PRIDE CALLS

I’m in between Prides. I joined Evan at Seattle’s celebration a month ago and he’ll be here for Vancouver’s parade this weekend along with another Seattle comrade and his best friend from Miami. Why anyone would in Miami would make Vancouver’s Pride part of summer vacation plans is beyond me, but then it often seems like too much of a trek for me attend events when I’m a only half hour’s walk away. I dump on Pride a lot. It’s habit. But I’m working on my bad attitude.

 

One of the things that stood out for me last month in Seattle occurred on the Sunday evening, after all or most of the official celebrations. I’m sure some event planner was still collecting ticket money for a Drag Hangover Gala and clubs were continuing to rake in price-gouging cover charges—Pride and greed can coexist—but Evan and I were done. Enough people, enough sun, enough of the too-short, too-tight clothes we probably had no business wearing. We ate nachos and drank margaritas at a Mexican dive in his neighborhood and then walked with a friend, Ronald, down to Lake Union to enjoy some quiet moments before looking ahead the coming week, the reality that resumes after the rainbow. 

 

The conversation turned reflective, as we considered how we got through our most difficult years coming out and handling homophobia. I’ve only known Ronald four months—he’s a close friend of Evan—but we hit it off from the start when we learned that we’d both gone to high school in East Texas, about thirty miles away from one another. I survived, he survived. Part of that may be on account of both of us having left the Lone Star State. On this warm June evening, Ronald talked about how his mother never wavered in loving him and in speaking strongly and proudly about him despite living in a judgy small town where Baptists regularly reviled homosexuals and, in the name of God, took pleasure in saying the gays would face eternal damnation, burning in Hell. Ah, yes. A loving god with righteous followers. 

 

“I wouldn’t have made it if not for Myrna,” Ronald said. As I glanced at him, I saw tears streaming down his cheeks. It startled me because Ronald is characteristically a strong man, an army vet who can be very sarcastic. 

 

Evan, in turn, talked of his own mother who had him at nineteen—her second child—and raised him as best she could, mostly as a single parent. She still had her own growing up to do and she made her mistakes, but her love was a constant. She too did all she could to accept and support Evan when he came out during his teens in small town Colorado where he faced relentless bullying and found his own ways to act out. She wasn’t just a parent; she was an ally.

 

I didn’t have my own stories to share about family or friends helping me as I came out. I stayed closeted much longer than Ronald and Evan and I can’t nod to a family member or friend for helping me get through the years I hid or the years I found my way forward. It was my new gay friends who supported me. The people who helped me most were Jay, a rail-thin drag queen who taught me to just be myself—that’s an ongoing exercise—and Richard, an older, far more experienced man who found constant amusement in my shocked reactions to all the gay things I didn’t know. 

 

Listening to Ronald and Evan led me to thinking about a missing component of Pride celebrations. Let the drag performances, dance parties and parades continue and please let there be art exhibitions and author talks for those of us seeking a quieter, more introspective Pride booster, but I believe it’s time we added formal expressions of gratitude to the yearly event. 

 

Are you listening, Hallmark? It’s your chance to profit with a new collection of splashy greeting cards. (Please, though, no sparkle glitter inside.) I have no interest in Hallmark’s bottom line, but I think we should begin a practice of formally acknowledging and thanking the friends, family and mentors who supported us and helped us get through the more difficult times when we struggled with our identity and worked through things in messy, imperfect, even embarrassing expressions of queerness. For most of us, there were people who loved and accepted us when we weren’t evolved enough to fully love and accept ourselves. We owe them an annual shout-out for helping us reach a point of genuine pride. 

 

Now that Pride has stretched from a parade to a weekend to a month to, heck, a long summer if you choose to plan an international Pride circuit, let there be a day we set aside to thank our loved ones. Most of us didn’t get through trying times alone. We have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparents’ Day and Ice Cream Day. It’s time we had a day for Pride calls and cards to annually thank the people who made our lives better. Call it Partners in Pride Day or Pride Ally Day. 

 

What do you think? Who goes on your thank you list?

 

   

DRESS YOU UP

Like most people, my body image affects the way I dress. I have an eating disorder so I’ve been plagued by seeing fat on me that may not actually be there. It’s like I have my own set of funhouse mirrors that reflect the cruelest images. 

 

Because of this, I hide under my clothes. The eighties were great years because the fashion of the day rebelled against the skin-tight jeans of the previous decade—Brooke Shields: “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins”—and welcomed pleated pants, shoulder pads, baggy jeans, loose-fitting Guess sweatshirts and parachute pants. The bigger the better, including the hair. 

 

Where is the eighties revival?

 

In truth, I’ve long since stepped away from clothes that could comfortably fit me and three other people. Loose clothing had its own triggering risks. I panicked whenever I viewed the ripples from excess fabric as my own layers of flab. Logically, I knew this was not the case, but I still felt I projected the image of a fat man. 

