Queer

175, Abigail, active, airy dairy fairy, anal assassin, anal astronaut, anal buccaneer, angel, arse bandit, ass bandit, ass burglar, ass pirate, auntie, backdoor bandit, back-door commando, batty boy, batty man, bean flicker, bear, bent, bentshot, bender, bone smuggler, bottom, botty boy, booty bandit, booty buffer, brownie king, brown piper, bufter, bufty, bugger, bum bandit, bum boy, bum chum, bumder, bum driller, bum engineer, bum plumber, bum robber, butch, butch-broad, butt fruit, butt hugger, butt pirate, butt rider, butt pilot, butt rustler, butter beaner, button stitcher, cackpipe cosmonaut, carpet muncher, catcher, celesbian, Charlie, chi-chi man, chutney farmer, chutney ferret, clam licker/slammer, closet case, cock gobbler, cock jockey, cock knocker, cockpipe cosmonaut, cockpipe cowboy, crafty butcher, cream puff, crossdresser, cub, daisy, diesel dyke, donut puncher, double tucker, drag dyke, dyke, fag, faggot, fairy, fagala, fanny basher, femme, flamer, flit, friend of Dorothy, fruit, fruitcake, fruit fly, fruit loop, fruit packer, fudge packer, game of flats, Ganymede, gaylord, gaysian, girlfriend, girlyboy, Harry hoofter, hawk, hemorrhoid hitman, homo, inspector of manholes, iron hoof, iron hoofter, Jessie, jobby jabber, kitty puncher, knob jockey, knight of the pork sword, lavender cowboy, lez, lezzie, lesbo, leso, lick-a-lotta-puss, light in the loafers, light in the pants, limp-wristed, Liza with a Z, Marmite miner, Mary, master of the manflute, mattress muncher, mirror polisher, mo, mound masher, mud packer, muff buffer, muff diver, muff muncher, muscle Mary, Nancy, Nancy boy, Nellie, Oklahomo, otter, pansy, passive, Paul puffer, penis fly trap, pillow biter, pipe smoker, pitcher, pole smoker, poof (poofdah, poofta, poofter, poove, pouf, puff), poo pusher, pounce, powder puff, princess, pussy pursuer, queen (bean queen, brownie queen, chicken queen, couscous queen, curry queen, dinge queen, doyley queen, drag queen, grey queen, gym queen, matzo ball queen, pissy queen, potato queen, rice queen, salsa queen, scat queen, semen demon, size queen, snow queen, taco queen), queer, rear admiral, rectal pioneer, rectal ranger, ring raider, roarer, rug muncher, rump raider, rump ranger, sausage jockey, sausage smuggler, scissor sister, she who drinks from the furry cup, shirt lifter, shit stabber, sod, taco bumper, tail-gunner, todger dodger, todger quaffer, Toby, tooty-fruity, top, trap, tribade, troll, trouser bandit, turd burglar, twink, twopence licker, uphill gardener, upstairs gardener, womb raider, woolly, woolie woofter

VIII

Queer

by

Matt Calumet

Queer

A Big World Book

1st Edition

Photographs by Matt Calumet (unless otherwise cited)

Illustrations by Sarina Darwin (unless otherwise cited)

Calumet, Matt 1967-

USA 

1. Gay and lesbian – Nonfiction. I. Title.

Text © Matt Calumet 2016 (unless otherwise cited) 

Photos © Matt Calumet 2016 (unless otherwise cited)

Illustrations © Sarina Darwin 2016 (unless otherwise cited)

ISBN-13: 978-1495437014

ISBN-10: 1495437019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without the written permission of the publisher and copyright owner

Foreword

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Buffalo, New York

-  Another Coming Out Story

-  All In the Family

-  Monkeyboy

-  Gaylord

-  Sex-Ed

-  Risk

-  Jew-Lover

-  The Porno Mag  

-  Markings

-  Hit that Perfect Beat

-  The Ultimate Fag Hag

-  South Pacific

-  A College Boy

A Voyage to Israel

-  This Ain’t Your Grandma’s Ulpan

-  Lovecats

-  Dishes

-  Jewish Grandmothers Are Hot

Return to Buffalo, New York

-  Eww!

