Tag: It's a Sin

YMCA

Ah, the Young Men’s Christian Association.

One of my favorite things about homophobic straight people is how clueless they are (the homophobia is really a tipoff) when it comes to queer stuff. (In fairness, if they don’t know any queer people why would they know anything about queer stuff?) Nothing amuses me more than watching crowds of straight people–whether it’s a sporting event, wedding, or a party– start doing the “YMCA” dance when the deejay puts it on. It’s particularly funny to me when it’s a sporting event, particularly something more on the unenlightened side with their fan base when it comes to queer equality, like NASCAR or hockey (although NASCAR had been doing rainbow stuff all month…). As I watch them all stand up and do the ‘YMCA dance”–always out of rhythm, never to the beat–I smirk to myself and think, you clearly don’t know that this song is about the sexual smorgasbord a YMCA was back in the day for gay men, do you? It’s about GAY SEX, homophobes! You’re singing along to a song about getting fucked at the Y!

It always makes me laugh. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

I’m sure the founders of the YMCA system would have been quite nonplussed to know that in some major cities, gay men turned YMCA’s into essentially bath houses. There were a couple in Manhattan that were notorious for hook-ups, but of course a YMCA would draw gay men. For a long time they were the only places for men to go and get exercise, unless they belonged to a men’s club, like the New Orleans Athletic Club (which used to be for men only), and since gay men, especially after Stonewall, liked to be fit and keep their bodies worked out and in good shape (to draw lovers, of course) they wound up at the Y. And when you get a bunch of gay men thrown together in an environment that includes pools, weights, saunas, steam rooms and showers, you’re going to get hook ups. YMCA’s also provided cheap rooming alternatives, too–and of course, that meant that you could get a room at the Y (just like you could at a bath house) which meant you could bring partners back to the room for sex.

When we first moved to New Orleans there was still a Y at Lee Circle (now Harmony Circle); the Lee Circle Y had been there forever and was actually kind of historic; one of the Israeli athletes murdered at the Munich Olympics was a Tulane student who worked out at the Y. I thought that should at least have some kind of commemorative memorial plaque–and had preservation-minded folk cared about the Lee Circle Y, it could have been declared a historic landmark, instead of closing and the land being sold for yet another hotel. Maybe a murdered Israeli athlete isn’t enough of a connection for historical landmark status. But I used to train people there, and also taught aerobics until it was closed permanently. They had redone the weight room and bought all new equipment a few years earlier, too. Some things–like the locker room and so forth–were musty and moldy smelling, with that distinct stench of decades of male sweat baked into the walls.

But yes, the Village People of “YMCA” fame–every one of them was dressed as a particular gay archetype (leather man, Indian chief, fireman, cop, etc.) and all of their songs were thinly veiled odes to the joys of being gay and having lots of no-strings-attached sex; “Macho Man,” “In the Navy,” “YMCA,” “San Francisco”–and the village in their name was Greenwich Village, the gayborhood in Manhattan. (The promotional video for “YMCA”–taken mostly from the movie Can’t Stop the Music–which is a topic for another time, because yes, that movie needs discussion–really says it all.)

There were bath houses, of course (Bette Midler famously got her big break performing at the Continental Baths in Manhattan); New Orleans had two when we first moved here–the Club New Orleans in the Quarter on Toulouse Street and Midtown Spa on Baronne in the CBD, across from where the Rouse’s is now. Both are long gone now, ain’t dere no more as we say down here. We used to do testing in the bath houses, which was always a weird experience. Every room had a television with porn on a loop; the room they used to let us at CNO to test in also was the sling room. So I’d sit on the bed/cot, with porn playing on the television hanging from the ceiling in the corner, and a sling in the opposite corner from the television. I bet that sling could tell some tales….or could have before it was consigned to the dustbin of history.

I also remember the battle over closing bath houses during the height of HIV/AIDS. Rewatching It’s a Sin reminded me of a lot of the struggles back when the disease was new and we didn’t know much about it other than almost everyone who got infected died. It seems kind of counter-intuitive now, but there was an argument that could be made that restricting gay sexuality was also a repressive attempt to push gays back into the closet as well as further stigmatizing gay men. It seems silly now, of course, knowing what we know now, but the mask argument during the pandemic kind of took me back to the struggle to get gay men to wear condoms. (I’m so old I remember when herpes had everyone freaking out in the late 1970s.)

