This Boy Elroy

Pride '08

Another pride has come and gone and once again Brad and I celebrated with our friends in the City. The weekend was full of great fun and great time with friends, I'm exhausted but it's a good exhaustion.

We started out the weekend at one of the oldest gay bars in the City, Cinch. Dan suggested the place since it was out of the Castro and we could go someplace off the beaten track. It was a great suggestion, and the entertainment was deliciously edgy. We even saw a unicorn!

Here we are with our cocktail waitress whom we called many names ranging from Margot Kidder, Tootsie, Sally Jessie Raphael, Linda Lavin, etc. She was a bit loopy but fabulous!

This one was selling corndogs and "Charro" Churros in the bar.



The unicorn.

Saturday we had our party which went very well. Pink Saturday party is much more fun watching from a window up high. Everyone stayed for a long time so that's always a good thing. It was nice to have old friends over to our new place. Kalvin and JR came over and brought a friend who is also a sometime contributor to GayGamer.net, PixelPoet. The next morning I got a flood of SMSes thanking me and Brad for a great party.

Sunday Brad and I woke up early at headed to the parade.

I got a great photo of Cindi Lauper.

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.



Love this sign.



Menz.



A great shot of Leslie Jordan.

After the parade, we headed over to Civic Center for the festival. There was a really cool with by this guy who makes figurines of Sci-Fi geeky characters our of junk. Here is Moby with Wall-E, aptly sculpted out of junk. The guy running the booth said they're not supposed to sell these but he had them anyway. Incidentally we saw Wall-E afterwards, LOVED IT!

That's about it. It was a fun, whirlwind weekend. I'm glad that this week will be a short 4-day one. Brad and I are planning a day trip next weekend to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium and Santa Cruz. I cannot wait!

Prideness

Pride has arrived! It's going to be really different for me and Brad experiencing all the festivities as residents of the city rather than visitors. We're looking forward to it and we're even hosting a small get together of close pals at our place on Pink Saturday. We certainly have the place for it with our bay window looking right down Castro St.

Jimmi is coming into town to join the mayhem. I'm excited to see him again, he's really one of my favorite people I've met through blogging. The last time I saw him he was drunk and I surmise that he'll be pickled most of this weekend as well. The only absence that pains me is that of Darin, it will be weird not having him here. I tried to coax him out here but the flights were just not cooperating. Fuck you Bush and your illegal war!

Tomorrow night we're slated to head to a bar called Cinch. Not in the Castro, this place resides on Polk street in the area of Nob Hill. I've heard that Polk street has a lot of good bars and restaurants so we're excited to try this place out. In any case, the Yelp reviews of Cinch are fantastic! My favorite is one where someone said they saw "a tranny on a 4x4 stage destroying a TV with an axe." Sounds awesome!

Celebrate!

Hooray for California! More pies, more pies!!

And someone captured the celebration on Castro St. last night.

Marriage Camp

There's an article that has been mentioned on a few gay blogs recently that was published recently in the New York Times Magazine, Gay Rites, about young (early 20s) gay men who are getting married. It's an incredibly interesting article for anyone to read in my opinion but certain things struck me as rather odd.

First, all the men mentioned in the article seemed to have some affiliation with ivy league law schools...that just creeped me out a bit.

What really struck me though was how much they had to say about how they defined their marriages/relationships, their roles and such. Admittedly I was thinking about myself and Brad while reading the article, we're as good as married after seven years, and we moved in together when I was 22 - so I guess we're similar to the article in that respect. However, if I were asked questions about our relationship that were asked to these men I don't think I could answer them, we're just not that complicated. In a nutshell: we have fun, we laugh a lot, everyday is different. Other than receiving legal benefits I don't see the point in Brad and I getting married, we're already considered a unit by those who matter to us and that's what counts. You don't get any more merged than we do, we even call ourselves BrAdam (isn't that sickening?).