-  ATM

A Voyage to Washington, DC

-  Throw Me Down the Stairs, the Baby, Her Sweater

-  Lammie

A Voyage to State College, Pennsylvania

-  The Woman So Nice They Named Her Twice

-  North Allen Street

Return to Washington, DC

-  Ode to Dead Dogs

-  The Bath House

-  Sarongs, Throngs, and Death

-  Thongs, Dongs, Jail-time, and a Gay Tupperware Party

-  Markings II

-  They Shoot Dumb but Pretty Horses, Don’t They?

-  Violins and Violence

-  The Cindy Clock, Campbell Soup, and Erasure

-  Pupazzo di neve

A Voyage to Czechoslovakia

-  Change

-  Warning! This Horse Bites!

-  Bitch, Please!

-  We Will Marry Your Girlfriends

-  Pane Pridel

A Voyage to Greece

-  My Own Personal Adonis

-  Miss Gillette

-  Oh La La!

A Voyage to Texas

-  Fire!

Return to the Newly-Divorced and Renamed Czech Republic

-  Death to the Americans!

A Voyage Ann Arbor, Michigan

-  Sexual Sparring Mates

-  Kimono Night

A Voyage to Asia

-  If It’s Tuesday, This Must be Japan

––––––––

A Voyage to Washington State

-  My Teeth Is Pain

-  2,264 Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

-  101

-  Larry Flynt, Meet Alfred Stieglitz

-  Lesbian Love

-  A Dog and a Bed

-  Threesome

-  Bosom Buddies

A Voyage to Greenland

-  The Poo Bag and the Qivitoq

-  The Lost Children of Greenland

A Voyage to Denmark

-  A Convivial Courtyard in Copenhagen

A Voyage to the Republic of Georgia

-  Planes, Trains and Fleshlights

A Voyage to Bosnia-Herzegovina

-  A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Bosnia

-  My Ex’s Junk on the Streets of Sarajevo

A Voyage to Norway

-  Magnets

queer noun \ˈkwir\: homosexual (anus-loving, fag-fucking, butt-sexing, come-eating, anal-sodomizing, backdoor-humping, butt-fucking, cock-sucking, fudge-packing, man-sexing rectal up-the-butt faggot puff). No need to call it any other way: I’m queer.

Foreword

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

The bells ring at five to the hour at the Saint Anthony of Padua Catholic church next to my apartment. The bells sound like a car alarm and go off – religiously – at 7:15 AM, whether you’re hungover or not. I prefer the Muslim prayers. When the mosque calls the faithful to prayer, I find the high-pitched Arabic more melodic than the Catholic call-to-worship. Then again, the Muslim prayers start at 5:40 AM. My apartment is situated between Saint Ante, as the Bosnians call it, and the Sarajevo brewery. Renovated after the war in the same architectural style, the two buildings look like a supercenter of sin and salvation. It completely works.

I sit on my back balcony and glance up at the hills, watching for Serbian snipers. They’re gone, of course, but it’s hard not to imagine them shooting down into the city. Most of the damage has been repaired, but it doesn't take a trained eye to see endless bullet holes, and I’d be careful walking in the suburbs of Sarajevo, or on any grass or unpaved surface in Bosnia. It’s still full of landmines. War really sucks. But cheer up! I didn't come to write about war. As Shakespeare said, The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. I don’t want the good to be interred with my bones. I’m a kid from Buffalo, New York, married to a very good Norwegian man, and I’m sitting on a terrace in Bosnia. It’s either extraordinary provenance or sheer, stupid, good luck that has brought me here. I’d like to think it’s a bit of both. That, and I’m plucky and rolling in chutzpah. Sure, there has been drama... in spades. It has been fun. It has been hellish. It has been my life.

