The only man: Crashing a gay Ecuadorian beach party.
It is morning in the coastal town of Salinas, Ecuador, but we have no sense of time, banging our palms, fists, on the metal door of the second-floor apartment, calling the phone for the fourth time or so, listening to it ring inside. We are standing on the ledge, literally and figuratively, like purgatory, like waiting at a stop light in the middle of nowhere.
The party kept us up all night, and one of us has a bad case of chuchaki, or hangover. It is he who raps on the door loudest, with his angry female knock. Finally, from inside, the little one, “la fuerte”, opens the door and wordlessly clambers back to bed.
The three of us say nothing, collect our things, say goodbye to the host, and return to saying nothing as we walk to the bus station. The warm sun on our backs, the golden sunrise and the fresh sea air add to the somnolence, dull our irritation.
I can think of nothing but how strange it is that I would be here, making a game of dodging the bottle caps stamped into the dirt road, the only gringo, the only heterosexual male, in the aftermath of an Ecuadorian gay party, walking down a dirt road to who knows where.
A few days earlier…
“Let’s go to the beach,” says my good friend Julio. “I have a friend having a birthday party in Salinas.”
“Yes” I say as always. “Vamos a la playa.”
A couple of days later he tells me it is a gay party. “Do you still want to go?”
I think about it. “Are there going to be any women there?”
“Probably not.”
Not an ideal situation, but nevertheless an opportunity that is unlikely to come back ’round again. The idea appeals to me on a strange masochistic level and, once again, I seek that satisfaction which comes from uncomfortable situations, like walking hot coals. Besides, I’ve never been to the beach in Ecuador.
“Yeah, let’s go. Doesn’t bother me.”
Many a straight guy has known a few of the gays in his day, but not usually do they spend an extended length of time in their natural habitat observing gay habits and testing gay preconceptions. Here is my chance to be the straight eye for the queer guy. My first conclusion, within the first few handshakes, is that gay people are the same everywhere and the feminine behavior isn’t some cultural thing from San Francisco. Furthermore, they get more effeminate when they are together, just like women do, and just as straight men get more masculine when they get together. Birds of a feather. Nothing groundbreaking.
My next observation, as we walk down the seaside boulevard of La Libertad, is a bit more surprising. A strikingly beautiful woman passes and no one pays the slightest notice. Yeah, it sounds obvious, but a men turning heads, even slightly, for a beautiful woman is such a given in my experience that the lack of it startles, almost frightens, me. Suddenly, I become very aware of the mental radar screen in my head with a blip for every beautiful woman within a hundred-yard radius. One of the blips starts flashing red and beeping with increased force as she grows near, but she passes within a few feet of my companieras without eliciting even the obligatory sideways glance. I, in turn, pull a full 180-degree rubbernecking maneuver and suddenly feel a little perverse without the herd backing me up. I want to throw my hands in the air and say “did you see that?!!” but I know they won’t know what I am talking about or care if I tell them.
Out of politeness, Julio points out all the beautiful women passing as we walk by.
“Look!” he says, pointing.
“Yeah, I saw her.”
“Oh, how about that one over there?”
“I’ve been staring at her ass for several minutes.”
He keeps going, but he misses a few vital blips, discouraging me in his ability to hook me up with chicks that he already warmed-up with his elegant manner, but sent my way because he doesn’t swing that way. On the other hand, he points out a couple figures on the horizon and says “those two men are gay.” I can barely tell they are guys, but as they draw close, my own gaydar begins to buzz a little. If I wasn’t staring right at them, I wouldn’t have noticed a thing.
Yes, it’s a big find for an up-and-coming sexual-orientation anthropologist. Fascinating!
“How can you do that?” I ask him, concerning his eagle-eye for birds-of-his-feather.
“All gay guys can do it.”
“So can they tell that I’m not gay?”
“No, because with some gay men you can’t tell.”
Great. So I’m gay by association. This could be a long night.
At the beach-side restaurant for drinks:
Inter-gay behavior seems to consist of gay sex jokes and variations on a very structured theme of gay insults, most of which I thankfully don’t understand, not having been versed in the lexicon of Latin gays. Some of my notes:
“You’re a real faggot. I’m a beautiful woman.”
“No, I’m not gay. I’m just a straight man with a predilection for the masculine.” “You really are a little flamer.”
“Yeah, but I’m pretty.”
“That is true.”
“Did you see that girl? She looks like if she laughs, ca ca will come out her nose.”
“Oh, how wicked!”
“You are BAD!”
And so on, punctuated with a little talk about music, past histories, and flirtations with “the only man in the group,” me. To wit:
“Aaron, I give you my heart. It is more yours than mine.”
“Hello, Papi. What can I do to make you mine?”
