A BANNER YEAR

 I choose Pride-lite every year. Whether things are in-person or virtual, I just never get around to amping up my gayness and my celebration thereof during the designated weeks on the calendar. But then, I’m not much for any designated celebrations. 

 

Hey, everyone! It’s my birthday! Take me to dinner and join me for K-pop karaoke night to prove you’re a true friend.

 

Hi, Mom. Did you get the flowers I sent you because the florists are making their guilt-tripping push? I know you have to post a picture of them on your Facebook page. My bouquet is way bigger than the one Mrs. Conrad’s son sent, right?

 

Don’t even get me started on obligatory Father’s Day phone calls.

 

It may be weird, but I prefer treating a friend to dinner or sending Mom flowers just because. “I appreciate you and I don’t feel like conforming to doing things when society says so.” (To keep consistent, I NEVER do things on my birthday and I love that.)

 

Regarding Pride, I suppose I quietly engage in gay professional development when it feels right over the course of any year. I read gay memoirs and LGBTQ fiction when I can, but that’s certainly not all I choose. (Current reads: Bryan Washington’s Memorial (gay) and What Comes After by Joanne Tompkins (not gay).) I watch some gay content on Netflix and pass on others. (I recommend the Australian series treasure, “Please Like Me,” I had a love-hate relationship with “EastSiders” and I typically abandon everything by Ryan Murphy after the first hour. Yay, “Glee.” Meh, most everything since. Just my opinion. If you spit at me through your phone, I probably won’t feel it, but it might give your screen a nice shine.)

 

Parades have never been my thing. As a kid, I thought it took way too long for Santa to show up and I worried about marching tuba players knocking me unconscious if they did an energetic swivel in the middle of a raucous rendition of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” a song which itself troubled me. (What about Mrs. Claus? Is Mom a slut? Why do I keep sending her flowers?) Basically, all parades are a pass. Too long, too many gaps, always too many tubas.

 

There are beer gardens, too, but I don’t like beer. When it’s the only option, I load up my bottle with a half dozen forcefully squeezed lime wedges. Tolerable then, but I’d rather just sip limeade…maybe with several splashes of rum.

 

I’ve seen a few arty queer films during Pride celebrations, but there’s often a lot of extended scenes of water running from a faucet down a rusty drain, a close-up nipple shot, a bubble-gum feather boa blowing from the antenna of a Buick sedan and then a long, long list of end credits. (Is it a coincidence that so many people have the same last name as the director?) After the credits—it’s only polite to sit through them—I want to turn to the person beside me and say, “What the hell was that?” but they always seem absorbed in a state of reflection, dabbing their eyes with a tissue and I know I just need to leave and head home to YouTube Donna Summer songs for the rest of the day. That’s as arty-gay as I get.

 

To sum up, Pride is either too crowded, too tedious, too forced and sometimes all of that at once. It’s hard for me to find connection. I’m gay in my own, rather conventional, solemn sort of way.

 

Several weeks ago, however, I stumbled upon a different expression of Pride. I’d headed out on an evening walk, my agenda limited to picking up a tube of toothpaste and maybe getting myself an ice cream. (Nowhere near my birthday, but sometimes I just like to treat myself to Crest Extra Whitening and a scoop of salted caramel. See? It’s so freeing to go with whims instead of iPhone calendar reminders.) When I popped out of the drugstore on downtown Vancouver’s busy Georgia Street, I looked up and noticed a pair of dark banners flanking the pole for a streetlight. I was seeing the reverse side of them, but I could tell that one banner had the word “PRIDE” printed vertically. This immediately upset me. I was in the downtown business-y district where people in stuffy Brooks Brothers attire talk too much about IPOs while others wear knockoff GUCCI sweatshirts tote designer store shopping bags that are fancier than anything featured on my coffee table. This was not the gay part of Vancouver and I didn’t like the idea of some other entity stealing our word. Why hadn’t we thought to trademark “PRIDE”? I suppose we thought no one would want to use it after we made it gay…just like the word “gay” itself which no one uses as a synonym for happy anymore. (That’s why eight-year-old boys crack up every time that seasonal song comes up with people donning their gay apparel.)

