Dire straights

A straightboy housewarming is a perverse place to spend Gay Pride. And this really was a straightboy affair. Yeah, they weren't the only ones there, but they definitely set the tone. And these are straightsboys from a "White ethnic" neighbourhood in Chicago, so like worlds away from the straight people I normally hang with. It was like briefly revisiting my high school days (at a Catholic prep school in suburban St Louis in the 80s). One of them now lives in Ravenswood, and it was amusing to see him have much the same reaction to some of the off-colour humour. Let's just say I've had my share of racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks for a while.

Not to say they weren't all "great guys". I mean, if my buddy Tam had to hide a body, I'm sure they'd all turn up to help him out, no questions asked. But if being party to a conversation between two guys about "eating pussy" isn't weird enough, just wait until one of them turns a throwaway remark into a gay innuendo and then does his impression of a sultry homo come-on. It's not like I never step out of my liberal bubble long enough to encountre this sort of thing, it's just that I'm used to seeing it come from tradesmen twenty years my senior and not friends of a friend fifteen years younger than me at a house party.

Now, I know it's extremely gauche to rag on someone's hospitality, but none of you will meet this guy and there's also a rule of etiquette which says that you don't claim a guest's dinner hour without feeding them. He even included in his invite a plea for RSVPs so he could get a head count for the food. At least a dozen people there, and we had (a) a nine-by-nine pan of Italian sausage with onions and peppers; (b) a bowl of corn chips with some dips; and (c) a vodkainated watermelon. There were also some grapes and a cake there. Why? Because I brought them. I suspected I should bring along something sufficient to feed me, but nothing at the grocery store spoke to me.

So I was put into the uncomfortable position of having to decide between staying at a gathering I was enjoying and striking out in search of some food so I could fall asleep tonight. Being me, I split the difference and left too late to find any place open nearby or to eat something in time to go to bed before midnight. (I wolfed down some pasta and potatoes when I got in an hour and a half ago.) A shame, but not a tragedy. Next time I'll know.

It's not like I didn't do anything appropriate to make the occasion. I thought I was feeling only the usual dragginess this morning until the Old Man complained of food poisoning, which of course was all I needed to believe I'd been poisoned, too. So I spent the morning malingering and watching Nigel Finch's Stonewall. It holds up well, but I was surprised at what I had forgotten in twenty years--such as almost the entire Mattachine Society storyline. In particular, Finch fantasises a conversation between the leader of that gradualist, assimilationist movement and the drag queen character he credits with kicking off the riots and it's a gem.

I read the book by Martin Duberman on which the film is based. He was criticised for flattening all of the disparate voices in the accounts he gathered with a blandly consistent authorial tone, and that's valid. But the testimonies themselves are fascinating. One detail that has always stuck with me is from an antiestablishment radical (who may have been the model for the movie's protagonist). He talks of having a circle of activist friends from his involvement in the Civil Rights movement and finding that, when he asked them to participate in the first gay pride march a year after the riots, every one of them begged off.

The lesson I drew from that is that, ultimately, you can never completely trust your professed allies. I'm very glad that--to a person--all of my straight friends nowadays vocally support full equality for LGBTs. Some of them have even done what that activist's friends didn't do and marched in protests or otherwise actively campaigned. But I can never shake the feeling that if push really came to shove, they would find some way of justifying not putting their livelihoods on the line for me.

And I doubt I'm alone in that. I wouldn't be in the least surprised to hear a female friend say that she feels the same way about men, no matter how active they are in promoting feminism. Or to hear a similar sentiment from one of my Jewish friends. I hope I'm wrong. But then, I hope I'm wrong about a lot of my own shortcomings, despite having been proved otherwise many times already.