Sitting on my balcony, I got to thinking about how many places I have traveled to, how many men I have loved, and how the many places are connected with the many men. Some of these men were lovers, some were not; some of them were gay, some were not; some of them were absolute douchebags, but thankfully, most were not. When I hear one of their many names, I can’t help but think of a place, and vice-versa. Like the refrigerator travel magnets that plague my house, they are reminders of where I’ve been and what I’ve done.

One doesn’t notice it at first, but old age starts to creep up on you. It’s not just noticing a gray hair, either. You can’t see as well, or run as fast, or stay out all night. People begin to fall out of your life and not on purpose, either. There’s no time for much of anything. You start to panic that you forgot to lock the door, or turn off all the burners on the stove. Even worse, friends, lovers, and imagined enemies begin to die off. It’s imperceptible at first, but your own mortality has appeared on the horizon.

I started to write, focusing on the good and the fun and pulling out memories and clippings from the cobwebs of my metaphorical plane tickets and hotel rooms and endless wanderings around the planet. When people proudly point to things as status symbols, I proudly point to another trip. That’s your new couch? The Baltics! Luxury car? Southeast Asia! Fancy shoes? Malta! Surely I’m not the only one to realize that material possessions mean nothing once you’re dead. We all want to be remembered, to make sure that our lives had some point or even importance. Of course they didn’t.

For most of us, in 50 years nearly no one will remember our names. In 100 years, we will be no more than a carved name on a stone. I am one of those names. Maybe, just maybe, if you take the time to write things down, a lifetime of memories isn’t necessarily lost the minute the big kahuna upstairs turns off the lights.

So many people. So many stories. So much life. I mean no disrespect or maliciousness to anyone, even those imagined enemies mostly made in inexperience and stupidity, and this gentle disclaimer is meant to add to the resounding truth: we had fun, and thank you.

Buffalo, NY

Another Coming Out Story

I always knew I was gay. For some people, the beginning of their life story means birth, family, and home. For me, my beginning was none of those things. My beginning was the awareness of my sexual identity: knowing I was gay. Gay can mean happy, gay can encompass a lifestyle, but in this usage gay means being sexually attracted to people of the same gender. I never felt much attraction to girls, their mysteries, or the delights of man-on-woman action. I was a little Irish boy who lingered over the men’s underwear section in the K-Mart Sunday circular. I remember going to the YMCA with my father when I was five or six and feeling something different when I took a shower with all those naked men. When I played around with the other boys in the neighborhood, it was the usual: kick the can, blanket forts, illicit homosexual acts.

I grew up in upstate New York. Buffalo to be exact. If you’ve had the opportunity to visit Buffalo, you know it’s one historic but tough little city. There are architectural gems from Louis Sullivan and H.H. Richardson, and four Frank Lloyd Wright houses within a block of each other. And how can you disparage a city with a park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, a history of presidents, and a presidential assassination? Buffalo is the home of chicken wings, beef on weck, Ted’s Red Hots, Bisons’ minor league baseball, Sabres’ hockey, and Da Bills – a football team that could have moved to greener pastures but its rabid fans would never have allowed it. At one glorious point in time, Buffalo was larger than Toronto, and the border crossing from Fort Erie was filled with happy Canadians coming to Buffalo to attend concerts and plays and to shop in its stores.

That, however, was not the period I grew up in. I grew up in the late seventies/early eighties, when the steel mills and auto plants on which the city’s economy depended were shutting down. The jobs were gone. Nearly the entire economic base of the city collapsed. People with enough money fled to the suburbs or other cities with better economic situations; the people who were left behind were the ones who couldn’t escape. In a period of ten years, Buffalo lost half its population. Thus, a city built for a million people suddenly looked (and felt) empty and abandoned. So, Buffalo was a great place to grow up, but it was also an economic hellhole. Most of the people who are still living in Buffalo are the survivors, and – for what they’ve been through – are amazingly understanding and tolerant. They’re also some of the funniest humans known to man.

