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t’s a discussion my friend David and I have
had at least once a month in the few years
we’ve known each other.
“It would he nice if there were a gay
neighborhood here,” says David, who grew up
in Portland and has seen just about every
thing— from hair salons to drag queens—come
and go. “You know, like a street where rainbow
flags are always out. Or a queer restaurant. Or a
gay bar where you know that every guy in there
is open to being hit on and not
some frat boy who’s really after the
chicks.”
We’ve been to Seattle a few
times, David and 1, and rarely in
that city have we
found ourselves
more than two
blocks
away
from Broadway.
Broadway, where
the coffee shops
are queer, the
bead stores are
queer, the music
stores, the Fred
BY
Meyer, the pierc-
ALEXANDER ing and tattoo
O'FALLON parlors— all of
them for, by and
about queers. To say nothing
of the bars, and the sex clubs.
Curiously, all of our trips
to Seattle have ended the
same way: with a measurable
degree of relief and joy when
Portland comes into view—
the bridges, the railroad
tracks, the Willamette River
and our miniature, almost
make-believe skyline wink
ing at yet another rusty sun
set.
“God,” David always says
as he pilots the car. “I think I O G ’d this week
end.”
Over-Gayed. Is it possible that too much of
a good thing is too much? That’s the question I
took with me when 1 visited three big cities
this summer.
All of the cities 1 visited have sizable queer
ghettos. Entire ZIP codes where it’s queer
around the clock. Bars, cafes, clothing stores,
gift shops, stores that sell nothing but sex toys,
entire streets and blocks where every face you
peer at, every bicep, every firm ass cheek, every
bulging crotch at which you gaze is worn— and
worn proudly— by a queer man.
"Where do the lesbians go.7” I asked a friend
from college with whom I spent an evening on
my trip to the East Coast. We’d had dinner and
were gathering energy for a night at the bars.
“What lesbians.7” he said, and his crassness
nearly took my breath away. Can you imagine
saying something like that in Portland and liv
ing to tell about it? But he had a point. In that
rainbow-festooned zone of utter bedlam— bars
where young men danced naked on the coun
ters, stroking their lubed and shiny erections
while my friend and I tried to have a coherent
discussion— there were no women.
Not only were there no women, there were
no average-looking men either. Nobody who
looked like he was earning less than $50,000 a
year, nobody with uneven teeth or less than
perfect skin or a protruding belly or a slightly
flabby ass, nobody without a cellular phone
and a tan to go with it. These were neighbor
hoods that had either inspired Calvin Klein or,
even worse, neighborhoods that been inspired
by his images of physical perfection.
And these were neighhorhtxxls that were,
in a word, hollow. Privately, I wondered if the
people who populated these ghettos were doing
so out of a sense of community, or if they were
just being exclusive. It is a question I cannot
answer— I didn’t stick around long enough to
ask it.
On each of my three journeys this summer 1
wound up forsaking the temples of queer spir
it— the bars and dance clubs— and opted
instead for the more secular realm offered by
coffeehouses, bookstores and museums. Practi
cally sacrilege for someone who has spent so
much time harping about how lame it is that
queer bars in Portland seem to always fall vic
tim to a takeover by the straights.
“How was it?” David asked me after I
returned from one of my trips. "Did you meet
anyone?”
"Well,” 1 said. “The gay guys there were all
a little too beautiful, a little too well-toned.
They were hard to talk to.”
“Jesus Christ,” David sighed. He’s always
been smoother at pickups, and he finds it fool
ish and amusing that I’m compelled to delve
beneath the firm and beautiful pectorals and
examine the human heart up close.
So we said goodnight and hung up. 1 went
out to the front yard and sat with my neigh
bors: a welfare mother in law school, two other
queer men, a couple of straight women with
cats, two lesbians over whom there’s a great
deal of speculation (are they a couple or just
really good friends?) and a het couple who
aren’t going to be a couple much longer if the
male half doesn’t stop asking me over for a beer
when his girlfriend’s working the night shift.
As we sat and beheld the spectacle of a full
moon rising over Southeast Portland, all I
could think was: Thank God 1 am home.
■ O U T W o r d is written by members o f Portland
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