“Open yourself, Aaron. You’re frightened, aren’t you?” I reply in the negative. “Have a few more drinks. By the end of this night you will be mine.”
One keeps calling himself Lois Lane, having commented that I look like Clark Kent with my glasses. He touches me often and tells me he would really like to have me tonight. He is the little one they call “un fuerte,” which means “flamboyant” from a gay’s perspective. I tell him not to touch my belly anymore. He stops touching my belly. By the end of the night, I learn to say “no” as a conditioned response to his opening mouth.
At first Julio assures me they are joking, but he isn’t as convincing as I would like. Julio tells me that sometimes his friends bother him when they get together. They are fuertes, but Julio is not.
There are advantages to hanging out with a bunch of gays. First of all, it’s good for a guy’s self esteem. They let me know when I look sexy, which is always; they compliment my frame, my eyes, my muscles. I just say thank you. Then there are plenty of willing helpers to rub coconut oil on my back at the beach. They also cook a tasty lunch and are quite capable Latin dance instructors. After a couple lessons, they say, “not bad for a Gringo.”
After beach time, during which I left los gays to suntan while I played around in the ocean, we go out for some beers, and everyone gets a bit tipsy, no longer hiding their gayness, referring to each other as “her,” or with feminine names, or adjectives in the feminine form of Spanish, as in: “We are loca. Loquissima!” “Viva la santa!” “This is Geovanna, my wife,” and gay things like that. They call out to a woman to come sit with us. She refuses after verifying their blatant gayness, but they insist, telling her that I am not only straight, but interested.
I wasn’t interested; rather, they were interested in setting up a social experiment. She finally relents and her table, also mostly full of men, joins ours in the bonds of drunkenness that bridge all differences. The straight guys are cool, but they should have brought more women. I don’t find the girl particularly attractive, although she knows how to use those big brown eyes. I smile at her briefly, not wishing to offend. Meanwhile, I am occupied responding to rigorous, albeit inebriated, questioning from the straight guys.
“Dude, we don’t care one way or the other, it’s totally cool if you are.”
“No, I’m hetero.”
“So do you like men or women?”
“Women.”
“Only women?”
“Definitely only women.”
“How about men?”
“No.”
“So those guys are your friends?”
“Yes.”
“Just friends?”
“Just friends.”
“Nothing more?”
“No, nothing more. I barely even know them.”
“So you like the mans or the womans?” they repeat slowly, being sure to translate to English for me, just in case something was getting lost in translation.
Meanwhile the girl, the only one, talks with my gay friends. We connect for a few eye gazes, and I think that maybe if I was a little drunker, maybe. My gay friends come up to me one at a time, saying, “Oh man, she really likes you. She keeps asking all these questions about you.” Yet something about having the gays do all the work ruins the thrill for me, and my scant interest is squelched. At the same time I realize the implications concerning my perceived sexuality of turning down the one woman here that everyone else finds attractive. But I didn’t ask for this.
Much like my straight friends might, my gay friends chide me. “You could’ve had sex tonight, and you didn’t even get her number?! She was really pretty, don’t you think?”
No, she was fat, not my type, and I want to sleep. “How about a different one tomorrow?” I finally respond. But I’m afraid I’ve already given them too much hope they might be able to recruit me to the other team.
The party won’t start for two hours and already I want to leave. The guys are in the bedroom trying on shirts and doing each other’s hair.
“Put on your best clothes for the party, Aaron. You have to look sexy tonight.”
I change my shirt and slump back down on the couch. Forty-five minutes pass.
“Okay, Aaron, are you ready?”
I give an annoyed nod.
“Okay, let’s go. You look sexy.”
I spend twenty more minutes sitting on the railing outside.
At the party…
A woman has come, but as I had feared, she is morbidly obese and repulsive. This is a true test of my sexual preferences, and although I recognize several of the gays as quite handsome men, I still find myself striking up a conversation with the girl and charming her way more than I normally would in a subconscious assertion of machismo. But by the time I realize I have her hooked, it is too late to retract the barbs without digging them deeper. I find myself agreeing to go on a beach walk with her later, as the lesser of two evils. I can see where this is going, and the idea is quite disagreeable to me. If I was gay, this would be a lot easier. Before we set out, she goes to the bathroom and I see my window of opportunity. I escape to the “confused gays” section to mingle with the chaps there, in the courtyard, where one can stare at the night sky, hors d’oeuvre in hand, and ask “who am I?” If I am to convert myself to at-least bisexual status, this seems like the logical place to start.
The fat girl doesn’t come knocking. A nice-looking and mild-mannered young man takes the beach chair next to mine, a welcome respite, really. After a while, he says,
“This your first time to a party like this?”
“Yes.”
“Me too. So why did you come?”