I lived in one of the toughest white neighborhoods in Buffalo: Riverside, a saccharine-sweet name for a rough-ass place. Who says poverty can’t be poetic? I lived on a street that was home to Irish, Hungarians, Poles, and the extremely elderly. For the longest time, my whole world was Catholic (except for my family) and white: the only place I saw people of color was at school. Buffalo neighborhoods adhered to strict color lines. I probably wouldn’t have been welcomed in East Buffalo, and much to my chagrin, African-Americans/black people weren’t welcomed in my neighborhood.

Cottage Street consisted of 12 bungalow-style houses. Buffalo is full of them. The four corners of the street were off-limits to neighborhood kids. There was a church on one corner that no one attended. On the opposing corner lived a family who were so meticulous about their yard that if we set one foot in it, an ominous voice would flow out of the house, threatening to call the police if we didn’t "Get the hell off my lawn!!!" Another corner housed the crazy man who looked strikingly like the lecherous guy played by Arte Johnson on Laugh-In, whom Ruth Buzzi would beat with her purse. And completing the Four Watch-Corners of the Apocalypse was a house with a truly amazing garage, which I mention because it was the focal point for neighborhood games, including dodgeball. It was the only garage on the street that actually faced the street, all the rest being recessed behind the houses. The neighbor to whom the amazing garage belonged hated us kids because of the eternal dents and scuff marks we made by lining up against its white surface and having balls hurled at us with pulverizing force. I hope that whoever invented dodgeball, or tether ball, or any other game where children hurl projectiles at each other (what the fuck: Jarts?) died ignominious and painful deaths, or at least suffered grievous injuries brought about by their respective inventions. The white garage door also served as home base for a variety of games, including Kick-the-Can, a personal favorite.

If you’ve never played Kick-the-Can, and have always wondered what the intricacies of this time-honored game are, our version was like this: someone kicked the ball (it was necessary to have the strongest kicker, who usually turned out to be one of the large, neighborhood Irish Shaughnessy kids), everyone would run and hide, and then the designated spotter would run and get the ball. Because I was extremely thin in my early years (and then ballooned into a human beach ball before losing the weight in my late teenage years) and couldn’t run fast, I was a natural Kick-the-Can spotter. He or she would take the ball back to home base, ours being a manhole grate with a hole in the center that conveniently held the ball in place in front of the garage. The spotter would then walk around, looking for the others, and when he spotted someone, he’d run back to the ball and yell, One, two, three, I see Mary behind the tree. If you were spotted, you had to sit by home base – either until everyone was found, or until some brave soul came along and kicked the can (ball) while the spotter was searching, setting everyone free and ensuring that more Kick-the-Can hijinks would ensue. The game could last for hours and it usually did. Although the stories about Buffalo snow are (mostly) true, the summer nights are seemingly endless. You simply haven’t lived until you’ve played Kick-the-Can for hours, only quitting because it’s finally dark (at 10 PM) and your mother is hoarse from screaming, "Get the hell inside!!!"

Completing the neighborhood were the Sparrows, whose house was always well-kept, and who had two children who were much too old for us to play with. Their daughter sometimes babysat us until my mother found out – much to my disappointment – that she sometimes took us to a local bar where we entertained the patrons. Next door to the Sparrows was a house with two apartments that were always filled with one type of crazy person or another. It was wise to avoid them. Then, there were those rabble-rousing Shaughnessys, the Anscars (who thrived on sports and cruelty to animals), the Kubackis (a good Polish family), the Hardys (resident child geniuses), and us. The only reason I mention any of this is that the Shaughnessys and the Kubackis produced boys that would shape my sexual identity.