I keep thinking I should write about the Lee Circle Y, just to preserve that piece of New Orleans history. “Never Kiss a Stranger” originally started with my main character getting off a Greyhound bus and lugging his duffel bag down Howard Avenue to the Lee Circle Y, where he gets a room while looking for a place to live. (I later realized the story actually begins with him finding that place to live; the rest is just filler and not very interesting.)

Maybe someday.

Don’t Tell Me

It’s the Monday after Mother’s Day and I managed to make it through somehow. I woke up this morning with a strong urge to remain comfortably in bed, but here I am swilling coffee and planning on how to make it through this week of work and everything else I have to get done. But yesterday wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared it might have been. I eventually became emotionally immune to Mother’s Day sales and the FTD reminders; my situation certainly didn’t require me to complain about others still celebrating with their mothers–why harsh everyone’s buzz? I can’t imagine anything more narcissistic than insisting everyone else calm down with the Mother’s Day stuff because it was hard for me. Next year I’ll know what to expect and will be one more year removed from the loss; time has a way of dulling the aches and pains and slings and arrows life hurls at us–all things become easier with the passage of time. A friend was in town yesterday and I joined him for a rather late lunch. I had a beer (!!!); a local IPA that was actually quite good–I’ve always only drank trash beer, and never really got into beer as an experience rather than as a method of alcohol delivery. (I also know nothing about wine.) That was a nice break from working, and last night we started watching The Consultant, with Christoph Waitz, on Amazon Prime. I don’t think we’ll continue. It’s well done but it’s very strange; it’s based on a Bentley Little novel, so it’s probably more on the horror end of the spectrum, but it didn’t really engage with us very much? I suspect we’ll be looking for something else to watch this evening after I finish working.

And because I never made a grocery run over the weekend I shall have to do it tonight after I get off work, which is hardly an appealing thought. I also have a ZOOM call tonight–I should be able to get home in time for it, I think–or maybe I don’t; it’s not on my calendar which is unusual, but there’s no meeting at all on my schedule for the month of May, which is very odd. I’ll have to dig through my emails to see, but I’m pretty certain it was tonight. I’m actually rather amazed that I remember that much, without it being on my calendar. I know i had some things I needed to do before that call, too–so that’s going on today’s list of things to do. MUST BE DONE.

But I feel like there’s a lot less on my shoulders this morning, which is also kind of weird. Was Mother’s Day that subconsciously brutal on my psyche that I was able to keep it out of the forefront of my mind while still carrying the load and only being slightly aware? My brain’s ability to protect itself (and me) from things I don’t want to think about or deal with at the moment is pretty uncanny; but I’m not sure if that’s entirely healthy. There’s a lot stored away in the dusty back corners of my mind that I’ve never processed or dealt with–watching It‘s a Sin on HBO MAX back whenever it was that first aired, for example, brought a lot of memories back that I’d not even considered, let alone dealt with and processed, since it all actually happened to me in my life. I said recently to a very young gay man lately (early twenties, so born in either the late 90’s/early aughts) “back then we just all figured we were all going to die before anything would be done about it” and he recoiled slightly from me, saying “But that’s terrible” , to which I shrugged and said, “that was our reality.” I’d never really thought about it much because it was the reality; and yes, it was indeed horrible. But I’ve blocked that all out so much for so long that it does sometimes seem like it was distant history, like it all happened to someone else, or that it was a book I wrote long, long ago and barely remember. The loss of memory from that time is no different, really, from the loss of memory of the times and years after Katrina or how all the pandemic/COVID years kind of jumble in my mind and I can’t remember timelines or when things happened or how they happened. Scrambled brains, I suppose, is the easiest way to say it; trauma and PTSD scramble our brains.

And even as I reread that last sentence, I am, as always, inwardly rolling my eyes at myself, So dramatic, my inner critic is sneering. You’re not the first person to lose a parent. It is funny, when you catch yourself being nasty to yourself and then start unpacking where that negativity and self-loathing came from. Childhood, of course, which is where so many of the scars were inflicted and lessons learned that have almost proven impossible to unlearn as an adult. There are no guidebooks for life; only experience and learning hard lessons. As someone who prefers a bit of structure to life, not knowing how I am supposed to handle things like grief and so forth inevitably results in me being harder on myself than I should be. How long are you supposed to grieve? How long before it stops hurting, before I can think about Mom without getting deeply emotional? Am I supposed to keep this to myself, or am I supposed to share it? Do people get tired of hearing about it and grow bored with me talking about it? I know I get bored with myself–and then wonder, is that self-abuse? Should I be kinder to myself? I never have been, really; so that would be a novelty in the first place. When does it cross the line from normal emotional response to wallowing in it?

