Why I Oughtta

Here’s a video of some jubilant gay folks waiting to hear about the California gay marriage ruling. Wait for it at the 3:30 mark.

Dear gay ads on MySpace, blogs and various other sites,

You are slowly killing me.

Love,

DAN

I got this subscription to this awful gay magazine called Genre a while ago.  It was supposed to last for a trial three months, but has lasted for more than a year at this point.

It is awful. A supremely awful thing this magazine is. The cover is always an anonymous model (we are never introduced to him because it really does not matter — why pretend that it does?) who is wearing as little as possible yet barely enough to avoid being labeled pornography.

It’s wholly depressing, but that is not the point.

The point is that this evening I was drinking with my roommate, doing Mad Libs with words culled from various magazines.  We tried to pull them from her editions of Foreign Policy and The Economist to no avail (I was hoping they would end up really dry and funny — they ended up up very clunky), but it turns out that when you get your words from Genre it yields instant Mad Libs success!!!!!

Here is the Mad Lib we created with the Genre words bolded:

A TOUR OF HOLLYWOOD

Good morning, ladies and packages, boys and adult movies.

My name is Sean Cody. I am your personal Mountain Dew guide. For the next six hours, we will delight in exploring romantic, strong-looking Hollywood, the glamour audience of the world.

Let’s start off with a bang and visit Mann’s erotic Chinese Theater, Hollywood’s most tanned tourist attraction. Etched in cement, you’ll see the foot genitals and the leg prints of the most famous male prison guards ever to adorn the home gym screen. Then it’s only a hop, skip and a flaunt to Beverly Hills, the playground of the rich and sumptuous. You will feast your arms on the million-dollar ass circuses of movie stars. You’ll actually get to visit the home of today’s hottest rump – Calvin Klein — who will sign autographs for the low, low sum of $19.95.

And here’s the big one! For lunch, we’ll be going to the studio commissary, where you can rub pecs with today’s leading actors and actresses.

All aboard!

I know my birthday’s not til August, but please?

On an almost daily basis, I post “Questions of the Day” to co-workers (to those who don’t know, I work for The Gays) via a little whiteboard by my desk.

Here is today’s, accompanied by an e-mail response from a lesbian co-worker.  Backstory: we often talk about the alleged stereotype of lesbians wearing wallet chains.

POD Question of the day:

Colleen has 3 drawers of 5 wallet chains each. She meets Denise at the Santa Clara County Womyn’s Festival (featuring The Indigo Girls). Denise has four drawers of 6 wallet chains each. How many wallet chains will they have when they move in together on their second date?

Lesbian response:

60 is my answer. You have to take into account their 2 roomates that that used to be a couple, but broke up 5 years ago and are both still living there to be with the cats.

Among the things I’ve learned by hanging out with gay people more — to “take off one’s earrings” means “to prepare to fight.”

So, now, next time you talk to a gay person, you won’t need an interpreter.

You’re welcome.

You should go.

1. For the most part, it was same gay people — different day. Same dykes, same bikes.
2. It seemed like the men were generally either not attractive to me at all or unbelievably, unattainably hot. Nowhere in between. I don’t know how to explain this.
3. Walking around at the festival, I kept repeating the same joke to myself in my head. Whenever I saw anything, I’d add a ‘G’ to the beginning of the word to make it gay. For instance, if I saw some raisins I’d say to myself, “Raisins? More like graisins.” “Airplane? More like a gairplane.” I did this all day and thought it was hilarious, even when it wasn’t (which was always). To make it worse, it’s really hard to do when the word doesn’t begin with a vowel, L, W or R.
4. The DC Cowboys continue to fascinate me.
5. I declined a crotch blessing from DC Radical Faeries.
6. It was weird to walk around Chinatown in the middle of pride and see it populated almost entirely by gay people. It was comforting, in a way, but mostly just jarring.

One Friday night a couple weeks ago, my friend Mary had a birthday party at a swanky lounge-type establishment near Dupont Circle. It was poised to be good night — I had a belly full of Alero (my favorite Mexican restaurant), I was wearing my olive-colored (I know this because that’s what it says on the label) American Apparel shirt that fits me too tight, I had my entourage of ladyfriends. In short, the night was ours.