Our house was a two-story bungalow that should have been condemned. The first floor had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room. There was an almost-hidden staircase of death off the kitchen that could surely have cloistered runaway Jews. This ascendancy of death contained 16 steep stairs leading to the second floor, where there was an old, enormous, unused furnace; a large, unfinished, unheated room; and a mysterious sealed room that stretched to the back of the house. In the stupidity of my youth, I would leap down the stairs, not realizing that I was risking a broken neck each time. The second-story floor creaked whenever you walked on it, and one time, my older sister put her foot through it into the dining room. Despite the treacherous stairs, the rickety floors, and the lack of heat, the unoccupied second floor would prove an invaluable refuge from my mother. The back yard was large and unfenced, with a giant slab remnant of an old chimney in the middle of it– all that was left of a burned-down mother-in-law house. Mostly, this area was the domain of endless, futile attempts by the man of the house – me – to mow it with one of those old turbine/cotton-gin/grim reaper/heart attack inducing-type mowers.

My small world also consisted of Public School #51 and the local Assembly of God church, the thought of which still makes me throw up a little in my mouth. It was there that my religion-crazed mother dragged us three times a week: twice for Sunday service, and Wednesday night for Bible study. The hat was passed each time (what a racket). As kids, my sisters – Shirley and Yvette – and I would pray for death at these religious meetings, whose length and scope would have been hellish even to Billy Graham. I would sit for hours on a hard pew, watching the clock on the wall, inventing stories in my head to while away the time. My personal favorite was an apocalyptic scenario in which Buffalo had been hit by a disaster, probably nuclear (as the Soviet Union was still very much a threat). I would go to bed at night wondering if the missiles were coming. Due to the incredible amount of time I had spent sitting in church developing these apocalyptic visions, my brain was full of complex story-lines and characters who banded together, cobbled together a government, and took back Buffalo... one zombie-infested street at a time in desperate hand-to-combat, until, finally, Armageddon!

The Assembly of God had strong views about Armageddon and the Apocalypse, but were sadly silent on issues of genocide, social justice, sexuality, and what it’s like to grow up in the modern world, etc. I made sure to take Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior once a week because I was terrified of being left behind in The Rapture and being forced to take the unsightly mark of the beast, as told in the Book of Revelation. The Rapture must be italicized and capitalized to emphasize the seriousness (and ridiculousness) of such an event. Our church would sometimes show horrendously-made movies depicting the End Times, which we naively – and desperately – watched with delight, because they took the place of normal – and forbidden – entertainments such as dancing, listening to music, and watching regular-run movies. The End Times movies scared the bejeezus out of every impressionable child in the room because they usually ended with someone losing their head (literally, cinematically) for not taking the mark of the beast. My favorite movie included a scene where The Rapture had taken place, and the unsaved came home to find unattended blenders whirring in kitchens and abandoned bags of groceries strewn in driveways. This was what remained behind when the good and holy were called to heaven. A stick of margarine ran like melted blood on the street from a dropped bag. This image has stayed with me for a lifetime.

Another vivid – but less searing – memory of childhood is of Yvette and me at a local drugstore with our mother, and somehow getting separated from her. In those days, kids got abducted, but no one really talked about it except McGruff, the Crime Dog – who helped take a bite out of crime and Saturday morning cartoon time. We were about 10 at the time, and while reasonable children would have found an adult and gotten help (or, at least, panicked), we instinctively thought The Rapture had taken place, and that we had been left behind. We concluded that it was only a matter of time before someone would be chopping off our heads for not taking the mark of the beast. We quickly formulated a plan for survival (which, as with all good escape plans, included heading to Canada), and walked home to pack for the journey. Fortunately for us, The Rapture had not occurred and Jesus had not returned; unfortunately for us, when we arrived home we got the whuppin’ of our lives from Big Momma – my mother’s gag souvenir paddle from an amusement park with the words (I am not making this up) BIG MOMMA written across it. It didn’t occur to me then – or, apparently, to the Assemblies of God – that The Rapture was a rhetorical device designed to impart moral guidance, rather than being a stone-cold inevitability. Lesson learned? Don’t waste time being afraid of the religious fundamentalists in other countries; the homegrown ones are scary enough.

