Robert David Sullivan

Haunting the gay bars of Boston

My good friend Peter Muise just wrote about the possible haunting of Boston's premier (and only) drag bar, Jacques, at his New England Folklore blog. 

Never one to overlook a productive way to spend a beautiful Sunday afternoon in New York, I naturally began the task of choosing a place to haunt after my untimely death. A gay bar fits all the criteria: a place of unspeakable heartache and pain, where it always seems to be late at night and any pale, wrinkled figure will prompt shrieking among the occupants.

My preference would be to haunt the Napoleon Club, where the love of my life once excused himself to use the men's room and then somehow vanished from the building without my seeing him. (At least my ghostly powers would enable me to discover whatever secret passageway he used.) Alas, the Napoleon Club met a fate worse than going straight: It was converted into condos. It would be a waste to haunt whichever philistines how occupy the space.

I could haunt the Eagle, but really the worst thing that happened to me there was being told the significance of each and every flag, pennant, and motorcycle-club patch on the walls. I've been told that my yawns can be pretty disturbing; still, I think I should aim higher than that.

Downstairs at the Paradise is another option, thanks to its brief experiment with "underwear parties" in the '90s. As I recall, the club waived the $10 cover charge for anyone willing to leave most of their clothes at the coat-check booth. This meant that the most exposed patrons in the place were also the cheapest patrons. Younger patrons (which included myself at the time) kept to the dance floor, fully clothed, while several older, flabby men in G-strings nursed their wine coolers at the bar. It was a surrealist enough scene for Twin Peaks (or maybe American Horror Story), but not traumatic enough for me to want to haunt the place.

There's the Ramrod, which now refuses to use its leather-bar name and goes by its dance-club incarnation, Machine. I did go to its infamous "back room" a few times, even complying with the shirts-off dress code. But the only action I experienced there was when a friend twisted one of my nipples, in kind of a pity grope. I heard that things got more intense after 1 a.m., but the subway stopped running at 12:30, so I never really found out. I guess I could haunt the MBTA general manager's office over that.

That leaves me with Club Cafe, also known among my friends as Club Snub. Indeed, I had many experiences of spotting someone I knew there only to have him look away and suddenly remember that he had something to do on the other side of the room. At least three times, I ran into guys at Club Cafe whom I had no idea were gay. These encounters were not the beginnings of beautiful friendships, as I never saw any of them again.

Club Cafe was also where someone I had dated a few times asked me to meet him one night, saying he had something very important to tell me. On my way to the bar, I played out various romantic scenes in my head, all ending with my joy that I would never again have to walk into Club Snub alone. After we got a table for two and a couple of Cosmopolitans, he told me the big news: He was pregnant. 

Yep, it was all a practical joke. Now this is a scenario right out of Carrie, something a ghost can really work with. So if Club Cafe is still standing after I go, look for me there, dumping gallons of cranberry juice upon the head of anyone who breaks a poor guy's heart.

Photo by Elmer C. on Yelp. 

 

 

New gay porn for men over 50

Imagine yourself in these scenarios!

• "Looks like we're snowed in," announces the ski instructor, a hottie from Montreal named Jean-Pierre, to you and the four college students who have taken shelter in a tiny lodge just outside Aspen. Kevin, the youngest and shyest of the students, opens a wooden box in the corner and gasps. "Wh-wh-what do you do with this?" he asks, presenting his newfound booty. "I can show you," you say confidently, "I can show all of you." A minute later, and a game of Scattergories is in full swing.

• After a long workout, you fall asleep in your gym's steam room. When you awake, you wander through the health club only to discover you've been locked in for the night! Fortunately, you encounter another towel-clad captive: a strikingly tall man with a shoulder-length black hair and a treasure trail down his torso. "You'll do just fine," you tell him. "Wake me up in six hours. A good night's sleep away from my dry, stuffy apartment will do wonders for my sinuses!"

• You weren't expecting anyone, but you answer the front door on a Saturday morning to find Zac Efron—or his exact twin—in a UPS uniform, sweat starting to glisten on his forehead. "I can't make out this address," he says. "Could this package be for you?" "I'm beginning to think this is exactly what I ordered," you say, inviting him in. Fifteen minutes later, you're binge-watching DVDs of The Good Wife, feeling no guilt over the delivery boy's probable dismissal for being too dumb to tell the difference between East 12th and West 12th Streets.

• "Since you're my last appointment of the day," says your new doctor, a dead ringer for Aziz Ansari, as he closes and locks the door, "I can offer you a little extra. Your insurance company doesn't need to know anything about it." Fifteen minutes later, that skin tag on your neck is but a memory.