 

Okay, so the stolen PRIDE had me riled up. I had to see what the wordier companion banner said. As pedestrians walked purposefully to the gym, toward the mall or into office towers, I faced the banners, standing in the middle of the sidewalk as the human version of a traffic cone discontented people had to dodge. I looked up for a clearer reading of the message fluttering gently on the pole:

 

 

 

Huh. An event in Canada’s LGBTQ history I did not know. I saw other banners running up and down Georgia and then more adorning Howe, a cross street.

 

 

 

No longer irked, I was excited and intrigued. I smiled as I walked each block, head up, embarking on my own Pride history tour. 

 

 

 

 

I have not seen this kind of signage in Vancouver before. Whatever committee decided on what should appear on these banners gave plenty of thought to representing diversity in Canada’s LGBTQ history. Trans rights, Indigenous identity and drag queen activism were highlighted along with significant moments for gays and lesbians. 

 

 

 

 

Political milestones such as Canadian marriage equality, adoption rights and the banning of conversion therapy were also recognized.    

 

 

 

 

THIS is my kind of Pride event, something to take in on my own time in an area that’s a fifteen-minute walk away from Davie Street, the traditional hub of the city’s gay community. Smack dab in the shopping and business core, this allows our history to be seen by thousands of people each day who are less likely to come upon the heavy concentration of rainbow flags on Davie and Denman Streets. 

 

This display is not sponsored by a Pride organization or some other LGBTQ association. I’ve learned that the banners were funded by the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association representing 7,000 businesses and properties in the area. DVBIA consulted with Vancouver’s Pride Society and Forbidden Vancouver Tours to ensure accuracy of the content on the banners.

 

 

The project offers more substance beyond rainbows, the word Pride and expressions like Love Is Love. This is an indelible part of how I see Pride as honoring our past and reaching beyond our community. I am proud of our city and prouder to be accepted as someone under the LGBTQ umbrella. 

 

I hope more people make a point of embarking on their own history tour.

 

 

A SUMMER OF PRIDE

I’m not sure when it happened but Pride got bigger around here. 

 

Ever since I moved to Vancouver twenty-five years ago, the parade has always been on the Sunday of the first weekend in August. It coincides with an official long weekend in the province, the first Monday of the month being a public holiday with the flashy name, British Columbia Day. There are some official events on the Monday, mostly attended I imagine by speech-happy BC politicians, historians who haven’t been outdoors in ages and people who like to drive around in old cars, reminding the rest of us what the provincial flag looks like—something with a sun on it which is apropos in the middle of summer but has absolutely zero relevance from November through March. My five minutes of research about BC Day is that it started to show up on the calendar a few years after another province, Ontario, named the first Monday in August a provincial holiday back in 1969. Basically, it’s a day off in the middle of summer because another province started it and we wanted an extra Monday to sleep in, too. Yay, BC!

 

The first weekend in August has become a whole weekend of fun, at least for people in Vancouver, with one of several fireworks nights on the Saturday and the Pride parade on Sunday. All those historical speeches on Monday, a buffer day of festiveness, I suppose, help folks wind down so they can head back to work Tuesday, perhaps without a hangover.

 

Okay, so that’s more than enough context than you need. (Perhaps in my next life, I’ll be a speechifying historian.) What I recall during my first Pride in Vancouver was the Sunday parade and a festival of sorts at a park by the beach where you could pick up a nice plastic bag with a fancy corporate logo on it and walk around, staring at a bunch of tables with tarps over them, signing up the upcoming AIDS Walk, picking up handfuls of free condoms and listening to business pitches just so you could make off with more corporate swag. (Who doesn’t love a fridge magnet?) Really, the post-parade “festival” was a chance to walk around in a really crowded space with your friends, whispering things like, “Check out the abs on that guy in the purple Lycra shorts” and, “Girl, look at Miss Thang over there stuffing her bag with lube. She was so wasted at Celebrities last night.” Ah, memories. I’m beaming with pride as I type this.

