Night out at Gay Clubs.

Several weeks ago I went to a local museum’s honoring of a transgender woman prison activist, then headed up to the reception afterwards and ended up gayclubbing after that.

At the bar after the reception bar, this young Mexican guy with stylish glasses kept eying me from across the room, and when I went to chat him up, it turned out that not only was he working in the city for the summer as a waiter at a fine dining restaurant downtown and was living with family out by the airport, but that 

he also had a boyfriend back in Guadalajara.

I spoke some Spanish with him, too, and he said his name was “Chava”, but I started playing dumb and pretending that it was “Chivo” (‘goat’).

“No,” he was like, “Cha-va.”

“Okay,” I was like, acting like I was trying really intensely to pronounce something very hard,  “Chhhhhh-i-vo,” and as soon as I stopped I looked up and mugged like I was confused and looking for approval and couldn’t understand why I had mispronounced the word again.

He seemed to get a chuckle out of that.

I also met a German stewardess from Lufthansa.

“There are many stereotypes about my profession,” he told me.  “Many are true.”

He also knew Spanish, so we spoke in Spanish a bit.  As it turns out, he likes black men and much prefers the U.S. to Germany for that.

As he explained it, in Germany it’s almost all African immigrants, and a ton of them think you’re rich and so there’s a ton of jealousy and weirdness around class, though he still managed to date two guys long-term, including one from Cameroon.

At the end of the night I ended up at the one trashy late nightclub that I love where all the trans*women go. 

For some reason, they had a theme night where there were 4 acts of trans*people lip-synching to music from "Grease".

During all that, one young clean-shaven “bro”-ey (white) guy off to the side of the stage just kept looking up at them with this almost beatific look on his face, it was so open and pure and happy, and so I talked with him a bit, though he rarely looked at me while we were talking, instead he kept his eyes up on the stage, though most of the trans*women were much older than him (like in their 40s).

He immediately said he was straight, and then as we went on to talk more, it turned out that he was a young vet from Iraq, originally from California, and had a thing for trans*women.

“They’re so beautiful,” he was like.  ‘They’re men, they’re women, what’s not to like?”

He then added that that didn’t mean he hadn’t also slept with men, and after he said that, he looked me in the eye.

It was his first time at the club, and as we were talking up on stage there kept going on this performance of “You’re the One That I Want” with all parts played by trans*women, except for the John Travolta role, which was played by a very young, very cute, very butch lesbian in a leather jacket, with a cigarette behind her ear.