• "I was just getting ready to close up," says the bartender—a muscular young guy in a tank top—as you walk into the popular but now empty club. "But I can take care of one more customer." You don't hesitate. After one sip of a gin and tonic, suddenly you're moaning with pleasure. "This is fantastic," you say. "I've never been able to find a seat in here before!"

 

 

 

Getting dizzy at age 52

I'm a couple of weeks away from turning 52, and just looking at that number made me feel as if I had tumbled out of a window.

 

It takes just a second to reassure myself that I'm not falling yet. But aging, like gravity, is an unstoppable force. And not everyone thinks to take advantage of life before the fall. I sometimes think of living as a chore that I've left at the bottom of a to-do list for... oh, 30 years. Like finishing Ulysses (my James Joyce reading group broke up rather abruptly) or dancing shirtless at Limelight.

 

I feel that we're all at a cocktail party in a glittering high-rise, and everyone gets pushed out the window eventually. You can't avoid your fate by hiding in the corner and avoiding eye contact with everyone. 

 

Some people never make it to the window. Bad luck and bad choices can mean an unnaturally early exit from the party. I'm selfishly glad that I made it this far, and certainly a little too smug about not drinking too much or taking any drugs that might have brought me to a sudden end. But I should have downed some of those raw oysters (everyone who ate them seems fine!) and been bolder about putting my arm around someone on the couch.

 

Last week I spent a couple of days on a college campus in Washington, D.C., and I regretted how shy and buttoned-up I was when I was younger. Why didn't I grow a beard before I got gray hair? Why didn't I wear cool sunglasses and walk around in shorts and untucked shirts when I could look roguish instead of sloppy and forgetful? (A stain on a shirt means insouciance at 30 and the beginnings of senility at 60.) I wouldn't have been kicked out of the cocktail party for displaying a little color or showing a little leg.

 

Should I warn younger people that a lifetime isn't infinite? I can imagine going to gay bars like a missionary, taking aside twentysomethings to preach what I've learned, but I wouldn't have paid attention to someone like that when I was in my twenties. And getting a reputation as a creepy old man is not what I need for my self-esteem at this point.

 

So I'm going to keep away from the window as long as I can. And be less picky about what's left at the bar and buffet table. 

 

 

 

New York, this is my last chance

Moving to New York at age 51—what was I thinking?

Well, I didn't do much thinking about it. I was offered a good and exciting job in New York and I could no longer afford my apartment in Boston anyway. I would have hesitated to leave a significant other behind, but there wasn't one, and the prospects for finding someone are a bit better in a bigger city. Here I can claim some dignity by telling people here that I had a boyfriend in Boston, and people won't necessarily doubt me. (Not that anyone has yet asked.)

After being here almost a month, the thing I miss most about Boston are the bathrooms. The bathrooms in New York are disgusting even when they're clean. I guess there is no incentive for commercial or residential landlords to upgrade bathroom fixtures every 60 years or so; prospective tenants just sigh and tell themselves that a missing faucet is worth being a block from the subway.

Customer service is far better in New York. On one of my first days, I went to Starbucks to get a lunch I could eat at my desk. (I thought such a practice was barbarous until I worked in Midtown Manhattan.) I didn't realize that I was supposed to take my food from the display case and hand it to the cashier. So when I asked for a chicken pesto sandwich, the cashier ran from her post to the other end of the store, made her way around the snaking line of customers, grabbed a sandwich in its wrapper, and ran back to the cash register before telling me with a smile that next time I could select the food myself. This would never happen in Boston, where the customer is always an idiot. The best-case scenario would have been a cashier who didn't use the f-word when telling me to go back and get the sandwich, moron.  

People do hold doors for those behind them in Boston, but they don't make eye contact like they do here, and say "Good morning!" like they mean it. In my apartment building, people bid adieu to anyone getting off an elevator as if they're waving goodbye to someone about to board the Titanic. ("Take care! [We might never see each other again!] " "You too! [I'm pretty sure we'll both be alive and on this same elevator tomorrow.]"

I'm sorry, New York, but you don't move any faster than Bostonians. You have even more people getting to the tops of staircases and coming to a dead stop to look at smartphones, oblivious of everyone behind them. And they're not tourists.

New Yorker are friendlier, but that hasn't made it a breeze to meet people. At bars and social gatherings, I get the impression, more than ever, that people can't look away fast enough if I'm brave enough to make eye contact with them. (This includes people close to my own age.) There's a logic behind this, in that there are so many more people to look at in New York, and you don't want to waste time on the wrong ones. I might do better meeting people in a small, closed-off population, but I don't think I can make a living as a proofreader in Antarctica.