I'm Prancing As Fast As I Can

WARNING: Those who don’t remember my past are doomed to repeat it.

It is night. The light from the fire lights his face is the most flattering way, and he knows it. He sits on a log, several young Queers gathered around him. They hang onto his every word, as he tells them a story. It is a story about mustaches and Gay bars and the Sears Men’s Underwear Catalog and losing your V to a trucker and chasing Gay bashers in six-inch heels dressed as a drag bunny and a virus and watching your friends die and ACT UP and dental dams and using words such as “lover” and “beard” and when Cher’s name had an accent and stealing a VHS copy of Batman and Throbbin from behind the beaded curtain and they are rapt.

“Tell us more,” they cry. “More about what it was like in the before-time! You’re saying marriage was a thing that wasn’t allowed to us? PrEP didn’t exist? Boys couldn’t wear nail polish to school? What about skirts?”

“It was very risky,” he tells them, “Even if you had the legs for it – which I did.” He speaks fondly of a time in the late-eighties when he wore a short skirt to a protest.

“A what?” they ask, wonderment in their eyes. They beg him for more stories from the past, and looking at their eager faces, how could he refuse? He continues…