It was obvious from his profile photo that Octavius, the Lyft driver assigned to take me to the hospital for yesterday’s swallow study, was a flaming homosexual.* Still, I was unprepared for what greeted me as I opened the door to his SUV and he launched into a carefully choreographed routine.
Todrick Hall’s “Queen” was playing, and as I buckled my seat belt he began singing along. He wore rainbow locs piled high atop his head, plastic rainbow earrings, a sleeveless tie-dye button-down, an Apple Watch with a rainbow wristband, blue shorts, and rainbow sandals over white socks.** Short of removing a male sex organ from his mouth prior to greeting me, he couldn’t have staged a gayer entrance.
There was a defiant edge to his performance that I mostly associate with silly teenage girls and messy young women, something that insists “I want your attention, not your approval,” when the latter is obviously untrue. That he paid closer attention to my reactions in his rearview mirror than he did to traffic only confirmed that I was being tested. Knowing my facial expression wouldn’t give him much to go by, I waited for the concert to end.
“There is,” he said emphatically as the playlist’s next song began. “There is glitter running through my veins.” He glanced back at me again.
“I’m gay, too,” I told him, and just like that he dropped the Jack McFarland schtick. Don’t get me wrong, his sparkly essence remained, but he stopped hamming it up, possibly pleased to have a passenger who didn’t shrink from him, ‘yaaaas, qween!’ him or view him as exotic.
He asked if I was going to Pride later this month and I said probably not; it’s a celebration that has misplaced its purpose. I took a risk with that answer because his age was difficult to gauge. If he was on the younger side of the mid-twenties to mid-thirties range I eventually settled on, he might assume I was ‘problematic’ in some way, but he nodded and said he also felt less connected to it than in the past.
“It’s for big companies and kids who aren’t gay. They can’t even tell you what Stonewall was about! How are you at Pride not knowing what we were fighting for?”
When he wasn’t railing against the corporatization of Pride, he lamented the loss of an event that was one of his favorite Pride traditions.
“I heard what happened was they opened their relationship,” he gossiped about its organizers, his delivery turning cautious. “Brought in a third or whatever. And you know how that goes.” He glanced back at me a couple times to make sure I wasn’t offended before continuing, “The community loses because of their drama.”
“It’s a metaphor for what’s happening within the LGBTQ+ community in general,” I suggested, and Octavius, who did most of the talking, turned his attention back to the ‘dumb kids’ ruining Pride.
“They’re just there to twerk to bad music and show off scars where their boobies used to be,” he groused, then apologized for his language.
“What I don’t like is their arrogance,” I said. “They don’t understand our history or culture, and they’ve never actually fought for anything or been denied anything, but they want to lecture us all on politics.” That set him off on another tangent.
If I shared this story on social media, where anyone could read it, there’d be a steady stream of “Sure, Jan” and “This. Never. Happened.” replies from exactly the sort of ‘queers’ we were Grumpy Old Men-ning about. That’s where the rubber meets the road with all this faddish nonsense, and what separates identity tourists from full-time residents of LGBTville. Since they’re not really part of our community, they have no idea how many of us feel this way; it’s a number much higher than most would ever guess.
When we pulled up to the hospital entrance, Octavius undid his seat belt and turned to face me; he wanted to tell me about a prank he once pulled on his mom. He’d gone to extreme lengths to convince her he was secretly heterosexual, even producing a fake girlfriend, and her reaction was predictably hilarious. Despite his best efforts, she was essentially unprankable. If there was one thing she’d always known about her son, from the time he was a toddler, it was that he was gayer than a musical number from Xanadu.
That is our sort of ‘pride,’ the kind that still exists, as Octavius noted — despite all his rainbow apparel — in the absence of parades and social media. It’s as real and hard-won as marriage equality, conversion therapy bans, and the decriminalization of gay sex. It comes from being yourself every day of your life, before you’re even fully aware of what that means, rather than blindly embracing whatever’s trending among your peers on TikTok.
Before we parted ways, he gave me a few dates and the name of a club where he’s about to debut his new drag act. “Bring your wife and I’ll buy you both drinks,” he offered. It was a nice moment of connection that I chose not to spoil by telling him, like any pragmatic middle-aged lesbian who’d just glanced at his dashboard indicator lights, “Save your money and get your engine looked at, and we’ll take care of the drinks.”
* As usual, names are (slightly) changed for privacy purposes.
** “How did you see his socks?!” Crankenstein asked when I told her this story. They were visible when I leaned forward so he could show me some of his drag photos. She always asks about my drivers because of my tendency to learn their life stories. Sometimes they aren’t chatty, which is fine by me, but others are, in which case I’d rather ask than answer questions. I don’t order rides too often, but when I do it’s to huge medical campuses or unfamiliar hospitals. We’re close to everything, so the cost is reasonable, and my appointments are stressful enough lately without having to deal with parking or construction zone headaches. It’s an imperfect system, though — some SUVs are so tall that I practically have to pole vault into them. There needs to be a ‘sensible sedans for short people’ option.