 

I’m sure it was a small roomful of gays who didn’t have six-pack abs (or even purple Lyrca shorts) and lesbians who couldn’t get into riding motorcycles topless who decided there needed to be other events like queer documentaries and art exhibitions that might include something more than a bronze of a penis that surely made a cerebral political statement if one stared and pondered on it long enough. Pride Day stretched into a week and then something more.

 

I stopped researching for this post after that heady reading about the civic holiday, but I’m guessing that other cities saw their Pride celebrations grow out of the similar circumstances. As parades dotted different weekends in summer, perhaps to allow the Proudest queers to embark on an international Pride tour, the media started covering Pride events with more depth and breadth than just broadcasting drag queens and hedonistic shirtless gays and lesbians on the eleven o’clock news to shock the straight folks in the suburbs who would call and blast the news station for airing such trash that might titillate vulnerable children without reasonable bedtimes and possibly a few wavering husbands.   

 

Mainstream media began to pick up on Pride’s origins, springing from the Stonewall riots which stretched from June 28 to July 3 in 1969. More news coverage popped up in the week leading up to New York City’s parade and, in time, June became known as Pride Month, not just in The Big Apple but across the U.S. and globally.

 

Of course, Vancouver wasn’t going to change the date of its parade. It would have left a glaring gap in its smashing weekend to kick off Dog Day Month. (That’s not an official name for August and its internally nonsensical but pass it on. Things are rather sparse of the calendar for the year’s eighth month.) 

 

While I’m often away for much of the summer, enjoying travel and—drat—failing to hit a single parade on the Pride circuit, COVID has kept me close to home this season. I don’t know if this has been going on for many years but, as I’ve blogged earlier, local businesses started hanging rainbow flags, slapping up Love Is Love signs and displaying other pro-queer messaging at the beginning of June because every corporate entity that wants the gay dollar knows now that’s Pride Month. It was quite nice. Everyone loves a rainbow, right?

 

Here’s the bonus: In Vancouver, Pride Month is now Pride Summer. Due to our delayed Pride events, the banks and shops have kept up their We Love Queers. Pride decorations have a longer shelf life than Halloween’s witches and spiders and even All Things Christmas. 

 

June, July and early August…’Tis the season. The Pride goes on.

 

  

MY SECOND "OUTING"

Betty Jo Weber outed me. 

 

Not about me being gay. That was Keith Somebody-or-Other, the guy who had the locker above me in tenth grade. It’s a good sign of moving on that I don’t have a clue what his last name is. I sometimes went to class without my textbook to avoid a run-in with this guy whom I won’t call a bully. He was just an indiscriminate jerk. When he announced I was a faggot—his word, half a notch less offensive than cocksucker—I began fretting over what mannerism was the giveaway. How was this football jock so sure of his gaydar when I still wasn’t so sure myself? I had leanings, but I hoped they’d go away. Maybe I needed to watch more “Charlie’s Angels.” Maybe I should have abandoned my internal debate about which Hardy Boy had better hair, Shaun Cassidy or Parker Stevenson. (It was Parker, hands down, but I didn’t want Shaun to feel badly.) Maybe I needed to stop wanting to play with my locker mate Carol Lee Cook’s majorette baton and instead convince myself what I really wanted was to play with Carol Lee. Sometimes there’s not a shred of hope in maybe. I was gay—er, a faggot. Keith Somebody-or-Other said so.

 

Back to Betty Jo. She didn’t enter the picture until nine years after locker traumas when she became a teacher’s aide at the Catholic school where I was a special education teacher. We were at lunch or in a meeting and I’d said something rather ordinary, for me at least, when she laughed and shouted, “You’re such a geek!” She wasn’t being loud as a courtesy for our elderly, hard-of-hearing nun colleagues. (They seemed to work till they dropped; our school secretary was 83-year-old Sister Albertine.) No, Betty Jo shouted everything. She laughed loudly. She talked loudly. I can’t remember for sure, but my revisionist memory would like to say she even ate loudly. Soup and apples, every day. 

