Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

Where do you live? Is it where you want to live? Is it a city on a hill? Are you perhaps one of those people who don't much notice their surroundings? Do you live an interior life?

One theory of gay life in Amerika had it that some cities were beachheads of gay advancement-- Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles-- and of course the college towns, Madison, Austin, etc. And then the list thins out. And even within the beachheads, only parts were safe. Then came gentrification-- the queans move into run-down areas, fix them up, make them smart, get the buzz going on them, property values go up-- and then the rich straight lawyers move in, driving the queans out.

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This cycle still amazes me. One of the most fascinating events for me is watching a gay guy of a certain age deeply absorbed in a fashion-lifestyle-home-decorating glitzed-up magazine. All that chintz! All those Italian designers! All the latest in gracious living. Things, things, and more things. My dream of a controlled experiment would be to take a representative sample of these kind of House Beautiful Queans, give them as much money as they wanted over a year-- and see what comes out the other end. And then, of course, assuming one or more of them would end up with this over-decorated floral-patterned freak show of a residence, I would condemn the quean to live in it the rest of his years!

I always thought Liberace had the right Zen meditation. Lee would waltz onto stage-- this was in his later years-- in some perfectly hideous floor-length animal skin, done up in sequins and piping. Liberace would leer at the audience and shout: "Like it? You paid for it!" which challenged the audience to actually witness the spectacle of its own bad taste come back to decorate its retinas. Sort of like the theme of the 50s sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet, the embodiment of psychic wishes-- usually all killers of one variety or another.

Why did Ulysses take so long to get home? Not want to get back? Wanted to spool around and check out some of the finer properties on the Med. Coasts? Perhaps he liked adventure. Some do. I prefer settlement. I simply cannot, and I have tried, imagine the trek of Lewis and Clark. All that schlepping! And then Meriwether Lewis-- and who names their son Meriwether?-- came back and killed himself a few years later. What caused this? Some think he was gay and this was just another gay suicide. The jury is out, though it sounds accurate to me.

A lot of gay people, unlike their straight siblings, wind up living very far away from where they were born, raised, went to skool. As we know now, the dislocation brought by the mobilization of troops for WW2 created what we now call the gay community-- creating those beachheads. We have a long way to go. How do so many of us get to Byzantium (or think we do)-- that city wherein beauty and grace just might spare us the evil effects of society and old age? It worked for the late Quentin Crisp! (Crisp's own tip on house-keeping? He never bothered dusting his apartment. "After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse." Perhaps Quentin should have been editor of the-- one issue only-- Quean Housekeeping Gazette.)

I had a southern quean befriend me some time ago. He was Deep South, honey, and he had come north, working for the airlines, and he was as southern quean as you possibly could get, and I suspect would have liked that home decorating gig with all the chintz and flounces, throw pillows, heavy mesh curtains, wine-red leather ottomans, flocked wallpaper-- everything for the total experience but the barf bag. He told me he had a plan to "conquer" gay social life here in Boston, where, despite what he had heard, he was gonna make the northern folk real friendly. I enjoyed listening to him-- though I did wonder what movie, or more likely TV sit-com, he had playing in his head. The Big Party loomed. He had invited all his friends he had met in the bars, and it was going to be just fabulous, catered by a professional staff, fine wines, and party games & each guest was to receive a small gift as they left. The Southern belle had shelled out Big Bucks to slay gay Boston society.

A week later, a dejected quean came in. "How was the Party," I asked. "No one came," he said. "They all stood me up, just knifed me in the back. I've asked the airline for a transfer."

"Where?" I was curious, already knowing.

"San Francisco." I assume everything has worked out just fine for my friend once he hit 'Frisco. I suspect his first party there was packed. (And isn't sad that Finocchio's has closed, driven out by hyper-inflated real estate valuations?) This southern quean was driven out of Boston-- not tar and feathers-- but by a vote of his "friends" when they didn't show up, somehow that was the valuation of what friendship was all about-- alas, some say "yes" when they mean "no." I myself am guilty of this ruse when pestered by a pesky quean-- just blow 'em off with a "yes, dear." I long ago decided SF was the one city in gay life where all are welcome; you're not thrown out, you're not judged, you stay. And, of course, if that is why you moved to SF, then there is the interesting question: if you want to leave SF, where do you go? Jim Jones went to the jungles of Guyana, his Byzantium. Constantine, of course, ruined Byzantium by making it a Roman capital. So many of our landing sites get ruined in like ways. I have my Byzantium while it lasts-- already, daily, slipping away. Have you?

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com