Eric Shaw Quinn

“So, Dolph,” Sans began.  He paused to formulate his question.

Though he’d never said, Sans assumed the building manager was gay.  Sans’ gaydar wasn’t good.  With men from the South or England it’s hard to tell.  Having only recently escaped from the former, Sans had had little opportunity to hone his skills.  The minister at his Mom’s church back home seemed as gay as a holiday tablecloth.  But Sans had met the man’s wife and gone to school with his kids.  Neither was the last word – particularly in the South – but it was the kind of background interference that fuzzed a clear gaydar signal.

Being part of an invisible minority was a big part of the reason Sans moved to Los Angeles in general and West Hollywood in particular.  He’d had enough of guessing and tiptoeing around the question.  He’d developed more than a few crushes on guys who turned out to be straight, despite their product and fashion sense.  Sans wanted to be certain somewhere besides gay bars.  He wanted not to have to be certain.  He wanted the chance to let his heart decide.

So far, the move had made very little difference.  He was still too shy to ask and too southern to assume.

He was all moved in and wanted to avail himself of one of the principle amenities of his new apartment – the highest gay population density in the world.  There were lots more gay residents in New York, say, or even Atlanta, but they’re all mixed in with everyone else.  Nearly half the small town of West Hollywood is gay.  Despite the promising percentages though, Sans still found that, unless you asked or observed someone engaged in a fairly intimate act, there was no way to tell for sure, even in West Hollywood.

This invisibility, combined with the absurd gay notion of being “straight acting,” further clouded the  issue.  The gym-to-population ratio in West Hollywood was as high as the gay population percentage.  Local residents, gay and straight, looked and dressed like He-Man — without his sword.

Sans’ fantasy was that there, like straight people everywhere else, he would be able to meet his great love at large in the world — albeit a very small West-Hollywood-sized world.   What he’d discovered was that he wasn’t bold enough for that and, even with its positive demographics, West Hollywood offered no more assurances than anywhere else, just a higher probability.  Resigned, Sans had decided to go back to the dark, smelly, second class recesses of the still smaller, more limited world he knew – the gay bars.

He ran into his building manager at the mailboxes, screwed his courage to the sticking place and resolved to find out what he needed to know — or at least to ask.  Engaging with Dolph, Sans had discovered, meant listening to him wax rhapsodic about tales of old Hollywood.  It was as though he was giving Sans a crash course in something.  To move things along, Sans pretended to know who Norma Shearer was and laughed at the lines he vaguely recalled from his one viewing of the movie The Women.  The fact that Dolph seemed to know the entire film verbatim offered further assurance as Sans prepared to make his inquiry.

Dolph bid him adieu.  He turned to walk back across the garden court with his copy of Vanity Fair and coupon mailers.  Sans spoke and stopped him.

Dolph turned and looked back at Sans expectantly, but with a gentle smile.

“Dolph, which of the bars on Santa Monica are the gay ones? Do you know?”

Dolph’s eyes grew wide and wet.  There was a moment’s awkward pause.  Sans feared a repeat of the horrible afternoon he’d decided to confide in his mom’s preacher about his sexuality.  Dolph’s lip quivered.  Sans considered running.  There was a clear shot to the street.

Suddenly, Dolph was laughing uncontrollably.  He staggered to a nearby bench.  Sans caught him by the elbow and helped him to sit.

“I’m sorry,” Sans said.  “I didn’t mean to presume.  I just thought, being a local and all, you might know which bars are the gay ones.”

“My dear boy,” Dolph said, putting his hand over Sans’.  “All of them.”

Sans sat on the bench beside him.

It was more than he could take in.  Back home there were usually two gay bars in a town.  The hot one and the one that used to be hot but was going out of business cause everyone had gone to the hot one.  Sometimes there was a small one for the elder tribe members, but that was for more cosmopolitan places like the state capital.  There were tons in places like Atlanta or New York, but there was nowhere Sans knew of where all the bars were gay.

He began to laugh, too.

In the end, he decided to go on a one man bar parade.  Like General Sherman’s march to the sea, Sans planned work his way east down the boulevard, hitting each bar along the way.  He would have one drink at each stop.  There were enough bars that he’d decided to walk, or possibly stagger there and back.  He began at the westernmost bar, Mother Lode.

He made it as far as a place called Mickey’s.

It was Meet the Porn Stars night at Mickey’s and, well, Sans just figured it was a once in a lifetime opportunity and those other bars would always be there.

The “stars” were not only appearing and signing videos and pictures and such, they were dancing in next to nothing on the stages scattered throughout the place.  Sans had seen gay porn, they had internet in South Carolina and flush toilets, too.  He’d never been a huge fan.  He’d seen quite a few films and liked what he saw.  But, aside from one or two guys, he would have been hard pressed to identify any of the actual performers by name.

