Republican Way Off Broadway

 

Not a Drape, not even a Scrape

 

Surrender Dorothy!

 

Dinner is served with a generous side of anxiety

Gỏi cuốn or summer rolls by Yuchinkay. CC BY 2.0 Generic.
Via Wikimedia Commons.

"You'll have to tell me how this works. I haven't eaten in a restaurant since March." 

 

Neither had I. 

Today Cairo and I went to a favorite Vietnamese restaurant, Pho Hung on Spadina Avenue at St. Andrew Street in Chinatown, for a late lunch/early dinner. Come to think of it, this is the first place we dined together in Toronto when we started dating more than seven years ago this summer.

Since shelter-in-place became the norm here in mid-March, I've done takeout from a Japanese restaurant and a Persian restaurant near where I live, but that, Tim Horton's, and Mary Brown's Fried Chicken, is about as adventurous as I've gotten in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In defense of both of us, patio dining just reopened in Toronto in late June, but indoor dining only started up again in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) on July 31.

 

First things first: 

• We had to wear masks, except when eating. Even when I went to the washroom, even when we paid the bill, we wore masks.
• We also had to provide our names and telephone numbers in case contact tracing was needed. (We now also have an app in Ontario to help with this as well.)
• All the silverware (in this case, chopsticks, soup spoons, napkins, etc.) came in individual plastic bags, which we opened ourselves.
• Tables were far apart and some were marked with a bright red 'X' so that no one was seated too close to others.

 But that didn't really matter because we were maybe two out of four or five diners in the restaurant. We were easily outnumbered by the staff and the owners.

 

Heretofore, this has been a very busy Vietnamese resto, in the heart of Toronto's main Chinatown. (There are a couple of others.) Maybe we went at an unpopular time or maybe it was just a nice summer day and everybody was at the beach or the cottage, but overall, Chinatown was more lowkey than you would expect on a Saturday afternoon in August.

 

The food was great, as always, maybe even better in some ways than usual but that could in part be down to the fact that we hadn't eaten there in so long. We even peeked into some shops along Spadina, which seemed to be doing a fairly brisk business, despite the pandemic.

 

But I keep thinking about that restaurants, all the restaurants, and how any of them have survived this lockdown. You really have to wonder how most of them, any of them, have held on for this long.

 

So maybe this will make me get out and about a little more, at least once a week, at least for takeout, to put some money back in the economy, other than a steady stream of Amazon and iTunes purchases. I confess that even as a die-hard introvert, I feel somewhat stir crazy at this point, ready for company, some activity, new sights and sounds, and definitely something other than my own cooking when I can be bothered to cook at all.  I can only imagine how the extroverts among us are doing. 

 

Stage 3 of reopening, where we are currently in the GTA, still feels a little raw, a little chancy, a little brutal even. There seem to be more homeless people on the street, in my own neighborhood and in Chinatown. We're not even close to normal, but perhaps today was one small step toward normalcy. Hopefully so. 

 

And then this evening we watched the news and learned that the province is back up to having more than one hundred new COVID-19 cases reported per day, a number not seen since early summer. Our infection rate is small stuff compared to what's going on in the States and other parts of the world, but that and the fact that the U.S.-Canada border is closed to travel for the foreseeable future are signs that the pandemic isn't done messing with us just yet.

 

I, the profaner

 

I discovered this song earlier today, the whole album in fact, 11 episodios sinfónicos, by the late Gustavo Cerati, a famed Argentine musician, songwriter, and lead singer of rock en español legends, Soda Stereo.

Cerati died too young, just a few years ago, due to ongoing complications from a stroke. This album and concert were recorded in Buenos Aires in the early 2000s when he would seem to have been at a creative peak, at least if this song provides sufficient evidence. (However, the Great Gazoo called and he wants his coat back, Gustavo.) I once had a boyfriend from Mexico who waxed eloquent about Soda Stereo, but I never really got them or got into them, at least back then. But now, I'm sorry I didn't. Maybe hearing this record would have made me appreciate the band. Maybe this record would have prompted me to travel to Argentina much earlier in life than I did, only a mere two years ago.