 

Nowadays, I wear more appropriate-sized clothing. Things fit me well enough. Still, whenever I’m in a relationship, my partner wants to see me in new clothes. It’s never been a reenactment of “Pretty Woman” with a Richard Gere doppelgänger loading me down with shopping bags full of the latest designs in Beverly Hills. I have a modest income as do the guys I date. But every guy I’ve been with has wanted to tweak my wardrobe. It’s not so much about fashion choices. I have a decent eye and I splurge on nicer items rather than sifting through sale racks at outlet stores. It’s the sizing that my boyfriends think I get wrong. 

 

I buy clothes that fit me, but my boyfriends want clothes that flatter me. Daniel, a guy I dated at the beginning of COVID, wasn’t so nuanced with words but he meant it as a compliment when he repeatedly said, “You look much better with your clothes off.” What he was trying to say was that I was in really good shape and no one could see how much so based on the clothes I wore. 

 

Every single boyfriend has steered me away from size Large. It makes me uneasy. I’m 6’1”. I don’t want to walk down Davie Street with people eying me for all the wrong reasons. Did he buy that ensemble at Baby Gap? (Matching bib and booties in the backpack.) 

 

My Portland boyfriend got me down to Medium in some brands. It always takes a lot of coaxing to get me to step out of the fitting room and stand in front of a full-length mirror while a salesperson says, “It looks terrific!” I’d take her word for it more if I knew she weren’t on commission. Sure, she could cross her fingers, thinking I’d still buy the shirt if I retreated behind the curtain to try on one size larger, but she must know of studies that show that, the more thinking time a patron puts into an apparel purchase, the less likely it is going to happen.[1] Don’t we all have a shelf in our closet with impulse buys we’ve never worn?

 

I will admit that it feels sexy going into clothing shops with a boyfriend and trying on clothes for one another’s appraisal. I hope that never goes away. I don’t want to try on items, tentatively step out of the fitting room and have my guy gaze up momentarily from his phone, only to shrug and say, “Yeah. Get it if you want,” before looking back down at his screen and pretending he understands what TikTok is all about.[2]

 

Evan has taken the whole clothes shopping event to an entirely new level. He’s been setting aside the Large hoodies I reach for and handing me the Small version instead. 

 

Small?! 

 

It’s part of an odd ritual that works for us. I hold up the garment, roll my eyes and say, “You’re kidding.” Evan points to the fitting room and says, “Go.” At least half the time, the thing seems to fit. (The rest of the time, it’s enough of a horror show for me to retain my knee-jerk eye roll reaction. So far, I haven’t needed a salesperson or EMT to cut me out of any item of clothing as I struggle to take in air, but maybe I’m pushing my luck. That’s the kind of happening that will make the evening news, thanks to store security camera footage.)

 

If I’ve gone down two sizes in shirts—at least sometimes—things are even more dramatic with pants and, egad, shorts. My latest purchases are down by three, even four, inches in the waist. In my sized-down pants, I can fasten the top button without gasping or cramping. I can even carry on a conversation with my normal voice instead of with some breathy, helium-tinged tone. And, better still, rolls of flesh don’t hang over the belt. This is not on account of rapid weight loss due to some COVID-activated banana bread diet. I promise. In fact, I don’t eat that stuff. Bananas, good. Bread, better. Banana bread? A tragedy. 

 

According to Evan, I now have a butt…or at least a mirage of one due to the denim fit. In my twenties, I was desperate for butt implants so, if he likes what he sees, I’m not going argue the point. I can save my plastic surgery fund for my eyes, neck and some especially alluring elbows. 

 

I’m most shocked by the shorts and swimsuits Evan’s had me try on. I now own a pair of $95 short shorts that make me seem 6’10” in photos, the legs looking like they belong on a gazelle instead of a pasty Scottish/English guy who must apply gobs of SPF 70 sunscreen to skin that hasn’t seen the light of day in decades. I have worn the shorts on a few occasions, but never in Vancouver where I live. Let the people of Salida, Colorado and Taos, New Mexico get all worked up over the need for new dress codes for daring Canadians ambling along downtown sidewalks. 

 

While it’s true I was on swim team in high school and wore Speedos for practices and swim meets,[3] I’ve reverted to a more modest look with age. I prefer loose, long trunks that look like basketball shorts with the hemline covering the tops of the kneecaps. Most often, when Evan dangles a swimsuit for me to try on, I hold up my hand, giving him my best traffic cop “stop” signal. “Not enough fabric,” I say. He can’t argue the point, but he’s persistent. The dude lived a few years in Miami and I swear it’s skewed his entire perception of what is acceptable to wear in public. I have one new swimsuit. What it lacks in material it makes up for in brightness, a rainbow of sherbet colors, with two hues missing. You can only get so much on a small swatch of fabric, after all.

 

I’m not entirely uncomfortable with the way I’ve been dressing. Sometimes it even feels good, especially since I have a boyfriend who appears so dazzled when I wear more formfitting clothing. Still, I can only hope that Marc Jacobs, Mr. Turk and Tom Ford will unveil new cloak collections for Summer 2023. Hell, it might be an act of charity for them to bring back parachute pants, too. The world has surely seen more than it ever wanted of this fifty-something body.  