He had friends who followed porn like sports.  They had their favorites, followed the blogs about industry performance drug scandals, knew who played what position and spoke with authority about the real names, identities and stats of performers past and present.  Sans just felt like the videos were filled with good looking men who were naked and up to something.  Who cared what their names were?

Despite his professed lack of interest, he took root on a bar stool, intent on staying for the whole event.

“Hellooooo,” the drag queen with the enormous head screamed into the microphone.

“Hellooooo,” the crowd screamed back.

Tuna Manhattan – aka Steven Swartz – was literally a local institution.  Tuna was not only a fixture at every local event, fundraiser and street fair, she was the name sake of TMI (Tuna Manhattan, Inc.) Productions.  The small film company had grown from Steven’s documentary film crew for his senior film school project into one of the largest porn production houses in the country.  As a local business owner and tireless self-promoter, Tuna/Steven was as ubiquitous in West Hollywood as rainbow flags.

“Are you ready to meet the stars?” Tuna screamed.

The answer was raucous and affirmative.  The “stars” were herded onto the main stage area to be presented to the crowd.  As each was introduced they danced a bit on stage and then into the crowd, through the room and onto the various bars and boxes around the place.  Eventually there was a steady flow of beautiful, half-naked men parading down the bar where Sans had been wise enough to stake out his seat.

Sans got kisses and hair musses that he wouldn’t soon forget, in exchange for the thrill of the furtive contact that a dollar in the g-string buys.

“You’re beautiful,” one particularly vacuum-packed looking bleach blond giant said.  The bronze god grabbed him and planted a full Rhett and Scarlett on Sans’ shocked lips.

The bar cheered.

“Here’s my number,” the giant said, snitching a pen from behind the bartender’s ear and writing on Sans’ left palm.  He closed Sans’ hand into a fist and kissed his knuckles.  “Hang on to that and call me.”  He tossed the pen to the bartender and sashayed down the bar.

Sans tried not to pass out and fall off his stool.  He watched as the giant danced away blowing kisses.

“Who that hell was that?” Sans said, more to himself, but aloud nonetheless.

“Don’t you know!?” the man on the next barstool demanded over the din.

“No, idea,” Sans said, shaking his head.

“That was Ryan Candler,” his bar mate squealed, like a kid with the game ball.  “Only the hottest and biggest gay star at TMI.”

“Yeah, he looked pretty big,” Sans said, staring.

Ryan turned and winked at him as he proceeded down the bar, leaving a tide of broken hearts in his wake.

“He looks even bigger without the g-string,” the man said, with a cackling laughed. “Hi, I’m Bobbi, by the way.”  The i was implied.

“Golly,” Sans said, laughing nervously.

“Golly?” Bobbi howled louder.  “Are you blushing?”

“Well, I just can’t account for that,” Sans said.  “I don’t usually get that kind of attention.  Or any attention.”

“I can’t believe that,” Bobbi said.  “Where have you been hanging out?”

“Florence,” Sans said with a sigh.

“Benvenuto!”

“Florence, South Carolina.”

“More grits, y’all?”

“Nice,” Sans grinned.

“Oh, don’t look now,” Bobbi said, taking Sans’ hand.  “Here comes my favorite.  Billy Blake.”

Sans shrugged.

“Perhaps you’ve seen him in Gang Bang Paperboy? Or Gang Bang Bike Messenger? Or maybe in his Adult Video nominated Gang Bang Office Boy?”

Sans only laughed and shook his head.  “I’m sensing a theme, though.”

“I guess it’s more of a specialty,” Bobbi said, wiggling his eyebrows.  “Like Meryl Streep and her dental appliances. His record is twenty-two, in Office Boy.  Hence the nom.”

Sans was still laughing when Billy reached their spot at the bar.

Bobbi held up a twenty and, before Sans could turn around, Billy was on his back, his legs aloft and his nether end up in the air.  Bobbi all but stood on his barstool as he flossed the twenty into Billy’s thong.  Billy threw his head back over the edge of the bar.  His unkempt mane of trademark surfer boy hair spilled into Sans’ lap.

Their eyes met.  The shock was mutual.

“Ric?” Sans said, recognizing his neighbor.

“It’s Billy,” Ric hissed.

“But I . . .” Sans managed.  Billy threw his arms around Sans’ neck and sealed Sans’ lips with his own and an upside down Spiderman kiss.

“Unhand him, bitch!” Ryan shrieked bounding back down the bar in their direction.

“What cologne are you wearing?” Bobbi said, dropping back onto his stool.

.  .  . to be continued