But I've done so twice now, and I will do so again, espero que sí, once the COVID-19 pandemic ends. I've even toyed with the idea of working remotely from Buenos Aires, which now seems completely possible. I'm not quite convinced my employer would agree, but if this pandemic is really anticipated to last for two years, as recently predicted, then what the hell? Why not? I loathe this job, and if you've been reading so far, you know Canada and I have a marriage of convenience--or inconvenience, given its unsatisfying retail scene and its small screen view of everything. Back home, the U.S. seems crazier and deadlier than usual. So if Argentina would let me in, if I had access to good healthcare, if I had access to a strong, reliable internet connection, would it matter if I did my job from a place I would much rather be, improving my Spanish, a lifelong goal, and exploring spectacular landscapes, steak dinners, and Malbecs along the way?

De veras, after all this meshugas, it's hard to imagine going back to the office, let alone to whatever was passing for normal at the beginning of 2020. If I can work from home for six months in Toronto, I could do the same in Buenos Aires, or Salta, or Jujuy, or Mendoza, or Puerto Madryn, or Trelew, or Córdoba, or Ushuaia, or Rosario, or San Antonio de los Cobres ... well, maybe not San Antonio de los Cobres, a unique and beautiful place but one where the altitude is high, the air is thin, and the roasted llama is a little too free-flowing for a sensitive stomach like mine. (And yet I ate it, loved it, and would go back for more if given the opportunity.) 

But, otherwise, hell yeah, I could do this and still hit up the llama blue plate special in San Antonio every few months or so. So buen apetito and buen viaje, bitches! I'm outta here first chance and a ticket on Aerolíneas Argentinas I get.

Tears of a clown

 

Mornin' glory

 

 

"And glory to my hot young boyfriend, Brandon!"*

 

* Fez not included; some assembly required.

Suddenly last summer

This is a recent mixtape I completed as a birthday gift for a friend of mine, who previously in these pages I've dubbed The Italian American, although that label does an exceedingly poor job of conveying anything about his personality. In some ways, it's more of an ironic label, at least if I even remember what irony is at this point, thank you very fucking much Alanis Morissette! (Just kidding, girl. You know I love you. Like a friend.)

We both enjoyed the movie and the book, Call Me by Your Name, although I think IA may have enjoyed both more than me. Increasingly I find I have a somewhat problematic relationship with media portrayals of the G in LGBT+ lives. However, I don't think it's so much the media's take that bothers me; It's more the wishy-washy, fuzzy-wuzzy, hyper-fluid, contemporary take on sexuality and gender identity.

No one seems to want to be Gay with a capital G anymore. Every identity, every gender seems highly mutable. Perhaps that's as it should be: The era I came out in (1980-1983) feels like a thousand years ago (and, let's face it, it was 40 years ago, a couple of lifetimes if we were peasants in the Middle Ages) and represented a very different time in gay life. Pre-AIDS for one thing but also in the midst or even a little post-liberation, a time when gay men seemed to know who they were and what they wanted--and that was to be men who unapologetically loved men. Gay identity was a political statement as well as a personal identity. We had to be united to get across who we were--sure of ourselves and our sexuality (this is not a phase!); men who wanted to be men and not women (I'm not a transvestite!); men who knew how to have fun (sometimes discreetly, sometimes not) but who knew how to present themselves so as to gain respect and further the cause of our safety and equality.

Maybe that's all an illusion. Maybe sexuality and identity were more fluid then than we realized, but back then the bisexuality of men often seemed like an excuse not to commit to being gay and marriage to a woman felt like a betrayal to the cause. That was perhaps way too rigid a view, but the rigidity was there to push us and our rights forward. No waffling! No backsliding! No second-guessing! We're here, we're queer, get used to it!

The rigidity could be chafing and stifling, even to me. It's not that I was interested in women or, other than for a couple of weeks after acknowledging my sexuality and figuring out how to explain it to my parents and friends, that I considered myself bisexual. I am not. I am a solid Kinsey 6, or at most/least a Kinsey 5.75. I can be intellectually attracted to women from time to time, although I'm not sure about physically, and I have no intention of exploring any other possibilities at this late date in life. And I don't feel as though I've missed a thing. If anything, when I think about what I missed, I recall missed opportunities to meet men, get to know men, date men, and have sex with men (although admittedly not exclusively in that trajectory)--and I recall missed opportunities to travel more, where I would have likely met men, got to know men, dated men, and had sex with men.