 

 

 

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[1] Full disclosure, I don’t know if there are any such studies with such a conclusion, but this is the internet. There’s a low threshold in terms of how much backing I need for anything I declare. While I’m at it, I’ll posit that studies have shown that people with any sense of taste abhor cargo pants and Crocs. Stop resisting, guys. Throw those things out!

[2] For me, Tik Tok will always be a Kesha song. That’s as hip as I need to be. And I’m self-aware enough to know I can never attempt to “randomly” fit the lyric, “Po-Po shut us down” into a conversation.

[3] It helped that we all wore Speedos. The only way to survive a public appearance in unflattering clothing is to have an entire herd similarly garbed. See also, bridesmaids.

GAZING INTO MY FUTURE: A GAYBORHOOD WITH A PRUNE JUICE BAR & ORIGAMI CLASSES

During my first years in Vancouver, I bonded with a straight woman and two gay men. She was a step instructor at the gym and we three gays attended her classes religiously. The four of us often grabbed coffee at the gay hub of the time, Delany’s on Denman Street, sometimes staying in to sip and chat, other times, heading to the seawall to sit on a log or walk along the water. The laughs were big, the talks often going from light to profound. 

 

As each of us was single, there was much talk about our futures and how those futures might play out should our single status hold. (None of us seemed to have many prospects to change that status.) We joked about growing old together, three bitter gays and our peppy fitness instructor, changing gears to lead us through wheelchair aerobics and cane jousts. We envisioned ourselves adding dazzle to our nursing home, downing our morning prune juice in the dining lounge while decked out in rainbow beads and high heels which would be much less hazardous to traipse about in given that our electric wheelchairs did all the movement.  

 

At some point, the jesting took on a more serious tone. What would eighty-something really be like if we were single and not as independent? What if we had to live out our golden years not as Golden Girls but back in the milieu of one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others, our Pride flags burned by the resident arsonist with Alzheimer’s? What if we each had to sit down to three o’clock dinners—Yorkshire pudding, again—at a table for one, all the straight seniors shunning us?

 

I’ve never looked forward to growing old, but the prospect of being the lone gay in a nursing home only seemed to make that future worse. We began to talk more seriously about an LGBTQ seniors community, little cabins along a pristine lane, a larger assisted living chalet at the end. What a difference it would make to not have to go back into the closet, to not worry about intolerance from another resident or a caregiver. 

 

I’ve held onto that idea, even as our fabulous foursome is very much in the past—a falling out with one, losing touch with another and one I only see once or twice a year when he swings back into town from Prince Edward Island. We won’t be roomies or neighbors in our utopian queer community for the aged, but I’d love to have a place like that to live should I need eldercare or want ongoing social connections as old friends die off or move to Winnipeg or Saskatoon to live with a daughter or the nephew who drew the short straw. 

 

I was both heartened and surprised to stumble upon a CBC news article last week about Toronto’s “Rainbow Wing,” billed as North America’s first-ever dedicated queer living space in a long-term care facility for seniors. It’s not an entirely gay nursing home, but one section consisting of twenty-five beds is for LGBTQ residents. The facility is operated by Rekai Centres whose executive director, Barbara Michalik, stated, “We can’t just slap a sticker on a door. We can’t just do one education during the month of June for pride. It’s continuous. It’s a feeling of culture when you come into that home [and] safety. It’s really constant reinforcement of welcoming.”

 

A quick Google Map search shows that the home, Wellesley Central Place, is only a block and a half away from Church & Wellesley, the hub of The Gay Village in Toronto. This allows residents to easily venture out by foot, walker or cab in a familiar area they may have lived in or at least spent significant time visiting. It seems ideal to remain in a place one knows instead of being transplanted to a suburban neighborhood where residents have no ties. For seniors experiencing some form of senility, a better sense of place may help them remain grounded in reality, past associations and connections being regularly triggered. 

 

I’m not sure the claim that it’s the first-ever such nursing home space in North America holds true. Within the past year or two, I read about Stonewall House in Brooklyn, not a nursing home, but billed on its website as “LGBTQ+ elder housing.” The seventeen-story building has fifty-four studio and ninety-one one-bedroom apartments. Stonewall House appears to be a place for seniors who continue to live independently so, while it doesn’t offer care, it provides connection and safety for queers as they grow old. Sadly, the site states in bold, “Our building is fully occupied. We are not accepting applications at this time.”

 

Clearly, there is a need for more LGBTQ spaces offering independent, semi-independent and nursing home environments for seniors. Not every queer person would seek out such a living community, but the demand still far exceeds what is presently available. Indeed, the CBC article mentioned a small survey of LGBTQ people aged fifty and older in which 94% of respondents favored opening a space like the Rainbow Wing. 

 

More seniors identify as queer, having grown up as LGBTQ rights gained traction and acceptance increased. Let more safe spaces—day centers and residences—become established for older gays to consider spending time in their later years. Many, like me, won’t have family networks looking out for them. I hope I can consider accessing such options if and when it seems appropriate.