 

Admit it...you've got a Manilow
t-shirt, too.

Geek? Undeniably. Betty Jo Weber said so. I have to admit, it stung. Almost as much as finding out I was a faggot. Seriously. I was in my early twenties and I still hadn’t given up on the idea that I could maybe, possibly, hopefully be cool. Like The Fonz. Or Barry Manilow. 

 

Not only did Betty Jo laugh, but her pal and my pal, another teacher’s aide named Amy, laughed too. Up to that point, I’d thought we were something close to a cool trio but, just liked that, it seemed as though I’d forfeited my place to Sister Marie Herman, still sprightly at sixty-eight, dazzling us all with her latch hook coasters. 

 

Self-acceptance takes time. When Betty Jo declared I was a geek, I’d at least decided that I was indeed gay. (I never took to “faggot,” no matter how many times guys shouted it from car windows while I jogged or, later on, when walking the supposedly safer sidewalks of West Hollywood.) Gay, okay. Geek? I stewed over that one. 

 

There’d always been signs. While my classmates in elementary school in Ontario wanted to grow up to be NHL hockey players, like all good Canadian boys, I aspired to be an elf at the North Pole. No lie. I had the sense to keep this to myself. I figured if word got back to my parents, my mother would try to kibosh it. “You’ll get frostbite. You always lose one of your mittens. Besides every time you use hammer, you hit your thumb instead of the nail. Santa’s too busy to deal with crying elves.”

 

In third grade, my classmates rushed home after street hockey to watch syndicated reruns of “The Munsters” and the police show, “Adam-12.” I chose to watch “The Odd Couple.” (Oh, that Felix. So fussy!) I also got hooked on “Ironside,” technically a police show, too, but starring Raymond Burr as a paralyzed, retired detective. Instead of car chases and climbing over alley fences to catch criminals on “Adam-12” or “Hawaii Five-O,” the main action on “Ironside” was Burr rolling around in a wheelchair. The show felt cerebral and way ahead of its time, focused on ability rather than disability. Maybe I was ahead of my time, too—PC before that was even a thing. 

 

I also liked school. A lot. Not the trips to my locker or P.E. classes or the Salisbury steak-vegetable medley lunch served in the high school cafeteria once a week. I’d never heard of Salisbury steak before moving to East Texas. In case it’s an unknown food to you, Wikipedia gives a handy definition of what it takes to be Salisbury-worthy:

"Salisbury steak" require[s] a minimum content of 65% meat, of which up to 25% can be pork, except if de-fatted beef or pork is used, the limit is 12% combined. No more than 30% may be fat. Meat byproducts are not permitted; however, beef heart meat is allowed. Extender (bread crumbs, flour, oat flakes, etc.) content is limited to 12%, except isolated soy protein at 6.8% is considered equivalent to 12% of the others. The remainder consists of seasonings, fungi or vegetables (onion, bell pepper, mushroom or the like), binders (can include egg) and liquids (such as water, milk, cream, skim milk, buttermilk, brine, vinegar etc.). 

 

Um…gross. This is not why I eventually became a vegetarian, but it added to my suspicion that school lunches in the U.S. weren’t about giving kids healthy meals. 

 

Back on point, yay school (with asterisks). Guys were supposed to hate school, all things academic classified as stupid, boring and/or dumb. (Developing a vocabulary was clearly stupid, boring and/or dumb, too.) I liked tests—even pop quizzes. I had the sense not to shout, “Yes!” like Troy Findlay every time a teacher told us to get out a sheet of notebook paper and number it one through ten. Now that was a geek. I got psyched up for research papers and learning the proper way to write a bibliography.[1] I loved the fact the photocopier in the library was free. There was so much fascinating information I wanted to keep handy from World Book Encyclopedia—which, damn it all, we couldn’t check out—the school subscription of Scientific American and that gem in the Dewey Decimal section 745.5, 101 Popsicle Stick Crafts. (You know your Dewey Decimals, right?)