The stifling part for me is that I often wanted to date and be in love more than I wanted to have sex with more men. I had my share of encounters, sure, but sex, even when I was at my peak {assuming I had one, that is) has never been a hobby or a mission for me. I also think that what rapidly became the gay identity of the 1980s and '90s--well-to-do white urban gay men and their hangers-on (the party boys, the muscle studs, the lovers, just add rainbow flags)--fell flat for me. I didn't have the money, I didn't have the body, I didn't have the ego and extroversion, and I didn't have the interest to be like everyone else, at least for more than a fleeting moment.  

The '70s and early '80s liberation and the '80s and '90s Reaganomics/Dynasty/Pet Shop Boys approach to gay life both seem très passé nowadays. Subsequent generations, post-AIDS crisis, appear to enjoy the freedom created, but the old man in me questions whether anyone coming out after 1992 or so feels any of the responsibility. I see stuff nowadays--the outrageous characters on RuPaul's Drag Race (the Canadian version in heavy rotation here at the moment), the predominance of trans identity in the media, the fluidity of gender ("some days I feel like a man, some days I feel like a woman"--so you understand what it's like to be paid less for the same or more work and fear being sexually assaulted wherever you are, including your own home?)--that makes me cringe. And it makes me feel very old. I always strove fro normalcy, respect, responsibility, permanence, and even a certain level of masculinity. None of that seems to matter anymore.

No, Gay with a capital G life hasn't been a bed of orchids or tulips for me. Sometimes it's felt more like a field of dandelions. While I've employed the beautiful ideal of men loving men as one of my guiding stars in my life, it can sometimes be a lonely journey. Some men can't love you. Some men only want to have sex--all friction and no feeling. Some men stay true to the rigid limitations of masculine power and dominance, even when given a opportunity to be free of these bonds and experience a transformative life. And some men just don't understand you--and you don't understand them.

Truth be told, there never was a choice, there was no fluidity, no in-between state of being: I am Gay with a capital G. It is who I am, and I am proud of that reality and that I've dealt with it reasonably well and lived the best life I could live under sometimes trying, sometimes dire, and sometimes happy circumstances.

So even Call Me by Your Name makes me somewhat uncomfortable as the movie perhaps more than the book implies a choice and a mutability of sexuality that I never felt were part of my reality. But, hey, maybe it's OK--it is the reality for some for sure. It's just that I find the idea of men loving men exclusively and determinedly greatly diminished and undervalued in the current milieu. Maybe we had it our way for too long--we set the standard, we set the course, and expected everyone to comply with our worldview. Maybe this represents a deep generational change, and I represent an old guard that can't get beyond its suddenly evaporating status and privilege. Maybe I'm in the wrong. Or maybe I'm not, but to quote our illustrious Fearless Leader, "It is what it is."

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the mixtape. I took a couple of songs from the soundtrack--French and Italian pop hits from the early 1980s--and expanded upon that, trying to represent the story and the scenes through song. Some of it likely works, some of it likely doesn't, but I hope you'll have fun listening nonetheless. I know I had a lot of fun exploring the pop charts, discovering new music, becoming reacquainted with old favorites, and putting this all together.

Thighs and whispers

Instabull not Constantonipple

 

Trump mispronounces Thailand as "Thighland" pic.twitter.com/PgTRnHpAA8

— The Recount (@therecount) August 6, 2020

Thighland
Nambia
Maracas
Salty Arabia
Phillypenis
Tzatzikistan

Little known fact: Toblerone, the capital of Nambia, and Vanilla, the capital of Thighland, are cistern cities.

Who's your daddy?

 

I wish him well

 

Oh, Schecky ... Part 3

 

Oh, Schecky ... Part 2

 

Oh, Schecky ...

 

Hey, swinger