The Booty Pageant

[December 14th, 2005] Most Thursday nights, round midnight, you'll find me and my partner parked on the couch, nodding off to yet another repeat of The Golden Girls—but not every Thursday night. Like a pair of aging vamps (or vampires), Juan and I still like to descend upon this city's late-ish, work-night scene. But it takes a damn good reason to keep us from crawling back to our lair way before the Bea-witching hour.

Like cheap drinks and a good dance floor.

Such was the case a couple of weeks ago when, following a slammin' bash at the newly expanded Adidas Originals boutique in the Brewery Blocks (that party rocked!), we found ourselves back in our neck of NoPo shooting back stiff ones at the queer-friendliest of straight bars, Porky's Pub.

Our excuse for staying out way past our bedtime? Matt Bell, Genre magazine's pop editor, was in town, and we wanted to make sure our new friend, a NYC nightlife charmer, had a chance to see this city's "best" sights/sites. That's why we took him to Porky's bacchanal blowout, "Booty."

Now, every time I've checked out Booty in the past, which hasn't been that often, it could be described as an "experience." Let's just say I refuse to elaborate on the night when three bears threatened to use my ass for target practice. This particular evening was no different from the rest. That's because we all landed here on the night of (drum roll, please!) "Booty Pageant 2005"—or, as I like to refer to it, "Murder(the)Balls II."

Unlike most queer beauty contests I've been at (or judged), this one had an edgy, Iron John fire in its belly, making it seem less like a pageant and more like Carrie's prom. Which, of course, made it much more interesting to watch.

While I do recall some prettyish lady coming on stage looking like one of Wisteria Lane's more desperate housewives, I was much more fascinated by the pageant's two gentlemen contestants—both of whom seemed to have a really hard time keeping their clothes on (sorry, I was too drunk to catch their names). These weren't the sort of dudes you'd wave dollars at in some strip club, the ones who flap their genitals in the air to the beat of the latest club hit. Rather these two boys struck me as queer rebels, the sort of distasteful fuck-ups who don't really fit into the increasingly moderate queer regime that seems to capture all the headlines these days. (You know, the kind of straight-acting queers who are more worried about their assets than how their ass looks in a pair of short-shorts.) I guess the same could be said for all the misfits who hang on Booty's every note, from the cute, boy-looking dykes to the too-cool-for-school modern primitives covered head-to-toe in tribal images. These queer folk really fit in here—even if they don't anywhere else in town.

I don't know what our writer friend, Matt, thought of all this (I have a sneaking hunch it was all very circa-1995 Brooklyn to him). But I did finally figure it was time to go. It was during the "talent" portion of the pageant, when one of the naked dudes, cupping his man meat gently in his hands, inserted paint tubes in his butt and began to use his naked ass as a paintbrush.

Booty may be booty-ful, but that was a little too much booty—even for a queer coot like me.