 

Okay. The signs were always there. Always gay. Always a geek, even if I’ve never ever played Dungeons & Dragons. Like gays, geeks come in many forms.

 

I swear there was a time when being called a geek was a putdown. Nerd. Geek. Loser. All grouped together like stupid, boring and dumb. By the time Betty Jo Weber called me a geek a second time, I’m pretty sure my face didn’t turn red. (A bit rosy, maybe.) As she started saying it more frequently, she always said it with a laugh. She wasn’t totally making fun of me. She just kept marveling how I was so hopelessly out of step with the cool kids. But she always sat with me at lunch and when we had important staff meetings. Amy stuck with me, too. 

 

That's right, I drove the same kind of car as
Mare Winningham's character in St. Elmo's Fire.
Mare Winningham! She was the coolest in the 
cast...way cooler than Rob Lowe or Demi Moore
or Emilio Estevez.

In time, I learned to embrace being a geek just like I was proudly gay. On an April Fool’s Day while I was in law school, an L.A. radio station announced it was changing its format, going Retro Cool. I didn’t want it to be a joke. As I drove on campus with the top down in my Chrysler LeBaron convertible—so hip!—my friend Adrienne rode shotgun. They played Paul Anka’s “(You’re) Having My Baby” and I cranked it. Adrienne was mortified and wanted to change the station but, hey, my wheels, my tunes, right? 

 

Who doesn't love a bad boy?

When you’re a geek, you don’t have to check yourself. No one will say, “Dude, be cool” because that’s like telling me to blow a bubble with my watermelon-flavored Bazooka gum. Not possible. The world needs geeks. I’m your go-to guy when the party hits an awkward point and you need me to step in and name the Seven Dwarfs. Easy-peasy. Hell, I’ll rank them! When the same party hits another snag after saying things in Pig Latin gets old, I can dazzle everyone with my command of Esrever. (That’s talking with all words spelled backwards. I can feel your awe at this very moment, but it takes practice. My friend, Nosylla and I have been talking Esrever since freshman year in college. Man, we rocked at parties!) 

 

I still like Barry Manilow. I bought a Scooby Doo t-shirt recently…and I wear it in public. I’ve never seen “Game of Thrones” or a Vin Diesel movie, but I’ve watched every episode of septuagenarian-focused shows “Grace and Frankie” and “The Kominsky Method.” The only decorations I put up at Christmas are my plush, collector’s item toys, Rudolph and Hermey the Elf. (Okay, they were dollar store finds, but they’ll go way up in value. Mark my words.) Yeah, I never really got over the elf gig. 

 

Geek for life. And that’s okay. It’s even something to celebrate. Jason Mraz says so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

[1] Ooh, and footnotes, too! How cool that tiny, raised numbers aren’t just exponents!

AGING GRACELESSLY

I struggle with the fact I’m getting older. We all do, I know. A newborn at five days is older than it was at birth. Obviously. To be more precise, I’m at least at the trailhead of the path marked with the sign Growing Old. I cringe just typing that. I’m an anxious person and the thought of aging has always been an issue. Sure, I couldn’t wait until I reached sixteen. I can drive a car! (Actually, in Texas, you can get a “hardship” license that allows you to drive to work and school at fifteen. No open beer or unregistered gun though. Even the Lone Star State has a few limits.) Twenty-one was kinda cool, too. I could drink without my are-you-kidding-me fake ID. It’s not that I was a lush—getting drunk has never had any appeal, much less been a Friday night (AND Saturday night) goal; it’s just that I happened to be two years younger than my peers and didn’t want to have youth highlighted by the possibility of a server denying me my amaretto sour. Youth. If only.

