All the gay people tell me “Go to Southern Decadence.”
Then the gay people get New Orleans destroyed. Thanks, guys.
Then again, I also wasn’t invited, either. I’m never going to end up going to any of these big cool gayfests.
(Are they really as interesting as people make them out to be? Or is it one of those things that I should go to just to say that I’ve been?)
Having once been to Mardi Gras and, on my life, completely and totally by accident wound up SMACK DAB IN THE MIDDLE OF A FUCKING GAY ORGY (literally- I didn’t even realize it until- well, long story, and one of my more horrifying), and being a librarian in so many ways other than professionally (I mean I don’t even like doing it with the TV on because they may be watching) I fear I wouldn’t really recommend any New Orleans gay mob scene. Of course, you’re a lot younger than I am and perhaps more adventuresome, but…
OH! I’ve got to hear it! I’m sure others would like to as well.
I found info on Southern Decedance at Wikipedia and it seems that it’s pretty much the same as Mardi Gras, only it supposedly centers on gays. So, it’s like a Gay Pride parade, I guess. Heh.
(from an e-mail I sent at the time)
The most annoying thing about the nastiest yet most enticing city in America is the complete lack of public facilities for the draining of one’s love gecko. At Mardi Gras, when all is mobbed, the problem is multiplied exponentially. No building allowed non customers to use their facilities, the porta-potties were far away and would have made the Manson family barf, and there was literally a line to piss through the grates onto the back lawn of St. Louis Cathedral.
I usually love gay bars about as much as your average 74 year old retired Baptist kindergarden teacher, but then most don’t have dancing nekkid boys and it was Mardi Gras. With bars comes drinking and in vino urinitas, so crossing from Bourbon Steet Pub to Lafitte in Exile (both gay clubs on the gay end of Bourbon St. one block from where it transitions from Streetcar Named Desire to the roadshow of Good Times) I became desirous of evacuating my bladder, but the bathrooms were mobbed and had a line 4 rent boys, 5 leather fags, 2 drag queens and 12 closeted-soccer-dads-on-vacation deep. Marie Osmond on her prom could not have been less penetrable.
Not wanting to pee on Bourbon St. (though the urine was already running down the gutters) but resigned to the fact that I would have to use a side street somwhere, I started walking down… Conti I believe, not sure. I saw the establishment RAWHIDE. Contrary to its name, it really isn’t a 60s themed family steakhouse- seek not a ROWDY YATES BURGER with MUSH MUSHGROVE MUSHROOMS here, but it also didn’t have a cover charge or a “NO USING OUR BATHROOMS- WE MEAN IT- WE HAVE ALLIGATORS AND PISSED OFF LESBIANS WITH GUNS” signs, so I decided to go in and light a candle at their loo. I entered and the front bar was surprisingly not busy for Mardi Gras, and when I asked where the restrooms were they pointed to the back, where I saw a huge crowd in the black light of the back room, and decided it must be a popular place for tourination. Here began my troubles.
Old. Young. Tall. Thin. Male. Male. Male. Male. Think it was Male. Male. Male. Is either transition to or from Male. Good Looking. Not Good Looking. Can’t Tale. This describes a random sampling of the 12,239 people in the 20 x 30 backroom. No pissoire can be worth this, I decided, and I turned around to leave only to be forced back by the serge of newcomers entering the room. Soon I was about five feet into the room and absolutely paralyzed in the mob.
Moving with all the grace and agility of a paraphlegic drowning in hardening concrete I didn’t so much move through the room as I was conveyed by an organic shuffle. Being much younger then (30) and less distanced from my youthful naivete I thought, because I so desired to thus think, “tis a trough there… and towards that they are moving… aye, that’s it… first they must circle counter clockwise seven times… makes sense really if you want it to and don’t think…”. The Varangian Guard that surround my Idealist Inner Emperor were somehow able to keep the Forces of Reality from penetrating at that moment, even allowing me to say to myself with the conviction of a 12 year old playing Uncle Vanya that "those guys on the wall next to me are dancing… slowly… I know they are, for anything else would make me unhappy… ".
We’d reached an impassed. It was literally impossible to move. I wasn’t afraid of having my pocket picked because there literally wasn’t room to slide a hand in. It took me five minutes to get a cigarette to my lips and light it. Behind me I heard a Nyawlins Bronx voice ask “Hey Buddy, can I bum one a doze?”
In another two minutes I was able to pass him back a cigarette, striking a pose that I should imagine resembled Stephen Hawking’s imitation of the Statue of Liberty.
“Thanks… ahhh… Buddy… got a light?”
I fished the lighter out of my pocket and handed it back at waist level, unable to get it higher. Mistake. In trying to pass it back at waist level I hit a hairy impassed that I realized was… the back of some guys head…
HOLY FUCK IT’S A HAIRY MIDGET! A REALLY HAIRY MIDGET! screamed my Varangian Guard as they desperately tried to fight back Santa Anna’s deguello (yes, I know I’m mixing continents and centuries but I don’t care it was a desperate time) and the men who had been slow dancing four feet and two people away from me suddenly struck simultaneous eye motions that caused said Varangians to just throw down their swords and flee, the first being trampled by the faster, as the white flag was hoisted and I unconditionally surrendered to the knowledge that I, Sampiro, born of Presbyterian parents and raised in the pastoral soft hills of the only cattle farm in Coosa County Alabama named for a Tennyson poem, WAS STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF A FUCKING GAY ORGY!!!
