Real love -- I'm, like, searchin' for that Queer Love -- LGBTQIA+ Love // A Thread for the Real Ones

whatcha doin in dublin alfred? vacation?

top back one side, top mid on the other

yay for pride events! tho i'm all prided out tbrr

Yep! My parents jumped on board unexpectedly, but they're cool-ass people if we don't discuss politics: they eat well, drink me under the table, wanna stay up late. I had to tell them last night, lol slow down, I need a nap.

I'm here till Friday.

I re-read parts of the gays ILTMI thread tonight, as part of some sort of ongoing psychic work, I think. anyway, it was great, if only because i got a new DN out of it thanks to a Whiney comment many years ago.

lol that thread is such a trip, just went thru it again myself

ultimately opted to attend 0 of the pride celebrations happening here today. dyke day picnic in the park and dance party/drag show at a local-ish bar yesterday were plenty for me. the weather was so gloomy this weekend that i didn’t feel like leaving the house, plus i’m taking antibiotics for a random infection that popped up on friday so couldn’t really get debauched anyway. it’s fine. instead i ordered a pizza and watched to die for and started putting together my late-june pride DJ set.

i'm too scared to open that thread lmao. to die for sounds good, i've never seen it! pride sets are fun. my inclination was always to go "deep and profound" but i recently realized, like in the past two or three years, that most people just want to hear lady gaga. which ok, "rain on me" is kinda profound anyway, so is "911". club mixes of those two have probably been my mvps over the last year.

yall i'm so busy right now i have no bandwidth for social stuff i should make time for, let alone uhh cleaning. and my day job is where i waste the most time! whenever i can take a breath i just want to be a plant for a few hours. so it goes.

not much new gay stuff to report.

Spent some time wandering around The Village in Montreal, which was overrun by bachelorette parties. I would not have had a strong opinion on this five years ago and I was a little surprised by how strong of an opinion I had on it now.

i mean i'm assuming you are not in favor

Haha that was unnecessarily ambiguous

No, I was not in favor. The groups drinking in the bars were perfectly fine but there was another woman lambasting the bouncer at a strip club for the behavior of one of the servers as we walked past and I was very surprised by the snap judgments I was making based on the overheard conversation. I don’t want people to feel unsafe or disrespected but it sounded from what I heard that she was angry that the bride wasn’t getting more attention and I kept thinking “… You are a bunch of women at a gay male strip club, I am not quite sure what you are expecting here”

At first I thought someone got handsy but that didn’t seem to be how the conversation was going; granted, I didn’t hear all of it

I was very surprised by the snap judgments I was making based on the overheard conversation

i've had enough drunk white straight women treating me like a human jukebox as a dj at gay clubs that i don't think your snap judgment is surprising or all that unfair frankly, even if you didn't catch everything. there's definitely an archetypal behavior thing going on in this kind of situation and with practice you can suss it out within 30 seconds lol.

straight women behaving badly in gay spaces is a little hard to talk about with other gay guys without going overboard ime but it's also objectively Pretty Annoying at the least & psychopathic at the worst imo

ugh seriously though read the room

(in ref: to DJPs Montreal tale)

so my pride activities have been VERY quiet. easing into this summer pretty slowly. a lotta people in ny recently saw kylie in concert - i guess she's taken over the summer huh? thoughts on padam padam?? i'm a little less gagged than everyone else.

haha. i like it. the older i get the less discerning i am, maybe.

it makes hooking up sound exciting again imo

fair point. i like it too!! i'm just a little confused why her voice sounds like she's singing through a soup can in a nyc tunnel. but other than that i'm in!

also the heartbeat thing. when it feels like we're all just information and economic status receptacles, it's a nice reminder that we're alive i think.

xp oh yeah, the production is weird. it's very "what us dance music sounds like right now" unfortunately.

yes the heartbeat is engaging - into that observaysh

slow summers are good. mine is fine, i'm busy and tired tbh. trying to get ahead a little bit. i might go to a leather / kink sex party this weekend. 50 / 50 odds tbh.

oh fun! do you think you'll partake in activities?

also related q - how much of a turnoff is a manscaping accident? like i accidentally went way too short lol and the lines are a bit off. oops!

haha i dunno i wouldn't be too bothered about it myself but i'm not into those kind of details

i probably will if i go.