 

I took hitting thirty hard. It was my premature midlife crisis, prompting me to walk away from my career as a lawyer (after a whopping two and a half years), and move from Los Angeles back to Canada, not to the area where I grew up, pre-Texas, but to Vancouver where I knew only one person.

 

After that, deep funks over getting older didn’t wait until I hit a new decade. Instead, every single birthday was cause for sorrow instead of celebration. Another year older…why the woo-hoo? As my mother is fond of saying, “Beats the alternative.” Sure. Technically so, but is that cause for cake? I’m not a cake fan even in general terms. I don’t tell people when my birthday is and I certainly don’t want parties or gifts. Let it pass. Don’t remind me. 

I don't want to board airplanes before everybody else.

 

Does it feel worse because I’m gay? I’ve long passed the threshold for being dead in gay years. I’m supposed to be settled down, out of sight, shopping for antique hutches with a partner, or I must submit to buying a one-way ticket for an aimless trip on an ice floe, waiting for a polar bear to scramble up after a swim and have breakfast. It would be easy to blame gay culture but, if anything, that’s only reinforced a mindset that was already there.

 

When I dated a guy last year, my running joke—which wasn’t funny at all—was that I was thirty-four, as if I’d undergone that cryonic frozen-in-time procedure without any of the problematic side effects like being in a block of ice. For a number of years now, I have truly felt like I was thirty-four in mind and body. Frozen in time, figuratively anyway. I’m more hyper than I’ve ever been, always rarin’ to go. My daily tasks are all punctuated with urgent exclamation marks. Jog! Bike! Write! Hike! Read! Work out! Thirty minutes after I finish a run, I’ll step outside, see someone else jogging and my mind automatically thinks, I should do another run. Now! I don’t but I really, really want to. 

 

I see the difference in my friends. My closest friend talks about his body turning pear-shaped (“like my [eighty-nine-year-old] father”) and spoke with pride this past weekend about how he likes to just sit and watch the morning show with Gayle King and her colleagues for three hours straight. While younger gay men send butt and dick pics to strangers, I send my friend pie pics (and, lately, croissant shots). He’s overjoyed. Another good friend has spent the past three years recovering from foot surgeries and considers an annual chat a significant investment. I hear lots about people’s aches and pains, frequent references to the way things used to be and all that talk about stocks, mortgages and pensions that made me cringe thinking about in my twenties, a sentiment that hasn’t changed. They aren’t willing to try oat milk, wonder out loud if they should get an e-bike (“It’d probably just sit in the garage”) and don’t believe meat-eating younger people would actually choose to eat at a vegan spot sometimes—just another option like Thai or Lebanese. 

 

What happened to fun? What about spontaneity? What happened to being open to new things, someday at least, if no longer with that sense of right away? It should be no surprise that the person I hang out the most with now is—you guessed it—thirty-four. This morning she sent me a TikTok video. I couldn’t figure out how to get it to play, but she filled me in after a couple follow-up texts. I’m (sorta) in the loop with the cool kids. On the weekend, I met her and her boyfriend to do a canopy walk in the forest. They drove there; I biked it. Afterwards, we sat on the grass and chatted. Friends my age look for benches. (“It’s too hard to get up,” one said recently.)

 

Ah, yes. Growing old takes some getting used to. My TV-watching friend talks about it with his own exclamation marks. Mushroom videos on YouTube! Pie! TV news! Horror movie marathons! I’m neither exaggerating nor making fun of him. I’m even partially in awe. He fully embraces the slower pace and, as he says, “doing nothing.” I was aghast this weekend on our “hike”—his term; I called it a walk—when he said, “What’s so great about our virtual world now is that I don’t have to travel anymore. I can just watch it all on my screen.” Sometimes you just know when not to argue a point. Sometimes people’s views are just too far apart. 

 

I do realize being sedentary isn’t solely for people growing older—there are plenty of twenty-something couch potatoes and nonstop gamers—but this friend of mind used to be on volleyball, softball and curling teams. He was my tennis bud. He backpacked across Europe and climbed Kilimanjaro. He’s three years younger than me but has a much older mindset. 