My mental state, you ask? Well, remember the final episode of MASH* where Hawkeye remembers it was a dead baby and not a dead chicken? Something like that, only if Hawkeye had suddenly remembered he wasn’t stranded in a bus of terrified and wounded soldiers and Korean refugees but had been travelling through a mine field in a military bus that was really A FUCKING GAY ORGY!!! AND HE STILL HAD TO PEE!!! REALLY REALLY REALLY FUCKING BAD!!! AND HE COULDN’T EVEN GET TO HIS ZIPPER IF HE FUCKING DARED!!!
This sudden moment of blacklit clarity gave me the stamina and the drive and the pounce and the vigor to propel myself through the crowd a good four inches. Thinking what a lucky mother Kunta Kinte was to have had so much more natural light and spaciousness than I had here, especially with those goggles that allowed him to see all and navigate and yes I know I’m splicing ROOTS and ST: TNG but that’s allowed because I’m in the middle of a fucking gay orgy and need to be somewhere else and if it’s seeing Lavar Burton chained in the hull of the Enterprise at least those logistics will keep me cocupied, I’d have given one of my legs and both of my brothers legs to have been able to have had the tiniest chain saw…
The rest of the Odyssey is a blur. I seem to remember somebody grabbing my crotch, which was quite impressive but only because it had to pee, with fingers that might one day be of use again (apparently I have a strong grip when in the middle of a fucking gay orgy- maybe it’s equivalent of spinach- "I makes Bruce Jenner look like Porgy/When I’m in a Queer Orgy/I’m Sampiro the Prudish Fag-- TOOT TOOT!) but the nice thing is his groaning went unnoticed in a room already brimming over with it. Another hand reached over and tried to pull the back of my pants down but I had a lit cigarette at waist level and I daresay the next 120 handjobs they give will be to an icepay and the commotion from this was enough to propel me a good yard and a half.
I remember constant motion and bumping into desperately sad Korean women holding dead chickens and generally being hailed as something slightly less revered than a Prophesied Deliverer by a multitude of faceless people. Finally leading an advance through that would have given Patton a woodie through odds no merciful god would allow I finally began to see the black light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes, however, when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s prudent to remember that so did Princess Di but it wasn’t pleasant, for that’s when next to me I heard “I"m Shawn” from a soccer-dad-type and “Ted” from a leather boy next to him and the leather boy dropped the fanny flap on his pants and Soccer Dad went to with each rythmic motion bumping into my forearm and that’s when I pushed like an epileptic giving birth in a 6.9 earthquake and managed to make the rest of the 8 foot journey out in just under six minutes…
Back suddenly in the rust colored light of the front bar of a cantina that would have made Ben Kenobi say “Fuck the Force… RUN!” I hit the cobbled urine soaked streets of Calle de Valois and pushed through crowds? what crowds? trading beads for boobs until I was half a block down Bourbon St. Finally I was on a less crowded side street and there, gushing up like the spring of Hagar, was a XXX shop with a sign advertising $5 CLEAN RESTROOM $5. I paid and it was and it was the best fucking $5 I ever spent and the staff of the porn store could have passed unnoticed at any Bob Dole Prayer Breakfast but that’s another story. The moral of this story is, of course, wear your safety belt.
I guess the fact that it was a false color image doesn’t mean anything to these people. A regular photo would just look like a giant swirly cloud.
Heh. And your whole story was funny, too. I just thought that this typo was appropriate.
God hates gays so much that when Toronto approved gay marriage, he sent a thunderstorm to make an airplane crash land and blow up and fall apart and made sure every fag and fag-enabler on the plane died a horrible death…What?
/Emily Latila voice: Never mind/
I personally think the New Orleans flood is in retaliation for Janet Jackson’s boob flash. It makes as much sense as anything else.
BWHAAHAH! My God. Excellent as always.
I’d probably feel the same way if I ran into any kind of orgy.
Thank goodness that no one replied with my reply in my absence. I thought about your story at work, Sampiro, and I realized that there should have been an obvious solution. The solution should have been to find someone in the big orgy who was into watersports.
Silly Sampiro.
I had planned to post this fact, too! Reportedly, there was at least one bar on Bourbon Street that stayed open through the whole hurricane and after. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050904/ts_alt_afp/usweatherbar_050904183549
A few diehards decided that the party must go on:
Other signs from the parade included “We’re Here? We’re Queer!” and “Blame the Levees, not the Dykes.”
:rolleyes:
We have the Big Dig tunnel springing leaks, and the concrete contractor is under investigation. Give us time, fer cryin’ out loud!
Every time there is a disaster, some bible thumper blames it on divine intervention and blames the sinful victims. Although they are curiously silent when a tornado rips through the Bible Belt
Further developing this point:
Do Unnatural Acts Cause Natural Disasters?
Absolutely hilarious. Should be required reading for the Falwell/Robertson crowd.
this was worth the price of Charter Membership!
I laughed. I cried. I laughed again until I horked up a lung.
Sampiro that was brilliant. Makes me wish I could be trapped in a gay orgy.
Wait…wait…
They control hurricanes now TOO? I thought it was just the tsunamis!
:: cowers ::
I, for one, welcome our wonderfully accessorized and coordinated overlords.
I like you. When I kill you, I’ll make sure that your death is quick and painless.
Yay quick and painless death! Woo!
Wait, can I be appointed to the office of Official Fag Hag? I am a great shopping buddy, I’ll totally make out with you while we are drunk and clubbing, AND I give a fierce pedi.
Whatdya’ say?
Hell, I always wish I could be trapped in a gay orgy…
And, I must confess now, I am responsible for the current catastrophe. All by myself.
You see, I booked a vacation for this past weekend in New Orleans. I should have realized that the Universe would never allow me to actually go to the original Sin City for unrestricted sex and hot men for an entire weekend. Therefore, she sent the hurricane.
I’m so very sorry.
Well, now, if it’s unrestricted sex you’re lookin’ for, just come on down to south Jawja. 