"All gay men are not my brothers."

I'm afraid I got a little preachy at the dinner table last night. Some remark relating to Will and Grace reminded me of Mazeppa's comment on the announcement that the Canadian "foot mailer" killer was suspected to be a gay porn star (since apprehended on the run in Berlin). It was something along the lines of "this isn't going to make us look good."

My response to him was "haters gonna hate". That is, reasonable people recognise that there are psychos in any group, and thus one gay guy murdering someone doesn't reflect badly on other gay guys any more than a White guy murdering someone reflects badly on other White guys. Anyone who thinks that gays, by dint of their depraved lifestyle, are more likely to kill people and cut them up is prima facie not a reasonable person. Seeing such a headline confirms their prejudices, but it's not like the alternative was them saying, "Gosh, there's no story in the paper about a gay dismembering a Chinese man, I guess that means homosexuals are alright after all."

If there was ever a historical moment when queers had to act "respectable" in order to be accepted and granted rights, it's long past, at least in this country. Nowadays you have to be living in a polygamous compound not to know some LGBT person who's just as bland and conformist as you are. I'm reminded of Wanda Sykes' brilliant bit on how "dignified Black people" can relax a bit now that there's a Black man in the White House and not be so obsessed with the critical gaze of White people. We're here, we're queer, if you're not over it, then just quieten up as you toddle off to die in a corner.

But really, I suspect I just want to excuse my open flirting with the bearish husbands of our host and my old best friend. (One of them told a story about getting kissed by a drunk guy at work, so when he was saying farewell to the other, I started chanting sotto voce "KISS 'M! KISS 'M!")

Reunited: Part the First

I haven't had good luck with class reunions. I went to my high school five-year hoping to reconnect with friends that I had (unaccountably, I thought) lost touch with while we were all away at college. Almost none of them showed up. The same happened at my college five-year, which taught me the lesson that the kind of people who naturally turn up at reunions are exactly the kind that I wasn't close friends with at school. If I want to see my friends, I need to network in advance.

I suppose it was different in the days when the only social network was a web of acquaintances connected by addresses on envelopes and phone numbers scribbled in notebooks, or maybe by parents who stayed in touch at volunteer group meetings, and you couldn't simply Google someone. Nowadays, Facebook is like a constant class reunion for many people.

But paradoxically, these expanded opportunities actually demotivated me to contact people. After all, if I could Google them, they could Google me--and much more easily, in fact, since I am literally the only person with my full name (and one of the very few with my surname) in the whole world. Two of my best friends in college had the surnames "Greene" and "Miller", respectively, and I despair of ever being able to hunt them down again. If they haven't...well, that should tell me something about the connection I had to them and their interest in renewing it, right?

I didn't reach that conclusion unassisted. It arrived by means of a string of disappointments. The first was the failure of my "best friend" to show up at a surprise birthday party organised by my sister when I came back from abroad. One of the high school friends I thought I'd see at the reunion got in touch prior to visiting town and said he wanted to see me again before I became "just someone I went to high school with". But after a somewhat awkward get-together in which I spent more time making smalltalk with his wife than talking to him, it became apparent that that's exactly what we were. My high school ten-year took place at a bowling alley; I didn't bother to RSVP.

I thought I'd learned something from these upsets and wouldn't make the same mistakes with college friends. After all, we had a deeper connection, forged when we were young adults rather than inchoate teens, right? You can see where this is going: I blew off my ten-year college reunion as well. I'd been interested enough in going the day before, but that evening my last roommate made plans to meet me and monshu and then stood us up, making me wonder exactly how much of a fool I was still being. I had some regrets at a party in Hyde Park the next night where members of the Skiffy crowd who'd made it to the class gathering informed me that I had actually been missed and then desperately and unsuccessfully tried to get in touch with one or two old pals before they left town.

As middle age crept up, I'd reached Acceptance. I resigned myself to the fact that most people in this life are simply flakes--myself included--and you need to learn to treat them as a sort of atmospheric phenomenon: Enjoy the warmth when it comes, but don't be surprised if it's followed by freezing drizzle and don't take it personally. With that in mind, I resolved to make my high school 20th--and then found that they'd scheduled it for the weekend I was going to be in San Francisco. I had to rely on one of the few pals I'm still in occasional contact with for a report on "who's still a douche and who's gotten douchier than ever before".