I got chewed upon at gay glamping three weeks ago, ending a sex drought, but I could use a roll in the heather.

does anyone care for bebe rexha? that goddamn "i'm good and i'm feeling alright" song that was everywhere last summer. i see trying to like her in my future & it makes me a little sad lmao

xp oh dang was there biting involved?

i'm convinced that glamping is a rip-off for clueless city people. i don't care how nice the teepee decor is, bugs and no private bathroom is not worth $80 a night.

I kidded about glamping (alliteration, etc.). We had our own cabin + bathroom, and the campground had its own bar and restaurant; but, remember, it's Florida in late May/early June. A brutalist aesthetic.

map, my neck looked like a demilitarized zone.

hahaha good work

love it. jealz. i don't know much about bebe but i think i watched a recent Vogue clip with her and she was cool! what other songs should i know?

i am broadly pro-padam - was expecting its ubiquity to have rendered it irritating by now but surprisingly that hasn’t happened yet. also i like it more than anything from her last record tbh.

rather than san diego for a weekend i ended up going down to long beach for one night. i love LB, quieter but friendlier than LA and still lots going on, we’ve talked about moving there but currently that’s not realistic for either of our jobs. anyway, bopped around the bars on broadway for a bit, ended up meeting a gentleman who lives down there (and who had driven up to my place the week before, ha). older handsome cuban guy who has the same kinks as me. it was very nice. walked around a bit the next day and bought some used records.

wow such a lovely image! glad to hear this pleasant account of life. jobs really do have a way of cramping styles huh. donna remind me what work is for you these days?

xp ah that sounds great dr. it's so nice when you have a positive dalliance. i always liked long beach the few times i made it down there (twice i think?). had kind of a wild time at a levi/leather bar down there, i can't remember what it was called. it looks like it might be renamed or closed?

we're hoping to visit salem, oregon in a couple of months. i'm hoping it has a similar kind of feel to lb, close-ish to city business (portland) but more friendly, rooted and affordable.

one of my aunts is moving to Oregon if you can believe it

i have never been

i think it's going to be my kind of vibe tbh

My one trip to Portland in the 90s made me feel like I was in all of the worst parts of St. Paul, MN aside from getting extremely baked at Reed College, which was the absolute highlight of the visit

So basically my advice is hit the weed and hit it hard

haha - what did you do at reed?

this is a very strong warning!
i will keep in mind....

This was a college choir tour; one of my buddies had a high school classmate who was a TA there so we stayed with him on campus for our Portland concert and he introduced us to the freshmen on his floor who created a bong out of a vacuum cleaner

This was 1994 so I am certain the city has changed over the past 30 years but at the time, my main reaction was “we have entered The Land Of Tonya Hardings” with a wonderful marijuana oasis in the middle of it

My last serious relationship was with a student at Reed a couple years ago...

verrry interesting boys...
never a dull moment in this group

I think Portland is a pit full of Nazis, have had some okay times there but have mostly enjoyed leaving.

Portland was also the place where I tried to buy beer at a gas station using my passport and was refused because it wasn’t a drivers license. I was using the passport because my license had expired but the woman wouldn’t sell to me until I showed her my expired license. It was very strange.

that sounds like a properly American request
i really had no idea people felt this way about Portland lol
you learn something new everyday
i still indulge in a good amount of weed even though it makes me kind of paranoid
the benefits still seem to outweigh the negatives i guess??

it's pretty hilarious now that it's legal in NY, plenty of street smoking. i love it.

swen - i work as an archivist. current job has been getting on my nerves lately, thinking it may soon be time to decamp (plus i need to anyway if i’m to have any hope of getting PSLF)

i’ve only been to portland once, for a conference. at one point i went to one of the gay strip clubs (there’s two iirc?) with some other ppl from the conference lol

hey i came on this thread to bitch about my gay ass life and y'all are talking about portland, we have a thread you know, but hey, this is portland, you do what you like.

