When I wore a younger man’s clothes, Martin, Paul, and I were the three musketeers; we had all been Franciscans and Catholic seminarians studying for the priesthood, but after college found ourselves an unlikely posse. Martin was a high school principal – black and overweight, Paul was in federal law enforcement – quite muscular and a ginger, and me, well I was a male porn star – a career I supplemented with my job as a computer programmer and IT and network support specialist for a television postproduction studio.
Though we were walking very different paths in life, they converged every weekend. The drill began on Saturday afternoon as though we’d been called by a tolling bell to the Liturgy of the Hours. But instead of the chapel, we gathered in the bar of a notorious gay Mexican restaurant in Silverlake just a stone’s throw from my apartment called Casita del Campo.
There, Julio the bartender, upon whom Paul had a major crush, would fix us three Cadillac margaritas, and put out some chips with which we could soak up the alcohol. After all, this was just the first leg of our weekend marathon. Don’t want to get too sloppy too quickly. And for the record, Julio chose to sleep with me; it was not, as would later be suggested, a “shitty thing to do to a friend.” Sometimes, Paul, you’re the bride, and sometimes you’re just a bridesmaid. It’s been thirty years… get over it.
After Casitas, it was a short jaunt down the Hyperion Avenue bridge to the Glendale Galleria. Clothes shopping. Yes, every Saturday. What was needed was an outfit for that evening. Our ultimate destination was Woody’s Club Hyperion in Silverlake for “Latino night” (where I obtained the moniker “the bean queen”), as it had been the previous Saturday and would be the next, so we couldn’t show up wearing what we’d wore the week before (or the week before that, or the week before that, or…).
It was during these shopping trips that I developed my well-documented and highly questionable obsession (by Calvin Klein?) with cologne (and moisturizers), buying a bottle a week. A shelf in my bathroom at home looked like the fragrance counter at Macy’s!
Well, until an ill-advised candlelit three-way with a couple of guys just in for the weekend from Tijuana during a power outage as LA’s famed Santa Ana winds blew resulted in me being roofied and coming to in the cold light of the next day’s morning to find nothing stolen from my wallet (thankfully) but my cologne shelf cleaned out of well over 52 bottles (tragically) and my cat Wil staring at me with a judgmental look of disgust on his face that said, “you imbecile.” Wil was often appalled at my behavior.
Anyway, after the mall, we went our separate ways for a short “disco nap,” a brief chance to recharge before it was once more into the breach. We’d regroup at 9 at Woody’s – early enough to stake out our usual spot by Junior’s bartending station (he could always be relied on for random, free, tequila shots), but not so late that the best meat would have already paired up and gone home for various and sundry extra-curricular activities. Which was, after all, the point. I am a very shallow person.
That night, Martin got there first and was already holding court when I arrived. He turned to me and said, “there’s lots of tasty treats in tonight.” I elbowed my way to the bar and ordered a Tom Collins.
That’s when I spotted him – he was tall and slender with shimmering jet black hair that while trimmed seemed overgrown at the same time, and oddly he was wearing a windbreaker. He was nursing a bottle of Dos Equis, and our eyes met, but as they did he quickly looked away. S’ok… maybe shy, maybe new to the scene… no matter, I love a challenge; the eager ones always end up disappointing me.
For those of you unfamiliar with gay bar etiquette, this “eye contact” phase is a very specific behavior called “cruising.” If you hold someone’s gaze for more than 3 seconds (give or take), you are essentially saying to one another: 1. I’m up for it, and 2. I’m up for it with you. This highly-developed non-verbal method of communication was essential in days gone by to avoid misfires: propositioning a straight guy which might end up with you getting socked in the face (or worse). So we exchanged furtive glances for over an hour, and while I had probably two more cocktails (and a number of gratis shots from Junior) in that time, I should have noticed he barely touched his beer, drinking only about a third of it in the same timeframe.
It was time to deploy one of my signature moves. Junior had his uses beyond free shots! So I pointed my prey out – “no, not that one you idiot… the third one from the left, over by Jose’s bartending station,” and Junior said “shot or beer?” Junior popped the top off a fresh bottle of Dos Equis and was just placing it on the bar in front of my intended evening’s love interest when a whistle being blown cut through the sound of hundreds of conversations already being drowned-out by overly loud, repetitive, hip hop dance music, and someone on a megaphone screeched:
LAPD, KILL THE MUSIC AND TURN ON THE LIGHTS, THIS IS A RAID
A raid? I know they used to raid gay bars all the time – in fact, Stonewall began as a raid. But this was the 90s. The 1990s! I later found out that as Silverlake, where Woody’s was located, became gentrified, the breeders and their rug rats moving in with their Volvos didn’t like having a gay nightspot in the middle of their little slice of suburbia.
As they started buying up all the duplexes refurbished by Home Depot-addicted lesbians driving SUVs down Griffith Park Boulevard with lumber sticking out the back of their hatchback, they’d pressure the local city council member to lean on the police to harass gay establishments out of business – and it worked!
These days, Silverlake, once known as the Swish Alps, because of its heavy concentration of gay people and businesses and its hilly terrain, is a shadow of its former self and the place to be gay in Los Angeles now is Highland Park… just follow the SUV down Figueroa Street with lumber sticking out the back.
As Junior yanked back the fresh bottle of Dos Equis and placed it under the bar, the guy I’d been cruising all night and already put through multiple romantic scenarios in my head (I say “romantic,” I mean lewd) reached under his windbreaker and pulled out a badge he was wearing on a thin chain around his neck. Several other “patrons,” interspersed amongst the crowd, did the same. I suddenly became aware the place was crawling with windbreakers!
The cops shut Woody’s down that night. It was open the next night, and for many nights after that. The “raid” had just been a coordinated and well-orchestrated exercise in homophobic harassment, with the aim of driving us gays out of the gayborhood. It eventually worked: my friends Bill and Ed, who owned the place, sold it for $2.5 million and retired to Puerto Vallarta. I transferred my allegiance (gay men are very territorial about their bar) to The Bullet in North Hollywood after getting thrown out and banned from Apache in Studio City (a story for another time).
The undercover “vice” cops had us form a single-file line and paraded us out of the bar one by one, pulling anyone too sloppy to stand up straight (no pun intended) or walk normally out of line for a night spent as a guest of the city downtown at the Parker Center jail. As I ran their gauntlet, I noticed my handsome, black-haired, Dos Equis-sipping failed conquest was standing at the door shinning a flashlight in people’s eyes as they passed. I stepped forward, eager to get the hell out of there. He stopped me, but instead of a flashlight in my face I felt his hand gently caress my shoulder. He said, “I’m sorry, it would have been fun.”
I knew it! My gaydar is never wrong.
