I may also have done the only signs I know (beautiful, thank you, and cookie) and maybe even vogued for a minute before admitting that I’m a liar.  A hearing liar, at that.  She was not amused.  But, whatev.  Everyone else giggles at us fags and faggettes.  Why not join the party?

Only one mildly bad thing happened, and it was, as usual, my fault. “Clare” and I went to a daytime dance party called Mango on Saturday.  It was wall-to-wall queer women.  Like overwhelmingly gay.  Like the only men these women know are sperm donors.  There were so many women that the line for the bathroom was a year long (which I bypassed by using the urinal, which made my shoes smell like piss but at least my underwear stayed dry.).  After the party, “Clare” split to take her whiskey- and cigarette-smelling self home and I stayed for a bit.  Later, when I was trying to get a cab, a black Town Car stopped across the street and the driver yelled to ask if I was looking for a taxi and I ran over and jumped in.  Unlike most professional car services, however, the back seat was covered in Arby’s bags and there was a woman and a pit bull in the front seat.  I didn’t want to be judgmental of the guy’s taste in food/dogs/women, so I crossed my phalanges and gave him “Clare’s” address.  But when he asked me how to get there, I realized that cabbies should probably know their way around town and that he was going to sell me into white slavery. I waited until the next stop light and jumped out.  Not exactly fun, yes, but a learning experience—one I should probably have remembered from the golden rule of kindergarten: don’t talk to strangers.

Coming next: Stranger From The Internet