anyway this week i am pissed because my girlfriend has been crashing on my couch since april and it has been a tremendous stress on both me and her and she finally got a room in a house, and has a lease signed, and was going to move in NEXT MONDAY, except the fucking HOUSE OWNER didn't tell the OTHER ROOMMATES and they're demanding the owner not rent to my GF. legally of course there's a signed fucking contract, my GF has the right to move in, but in practical terms, you know, she doesn't want to live in a house where the other housemates don't want her there and fucking hate her being there.

the thing is, this is just a fucking STANDARD FEATURE of queer life. we're all disasters, we're all under huge allostatic load, and every trans person in particular i know, myself included, does fucked up shit like this on a regular basis. i'm sick of it. i'm fucking sick of it. i was talking to a cis queer friend about the drama in my life and asked how she was doing, because, you know, it's polite, i asked her before i trauma dumped too, again, it's good to be respectful, and she said her life was boring and all she was doing was working and GOD i would kill for some boring right now. one week. one week free of insane personal drama. that's all i ask.

and again i'm not exactly a poster child for mental health, and my gf is dealing with a lot from me. compound trauma, you know? compound trauma. i just want a chance to catch my breath and then maybe i can deal with all the shit that's been piling up, then maybe i can get through life without fits of involuntary screaming.

---

re: glamping - the queer leather group i'm in is having their annual camping trip next month and i'm going to unfortunately miss it. half of the lesbians out here are hiking lesbians and i got kind of a complex about it, i got severe functional limitations and my dating pool is kinda limited as it is.

regarding salem, it's a government town. everybody works for the fucking government there. i've never been, maybe you will get "friendly, rooted and affable" from state employees, but that's not the general vibe i get from the place.

portland has changed a _lot_ over the past 30 years. i wasn't there in the '90s, i hear people talk about the Old Days pre-Portlandia a lot though. there is lots and lots of marijuana. i don't smoke myself but if you do, you know, portland is a good city for you.

i got an ex who's a reed alum. it seems like a decent school if you're into that hippie shit.

there are nazis here certainly, and most of them are cops or cops' brothers. so, you know, something to watch out for. most people are pretty strongly anti-nazi, though.

at the same time portland is institutionally pretty fucking racist. everybody knows it, knows oregon has been one of the most racist states from the beginning, but nobody does anything about it. so, you know, it's pretty standard for us to be huge hypocrites, you know, standard west coast shit.

it's weird because simultaneously it's gentrified and there's a lot more homeless people. lotta drugs out there too. crack is, inexplicably, big again this year.

in conclusion, portland is a land of contrasts.

i come at it from a punk/former hobo perspective. King Burritos are excellent, some of the beer is good, the town is a sprawl and most of the people suck

regarding salem, it's a government town. everybody works for the fucking government there. i've never been, maybe you will get "friendly, rooted and affable" from state employees, but that's not the general vibe i get from the place.

i work for the government so my options are limited. just doing a bit of wishful thinking re friendly and rooted etc but tbh it's gotta be better than salt lake fucking city. incremental improvements you know?

i'm sorry you're going through all of this right now kate and i very much wish for you a week free of personal drama tbqf.

i have a couple of friends from here (both pretty granola) who moved to Portland and have been trying for years to coax me out there for a visit, and an ex who used to always tell me i would love Portland so much, which i very much doubt because all the bands from there make me want to fucking puke. The Decemberists, the Dandy Warhols, Sleater Kinney, Modest Mouse, the Shins- you name it, i can't stand 'em. and it's put me off the place for life.

Also what Kate said about institutional racism and hypocrisy, i just can't imagine myself ever living in a city that is 70+ % white.

anyhow sorry for the rant. love to all'a yous.

for the record i didn't know most of those bands were from portland (i knew about sleater-kinney). the big band people seem to like around here is dead moon. never heard 'em personally.