I really hate that my parents lost my user manual so many years ago…

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. It’s a Monday, so take it as easy on yourself as you can–we can make it through yet another week of challenges and excitement, can’t we?

Stray Dog

Well, top of the morning to you, Constant Reader! It’s a gray Saturday morning here in New Orleans and so far, so good–my arm still hurts like a son of a bitch, but the debilitating fatigue from yesterday (I took a nap in the early afternoon, another in the early evening AND went to be around ten) seems to be past–at least so far, at any rate. I don’t remember being exhausted yesterday morning, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t. I do recall thinking at several points during yesterday that if this was how people with chronic fatigue syndrome felt, ye gods! But today is another day, the enormous amount of work I have to do has not magically disappeared–it’s just a little more dusty this morning. As I glance around the kitchen/office this morning there’s a lot of clean-up to be done around here–not the least of which is filing and organizing, chores I always dread and put off, yet am alway find satisfying to do once I actually get started on it.

Go figure.

I tried out the air fryer yesterday on chicken nuggets in the afternoon for lunch (then again for dinner; I wasn’t hungry but made nuggets for Paul) and it works just fine, frankly. The nuggets were good if different–and I realized the difference was the lack of greasiness and if they were a little drier than usual, that was the lack of grease. It’ll take a while for me to get used to the lack of grease in things like nuggets and so forth, but I deeply approve of this new healthier alternative to deep-frying, and I am going to see about using it for other things, like Brussels sprouts and asparagus and other healthier things. I may eventually have to get a bigger sized air fryer, but the one I have will certainly work for now. As one of the goals for the year was to work on being healthier over all, this is an excellent first step.

We did watch Uncle Frank on Prime last night, and while it was enjoyable on some levels, it was painfully difficult to watch in others. Perhaps it hit a little too close to home for me in some ways, but at the same time, while it was about the main character’s relationship with her gay uncle and his partner–and his estrangement from his family because of his father’s homophobia–there were some horrific scenes of familial homophobia and the emotional/psychological abuse that comes with it. I thought it was going to be more of a comedy–at least that was how the trailer made it seem–but it most definitely was not a comedy, although there was some humor. I’m not certain that the audience for the film was really gay men–it seemed, particularly towards the end, to be like Philadelphia–a movie about gay issues that was really for straight people, and that really can make a difference in how the story is told and how the characters are presented. I do recommend it–it really recaptures that early 1970’s feel, both in South Carolina and New York City; some of the homes and settings in South Carolina (as well as the performances of the actors) made me feel like I was a kid visiting relatives again; and since some of the in-progress works (short stories and novellas) I have are set in the 1970’s South…it was interesting to see and triggered some memories for me. But one thing that was delightful about the movie was it sort of had a happy ending–sure, the two gay characters had a lot of suffering to get through to get there–but neither one of them died, so that was lovely, and the 1970’s setting meant the specter of HIV/AIDS was long in the future. I also couldn’t help wondering, though, as I watched, if either of them would make it through the 1980’s alive, and just having to wonder that about fictional characters is rather sad.

I’m also looking forward to seeing the new Russell Davies series, It’s a Sin, when it drops on HBO MAX next month. (I much preferred the original Queer as Folk to the American version, quite frankly. I’m curious to see if they do an American version of this one, as well…but since it’s airing on HBO MAX I tend to rather doubt it; but I don’t remember how Americans watched the original Queer as Folk either.)

Paul is off to the office later today so I will have the house to myself for the most part until this evening, which is nice but also going to be a bit weird. I keep forgetting that the festivals are looming, so of course he is late getting home every evening and will disappear on Saturdays; it is the time of year when I become a Festival widow. I of course should use this time productively, and am actually planning to go read for a bit once I finish this, spend some time straightening up in here, and will sit down with the manuscript later on today to see what needs to be done and get organized with it as well so I can plan out my writing and editing needs for the rest of February. Hmmm…thinking about organizing and getting stuff done hasn’t fatigued me–we’ll see how that goes once I start actually moving around and trying to do things, shall we?

And on that note, I am off to the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday wherever you are, Constant Reader!