 

It used to be that my fear of growing old was about being alone. I didn’t want to be single and die alone. I’ve let most of that angst go. I still don’t want to die and go three weeks in my condo, body decomposing, only to be discovered because neighbors wondered about the bad smell in the hallway. Of course, I won’t be around to face them or be duly mortified, but it still seems more than a tad undignified for a final exit. I think I’ve solved this by deciding that, at some point, I’ll get my pastry pal to agree that we’ll text each other hello every morning. No text by noon requires investigation. Problem solved.

 

I’ve also worried aplenty about becoming invisible. I’ve observed many times how an elderly person walking with a cane has to stop at the edge of a sidewalk as a chatty couple or a group of younger folk (at that point, they’re all younger folk) pass by, oblivious to the gentleman’s need for space and constant concern about the possibility of falling and breaking a hip. I’m already getting a taste for being unnoticed and irrelevant. It’s one part freeing and two parts depressing. I’m learning to deal with it.

 

I may feel thirty-four, but that’s not what passersby see. I get called “sir” a lot and, while it’s supposed to convey respect, I hate it. The checkout person, the barista, the computer tech guy who has to show me how to download photos…to all of them I’m a sir. The only way I’ve “earned” the reference is in a “respect your elders” kind of way.

 

For all my denial about aging, the signs are surfacing. Six years ago, I got my first pair of glasses and now I can’t read anything without them. If I take a selfie, I’ll glance at it and think the crow’s feet and deep, saggy crevices under my eyes are an indicator of the low-quality camera on my cell phone. (I should get a newer version, but I can’t bear to hear all that gobbledygook about giga-somethings and some sort of cloud in the sky that stores my stuff. (What happens on a sunny day?) Even more telling, I can be as sour as those two old Muppets, Statler and Waldorf. Early onset of “cranky old man.”

 

Every time I forget something (What was that brilliant writing idea? Why did I open the fridge? Why am I holding this whisk?) I immediately attribute it to aging and fret that maybe I’m in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Did I forget things when I was twenty-three? No, never. Of course not!

 

Worst of all, I’ve had to ease up a bit on my hiking for the last six weeks because my left knee has a persistent pain. Running is totally on hold. This is the beginning…

IT'S OKAY IF YOUR SOFA ISN'T GAY

I’m not rushing to IKEA. I have a generalized liking of the company because it’s Swedish and all things Swedish make me smile. As well, one of their commercials always amuses me and I regularly use its catchphrase, much to the puzzlement of my friends. Still, my days of shopping for some-assembly-required furniture are in the past for several reasons. I once put together an IKEA armoire that did a spot-on Leaning Tower of Pisa impression. I don’t wish to park my car in the far reaches of the parking lot which may technically have me across the U.S. border, if not Mexico. And I don’t want to carry around one of those ridiculously large yellow or blue shopping bags that whisper nonstop, “Fill me.”

Not even a gay sofa will lure me. 

 

If that’s your thing and it goes with your décor or serves as the inspiration for a redecorating project, go for it. I don’t have any objection to an LGBTQ sofa in any of its news-making incarnations. I just don’t have the need for one. My charcoal-colored sofa is comfy enough, even if the accessorizing pillows are looking a little dated.

 

When I consider building up The Pride Inside, I’m thinking about within my mind and soul, not my living room. I’m not sure that any item in my entire apartment screams gay, but I’m okay with that. Trying to make a statement with a gay shower curtain or nightstand or spatula would be much ado about nothing. I already know I’m gay. My gay spatula isn’t going to out me or showcase how important queerness is as part of my identity. I don’t cook that often and, if someone came over, we’d definitely be ordering takeout. Call it a hunch, but my not-so-famous soggy nachos and overcooked fettuccini with vodka-infused Prego sauce are for my taste buds only. 

 

I don't know...If this sofa were really 

gay, I think it would be tastefully edited.

Too garish.