Hopefully this wordy preface has given you all some appreciation for the strongly mixed feelings with which I approached my college 20-year last weekend. Several months ago, one of the few classmates I'd had a little success at remaining in touch with added me to the reunion group on Facebook. I would check in occasionally hoping to see familiar faces and instead finding exactly the opposite. Last Friday, I went through the whole list of members and found only two people I actually knew personally--one of whom I didn't even realise belonged to my class because I first met him only years later. (He's spookyfruit's law partner.) Not only was I not friendly with the rest, with a few exceptions I didn't even recognise their names and I used to work in the college mailroom.

But still, I was willing to give it a shot--until I went to register and discovered that the class gathering was taking place not on campus but at some spot on the North Side with no class associations that I would probably never willingly set foot in otherwise. Moreover, the charge for my class gathering would be $60, for which we could expect "'heavy' hors-d'œuvres". As monshu observed, clearly the committee had put "cost recovery" above inclusiveness. As I ranted to some older alumni later in the weekend, "I know people in town who are underemployed or unemployed. How can they afford that?" The trend others had trenchantly observed taking root even before graduating of treating students as "TPUs" ("Tuition Paying Units") seemed to have continued unabated over the years. The message to my class: If you don't have money, then we don't care about you. Disgusted, I broke off registering.

So how did I end up going after all? Blame Facebook. I awoke Saturday to find a message from one of the "Snell Girls", a fun-loving coterie I'd fallen in with my first year: "Since you live here," it read, "we vote for you attending one of the events tomorrow." I had another look at the (confusing and badly-organised) list of choices, singled out the picnic, and confirmed that they planned to attend. Then I informed the Old Man, packed a bag, and took off. Two hours later (thanks for picking the middle of the day to fly home, Mr President!) I disembarked in Hyde Park and began fighting my way past the 57th Street ArtCraft Fair.

I think I'd heard at some point that the alumni association had taken over the former McCormick Seminary building on Woodlawn, but I failed to remember this at the critical time; the cumulative affect of all these delays was that I got to the picnic just as it was shutting down. The one consolation was that they simply waved me in, so I didn't have to pay for my mushy bratwurst and dessicated hamburger. My classmates--if they'd even made it there--were long gone.

But where to? I recalled a posting on the FB page about a biergarten sponsored by Great Lakes Brewery in Harper Quad. From what I remembered of the gang, it seemed like exactly the place they'd gravitate towards, so I snagged a tasty porter, found a seat in the shade, and waited. And waited and waited. I reminded myself that, even alone, there were far worse ways to spend an absolute gorgeous day in Chicago than sitting outside with a free beer eavesdropping on stories of making yoghurt in bathtubs. I did manage to strike a couple conversations of my own, one with a delightful older woman just killing time until President Zimmer's address, another with the kind of awkward geek which the College was once notorious for producing.

But eventually this became boring and I headed to Rockefeller Chapel where a concert was about to begin, hoping I might see someone I knew in the crowd. I didn't. Another concert was going on across the street at Ida Noyes Hall, so I checked that out, too. No joy. The rest of the building was unnervingly deserted--I say "unnervingly", but in my day it was the social centre of a campus conspicuously lacking a real student union. I felt like I'd simply stumbled into it on a random weekend in the summer, not in the middle of a major alumni event.

What to do with myself? Well, as long as the Seminary Coop Bookstore continues to reside there (which is to say, for another four months) no trip to the UofC campus will ever be wasted. As a bonus, I had a pleasant chat with the bear cub who gave me my 20% member discount about cataloging software. That made me wonder if, just maybe, there was someplace I could get online to see if anyone had updated my FB wall with revised rendezvous information. My alumni tag got me access to the Reg, but getting a computer might've been a different story if I hadn't come across one of my few fondly-remembered former co-workers at the reference desk.

Still nothing, and an hour to go before I had to head north again to help monshu prepare for Bear Night cocktails. Not enough time to drop in on any of my Hyde Park acquaintances, so I made one more stroll through campus and ended up outside Rockefeller again. As I contemplated my route home, I considered passing the Medici--the premier student hangout in our day--on the off chance that might be where the girls were meeting for dinner. But this smacked of a desperation which I was anxious to leave behind, so I decided instead to leave by means of the Midway in order to avoid the crush and score a better seat on the Jackson Park.

Into this moment of complacent resignation strolled Guge.