The religious indoctrination of my youth was a complete waste of time, except of course as it provided me with ample storytelling fodder. As I look back on it, it amazes me how easy it was to pass off thinly-veiled racism and religious intolerance as holy and righteous. Anyone out of the norm – people of color, people of other religions – was unwelcome, if not downright satanic. Once, at a Sunday service, a very drunk but quiet man came in and – before he entered the pew – genuflected. The congregation was outraged and shocked. You would have thought he had jumped on the pulpit and taken a poop. Was their indignation about his inebriation in the House of God? No, it was about him performing a Catholic practice in their House of God. So, instead of taking an opportunity to welcome and assist another human who had come into a church to find solace and help, the church deacons (aka: The God Squad) roughly escorted him out. At the time, I viewed it as a momentary respite – a bit of drama! – from the monotony of Sunday service. Now, I see how intolerant and hypocritical these supposedly holy church leaders were.

When I was 11, the church sent me to camp, which was probably the best thing the church ever did for me. Before then, I had never been outside Buffalo except for when my family drove to Cleveland – where I almost died from choking on a piece of bacon and lost my favorite stuffed toy, Snoopy. I’m pretty sure my parents threw it out in a futile attempt to make me man up. Anyway, I had won a church contest for reading the most scripture (or being the best brown-noser), and off to camp I went. The camp was in the Adirondacks, like almost every camp in New York State; however, unlike almost every camp in New York State, this was a religious, all-boys camp. There were nightly prayer services, complete with speaking in tongues. The pastor would touch people on the head, they would fall back and begin to writhe on the floor. Conveniently, because this was an all-boys camp, no one had to put a blanket over anyone like in church to keep us from looking up their dresses. Although the Babel-esque utterances intrigued me, perhaps foreshadowing my linguistic accomplishments in adulthood, my lust for the other males in the room might have somehow – inexplicably – hindered my progress in mastering this particular language.

Oh, did I mention? Camp was a hotbed of homosexual activity. Although we were expected to wear T-shirts when we went swimming (so as not to excite the other boys), the camp would have put a British boarding school to shame. At the time, I focused my attention on nightly prayer sessions, which were boring, tedious, and time-consuming. I was too young to understand what boys grabbing each other in the shower – and furtive movements in the night – meant, but these things were happening all around me.

All in the Family

I had little if any contact with my father growing up. My parents divorced when I was three and he moved away from Buffalo, or was driven away by my mother, a theory I was never able to confirm. My one distinct memory of my father – and my earliest memory of life – was of him sitting in a comfortable chair, smoking a pipe. I sat on the floor, playing with a toy, as the smell of pipe smoke filled the room. That’s it: the one and only memory of my father from my boyhood is of a man, smoking a pipe, in a chair. It’s not much to go on as a role model.

Until she found religion, my mother was a bit of a hellion in her youth. I remember motorcycle ruffians and other assorted riffraff hanging around our house. Note from my editor: you just used hellion, ruffians and riffraff. My mother was a decent woman when she wasn’t whipping us (raising four children on welfare is no easy task), and not long after my parents divorced, my mother married a Vietnam vet named Donald. Although I doubt my mother ever really loved him, things with Don in the house were greatly improved, and between my father’s child support payments, which he made until he decided that supporting his children wasn’t important enough, and Don’s VA benefits, we were almost prosperous by Riverside standards.

Don had been shot in Vietnam and had a hole in his leg – smack dab in the center of his right calf – which fascinated me and my sisters. Every night, he would clean and bandage it. Once, when I was about six, my mother was out shopping with my two sisters, and Don and I were watching TV. Don announced it was time to clean the hole and I, intrigued, followed him upstairs. Usually, Don just pulled up his pant leg, but this time –  much to my surprise – he took off his pants. Holy Mahatma Gandhi! He wasn’t wearing any underwear! Other than my vague memories of the showers at the YMCA, I had never seen a grown man naked before, so there was little to compare him with, but his penis looked huge. The amount of hair was equally intriguing. We talked nonchalantly as Don cleaned the bullet hole, and even though at age six I knew not to