Reading that article it just seemed, to me anyway, that the couples were over-thinking marriage, sometimes to the point of camp. These men are more or less my peers but I don't understand where they picked up a Brady aesthetic to marriage? Maybe it's just me, I've never liked weddings. It could be the fault of the author though as well and how he framed his subjects. Just look at one of the photos that accompanied the article:

Reminds me of MeatScapes.

I'm partial to this photo though:

Bearstar Galactica

John from By The Bayou Twittered this to my attention.

This is the best piece of art I've seen in a long time. It's a beautiful thing when gay geeks make art.

Phoenix Phurfest 2008.

Question: Is the spelling of "phur" similar to the evolution that resulted in "phat?"

Gomo Hanky Code?

This morning I was listening to Peaches and was chuckling when "Hankey Code" came on. I find it quite amusing that gold lamé is used to designate a preference for musclemen bottoms and musclemen tops. Regardless of your preference who wants to walk around with a gold lamé hanky? Can you imagine what Tim Gunn would say?!

As usual I Twittered my amusement, because an emotion isn't real unless its on Twitter you know, and Alden replied to my tweet "What's the hanky code for geeks?" After reinvestigating several internet resources I found that there isn't one. I thought perhaps silver lamé, geeks like shiny silvery things, but that's taken for celebrities. Boo!

So, gentle readers, what should the hanky material be for geeks? iPhone on the left for "I am a geek", iPhone on the right for "I want a geek?" Gameboy on the left "geek boy wants a daddy," Gameboy on the right "daddy wants a geek boy?" Perhaps a piece of an old motherboard? Digital display watches might suffice as well. What do you think?

Familiar

This is an all too familiar scene. The porn mag next to the yearbook with the pages that are stuck together was an especially realistic touch. When you're growing up and you do or think about certain things - you think you're a total freak, but as you get older you slowly realize everyone else was doing the same thing.

Bored at work? Make a crown. That's what I did.

Take a boring old DVDr spool label:

On the back draw your favorite crown design, I chose the classic fleur de lys:

Cut pattern out with a razor blade:

Try the pattern on before proceeding:

Break for lunch.

When you return, use pattern as a guide to cut foil to cover your crown with a metallic facade:

Wear your finished product whenever you like, however you like:

Gay On The Range

I found a gem of a site from reading PopSucker.net, one of my new favorite blogs brought to us by the people who started GayGamer.net. It's called Gay On The Range, a collection of gay themed pulp fiction covers from the 60's. It's definitely worth your time to browse through and chuckle. Actually, some of them are appealing to me so really you get comedy and arousal so it gets an A in my book.

Some of my favorites:

I love the title on this one, it makes me laugh, and I think the man is hot.

This is pretty much how it is every night at our house, seriously I'm not being sarcastic.

I like this one because it mentions the contemporary antiquated view of gays as an "other" by calling them "the third sex." That and it makes me think of West Side Story. I mean look at how that one in the red shirt is posed, it reeks of Jerome Robbins.

Definitely not me.

Along with OUT magazine, Genre continues to fail to speak to me as a gay man.  Just take a look at this "fashion" spread from this month's issue: 

No, this is not a joke.  This is how Genre thinks queers living in the 10014 zip code will be dressing this fall.  I won't say anything snarky about the the clothes, they speak volumes that I could never fit on this blog (Since when are plastic sacks from big box stores accessories?).  What's worse than the outfit though is the copy that accompanies it:

Has traded his Doc Martens and Act Up meetings for shopping sprees at Jeffrey.  Loves the Sunday Times crossword puzzle, the apple tartin at Pastisse and online dating on Match.

So Genre, what you're saying is that being in Act Up, or any other political action group, is out and assuming the guise of a bum while having the personality of a boozhy wanker is in?  That's nice.  We get this publication for free, I forget what I signed up for to get it, but it's not worth the paper it's printed on.  Typically my philosophy is "If it's free, it's me" but Genre magazine is proof that my statement has limits.  Someone, anyone, please tell me who this speaks to?   It's definitely not me, it's not my friends, and it's not anyone who I would want to know.