We entered the venue and I was the second person of the group to head up the stairs to the club. The staircase was sort of long, with a landing in the middle. I walked up the stairs, my hand on the railing, and as I walked across the landing the heavy metal railing became dislodged from the wall. It was to heavy for me to hold up — especially with the suddenness of the separation from the wall — and it fell to the floor with a sound like a single gun shot.

If you are wondering if this was an omen — yes, it was.

The bouncer daintily put his hand over his chest, informing me that, yes, I had scared the crap out of him and, no, that’s never happened before. When I looked back, there was a giant hole in the brick wall. Regardless, we were somehow allowed entry.

We cozied into our party’s location in the corner and set up camp — K with her vodka tonic, Lara with her scotch and soda, me with my Jack and coke. We were ready to go.

A bonus to the evening, it turns out, is that we had a hot waiter. Upon calling a sexual orientation conference, we decided that he was, in fact, my team. This would be confirmed by the fact that in our interactions we had several little flirtatious glancies. Before long, I was in the surrounded by people urging me to go for it — like a group of 7-year-olds coaxing the weakest of the bunch to devour a centipede or box of crayons.

Soon, though, when Lara had gone to the bathroom (taking extra-long, so she claims, to leave me vulnerable) the waiter came over and introduced himself. We established some preliminary communication — names, locations of work and home — and the flirt was very much on. I forgot his name immediately after he said it. For the purposes of this blog, I will just call him Johan.

After our conversation, I decided that I would give him my number — so I wrote my cell on the back of my card and clenched it between my fingers and tried to not let it get all clammy. When he came over with our check, I gave it to him and there was even some exciting back-touching involved. Exchanging numbers with people, particularly in a bar-type establishment, is so unbelievably not ‘how I roll’ — I was super-excited and proud of myself. I was all “Way to go, Dan! Way to pick somebody up at a bar! Gold star!”

The next day he called while I was at a play with K and we played a little text message tag, eventually deciding to meet at the Fox and Hounds — my favorite bar in DC.  I would be departing from Adam’s Morgan, he would be departing from the Chinatown area and we would meet at 12:30.  Already, this was seeming weird.

At the party I was at, Kristin’s Cinco de Mayo fiesta complete with make-your-own quesadillas and frozen margaritas (really, there’s not much more I want out of life than make-your-own quesadillas and margaritas) I was busy hyping up the big event, considering pretty much everyone who was at the event the night before was also at this party.

I was talking to one of my gays (a dancin’ gay — for those of you keeping track of my various factions) and I happened to mention that Johan had a Utah area code, to which he said “Gay mormons?!”  And then we actually shared a high-five.  I’m kind of convinced that gay mormons are to gay men what girls in Catholic school uniforms are to straight men.  A very bridled sort badass purity — their white short-sleeved dress shirts, their bicycle helmets, their faces full of idealism and good intentions.  You just know they’re waiting to go wild.

So I depart the party and I get two identical texts informing me that he’ll be late (strike one).  Eventually, he arrives and is accompanied by no less than eight cronies — most of whom were straight and of the chest-bumping variety. He went on to explain that not only were he and his friends from Utah, but they were all Mormons (or ex-Mormons, depending on how you think of it). To this, I tried to conceal my glee. What I said in reply was “Oh, really?” But what I meant was “Oh my God! Let’s talk about the special underwear!”

After about fifteen minutes in the bar, it’s clear that I’m probably his third or fourth priority.  First priority is his gigantic cell phone (he works for a certain red-nosed Massachusetts Senator) — one of those gigantic contraptions where you can negotiate with Kim Jong Il, deliver a baby and do a sudoku at the same time. Second priority is talking to all the friends (who, actually, were all quite nice), about doing his mission in Russia and how he loves the language. In fact, he said he “needs to marry a Russian” so he can speak the language. To which I was all “Well, screw you Boris.”

Eventually, as he grew more and more distracted, I just started asking his friends point blank if he sucked.  None of them really responded “no.”
And so I made my hasty departure.

True story.