Truthfully, no one would even chance upon my gay spatula while rummaging through my kitchen drawers as I head down to the lobby to pick up the aloo gobi and channa masala from the DoorDash guy. (This is my made-up scenario. I’ll order what I want and the fictional guest will happily go along with it. Mmm, aloo gobi! Whatever that is.) I’ve had no one over in the past year. I could say that it’s on account of COVID so it doesn’t sound so sad but, truthfully, I’ve never been keen on hosting. In my five years in my prior home, I didn’t have a single party…not a dinner for four and most certainly not some raver celebration that gets shut down by the police. I don’t even have a dining room or a table. If IKEA comes out with gay dining room tables…Nah. Still not a statement. I’m not going to suddenly say to the barista who only knows me as 20-ounce Oat Milk Latte, “Hey, want to come over and watch Netflix when your shift’s over? I have a brand-new dining table. It’s gay, by the way.” 

 

I confess, I was just looking

for a strictly professional

reason to do a Google Image

search of Nate. 

Can you blame me?  

Sure, some boyfriends saw my last place, but I didn’t feel any sense of regret that, in giving them a tour of my teensy space, I couldn’t say, “And here’s my gay lamp. Don’t you think Nate Berkus would love it?” The light even had an environmentally responsible LED bulb. Not that I had a yearning to highlight that either. Sometimes a lamp is just a lamp. Let it help me read at night, let it soften the bags under my eyes if I should decide to take a selfie. Perfectly functional, perfectly fine.

 

There was an episode of “Queer Eye” when they focused on Skyler Jay, a young trans man. I recall him having a big rainbow flag hanging in his living room and the QE team taking it down during the makeover. I don’t recall their reasoning, but it was probably something like too college dorm-ish or Your living room has a big window with southern exposure. You know flags fade, right? 

 

Even if I were in the market for a new couch, I wouldn’t head to IKEA to purchase one that’s just celebrated its coming out in a big way. If sofas could talk, this one would say, “Yep. I’m gay.” (If your sofa actually does talk, you might want to see someone about that.) I’m pretty sure that, even after the deepest night’s sleep, I’m not going to crawl out of bed at ten in the morning, step into the living room, glance at my sofa and think, Oh, yeah. I’m gay. Thanks for the reminder. Now…must have coffee.

 

If I were still passionate about letting the world know I’m queer, there’s not a thing I could do in my condo that would convey the message. Not even if I bought three gay spatulas. It’s no bolder than all those overwrought journal entries from my adolescence that always ended with the same sentence in all-caps: I THINK I’M A HOMOSEXUAL. No one ever read my diary. Not even my mother was that curious.

 

So magnet-worthy, don't you think?

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to buy a gay fridge magnet, one with the AIDS ribbon or a highbrow literary nod to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room which I haven’t read but is always near the top of my reading list. (The magnet might work better than a Post-it to nag me into finally checking it out. When you commemorate something on a magnet, it’s serious.) Maybe I can just get someone on Etsy to make me a shirtless Matt Bomer magnet. I’m not really all that highbrow.

 

If I want to show my Pride in any meaningful way, someone else has to see it. I can walk into the grocery store with my rainbow face mask. (Yep, I’ve got one. The only person who’s ever commented on it is a young, overly caffeinated female barista at another café who knows me as Large Nitro Cold Brew.) I can also put on my rainbow Converse shoes which still haven’t been broken in. Another option is to carry around a softball and say to random strangers, “Hey, you wanna play catch?” If they shrug and say okay, I could then miss every ball. Oh! they’d say. He’s gay. (I’m the reason the stereotype still exists.)

 

As far as my living space, I could buy some art by a local gay artist (because I’m pretty sure I can’t buy a Mapplethorpe or a Hockney). A painting by Joe Average or John Ferrie perhaps. I’d rather my money go to someone who’s gay than to a large corporation that makes clearly faulty armoires. 

 

For now, I’m going to spend the rest of the day shopping online for new pillows.