A couple of months ago B and I went to a gay bar downtown for karaoke night. You can just imagine. Why did I think of this now? Don't misunderstand me, I love being gay, after all what's not to love? Okay besides that. And that. Forget it. I do treasure the little perks that come with homosexuality, like for instance the numberless daily opportunities to be aroused by or simply admire the glorious if actually sort of repellent male body and the concomitant opportunities to be chased and punched or beaten with lumber or metal or simply called a homosexual but in a really mean way. I wouldn't trade my sexual orientation for anything of comparable or lesser value, except maybe a leather club chair for my office (with ottoman), or a red Mini Cooper, which you know I would look totally cute tootling around town in, but what would be the point if I wasn't gay in it. I'd also take cash but who could attach a dollar figure to such a phenomenon? We're not talking about simple homosexuality here after all, we're talking about my homosexuality, with its unknowable complexities and its patina of luxurious decay. Being gay isn't what it used to be but it's still outpaced inflation and remains a sound if unimaginative investment going forward. In adjusted dollars I still feel comfortable calling myself a solid little nest egg fag.

Anyway, I went to this karaoke thing at a nondescript fag bar in what passes in Portland for the "gay district." Look for the rainbow pennants flapping in the acidic homosexual rain and sniff the air for desperation and Cologne de Closetcase, you can't miss it unless you're driving by at more than five miles an hour. My friend B did a few numbers, but actually what I remember most is this odd little fellow who sang "Laughter in the Rain" by Neil fucking Sedaka. This is a song no one should ever hear again, but if you must I recommend hearing it earnestly warbled in a karaoke version as radically untasty gay pornography is projected on a large screen above the singer, a looped panorama of hydraulically mechanical fucking so pixelated it suggests the enigma of gay desire abstracted into irreducible atomic units we'll go ahead and call sissyons, a red-faced tweaker getting jackhammered from above into painful, ungainly postures of sexual woe by a sketchy-looking Latino with a head like an enormous bouillon cube and giant pores, next to a swimming pool, in a position that probably isn't called "The Butter Churn" but ought to be.