“My friend pressured me into it,” I say, pointing vaguely into the mass of people crammed into the pastel, open-floored vestibule. “And you?”
“Curious I guess. So how do you like it?”
“I don’t really, at all.”
“Yeah, me neither. It’s pretty pointless. I thought it would be…well, different. What did you think it would be like?”
“Never thought about it, really. So what’s keeping you here?”
“Nothing, really. I can go whenever I want. It’s just…” He shrugs, smiles, shrugs again, goes to see what is happening inside. Loud reggaetón music. I nod in calm confusion, a late reaction, as if to agree with everything and nothing in particular. That cockroach knows what I’m talking about.
However, when the dancing starts an hour or so later, I can’t bring myself to join in on the man-butt grinding and find myself dancing dangerously close to fatty, caught between rock-hard abs and a soft place, as it were. She can move more than would seem physically possible; I’ll give her that. By this time, the sweat is soaking through in noticeable patches. She is drunk and has most definitely lost any of the appealing characteristics she might have had which I overlooked earlier.
I try to pretend like I don’t know I am dancing with her and slowly edge my way to the side and stop dancing altogether, hoping she is too drunk to notice. But she follows me and says in clear Spanish,
“You said you were going to wait for me, but when I came out, you left, and I was waiting for you there for a long time.”
“Really? I was waiting for you outside.”
“No, I said I would be right back and for you to wait for me, but you left.”
“No, you just said you were going to the bathroom.”
“Are you calling me a liar?” she said, noticeably offended.
“No. I guess it was just a misunderstanding. I don’t understand much Spanish.”
“Liar! I don’t believe you. Where are you staying tonight?”
“I don’t know. I guess the place I stayed last night.”
“Where was that?”
“At Daniel’s house with my friends.”
“Oh really?! How does that work?”
“I sleep on the floor and there are three in the bed in the other room.”
“So then, where are we staying tonight?”
“I just said I don’t know where I am staying.”
“But where are WE staying tonight?”
“I’m staying at my friend’s house, I suppose.”
“You are ill-mannered and bullish, aren’t you? What is it that bothers you so much?”
“Nothing is bothering me.”
“You’re a liar. I can tell by your face. You look annoyed.”
“I guess that’s just the way I look. Really, nothing is bothering me.”
She laughs. “I think you are lying. You are a tease. You just understand when it’s convenient for you, don’t you? You do, don’t you?”
I smile.
She laughs again, and draws closer to me until I can feel the steam from her sweat.
“Everything is right here in your face. Everything, and I love it. You’re bullish and coquettish, you say little, but you say everything with your face. It could mean anything and I love it. I love it.”
I shrug. “I didn’t do anything.”
She laughs again. “There it is again. It’s all right here,” gesturing to my face. “I love it, and this is where I am staying. Right here,” gesturing up and down my body. “I love it. This is where I want to be.”
Uh oh, I think she might be hitting on me. I look around desperately for my friends, catching a couple of them by the eye and making the “get me out of this” head-nod gesture, but they don’t catch on to the straight speak. I start dancing to the music a little, on the line between dancing with her and no one, ignoring her as much as possible, kind of halfway facing her without looking into her eyes and having to deal with what I might find there.
“Want a drink?”she asks me.
“No thanks. I don’t drink.”
“Why aren’t you drinking?”
“I don’t feel like drinking.”
“You have to drink! I’m going to get you a drink. Wait, I have to the bathroom. Wait right here.”
I get the hell out of there.
Unfortunately, the night is still young. The remaining agonizing hours I spend sober, unable to think of anything good that could come from insobriety in this circumstance, sitting in a beach chair in the courtyard, eating sausage franks on a toothpick, drifting in and out of conversations, looking at the flowers growing around the high-walled perimeter, wondering why the cockroaches are in such a hurry, looking into the sky and smelling the sea air.
The last hour and a half the party has entered fallout stage in a big way, the sound of sobbing and wailing from inside overwhelming the sound of vomiting outside. I go inside to sit in another peripheral vantage point. There is at least one man effeminately comforting each yet more effeminate sobbing man and sometimes the comforter starts sobbing himself, runs off into another room to be comforted by some other man who isn’t me. The only thing I can understand between mucousy gasps and heaves is “I’m so stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Oh my God!”
“No, Jeffrey, listen. Listen. Listen to me. You’re not stupid. Jeffrey. No! You’re not.”
I decide I am doing exactly what I should be, calmly sitting in a chair and contributing to an atmosphere of sanity, having decided against a thumbs-up and a “great party” to the sobbing host. I’m fatally bored and tired, but pretty satisfied, glad to have gotten the Ecuadorian gay beach party out of the way, and even gladder that things never turn out how one imagines.
Tags: Ecuador, Travel
Aaron Baldassare