Ranting Details

Missoula Spotlight: AmVets

There is a dungeon in downtown Missoula and it goes by the name of AmVets.   By definition, a dungeon is a labyrinthine subterranean setting, but to define it in such grandiose terms is to give it false representation.  There is nothing remotely grand about Missoula’s only gay bar. 

Even though, as the name suggests, it was intended to be a bar for American Veterans, AmVets has turned into a smorgasbord of small town gay culture that is truly one of a kind.  Situated between a few bars that have been deemed “hick” establishments, the entrance to AmVets looks more like an abandoned hut than a welcoming nightclub.  The wooden enclosure is a gateway to a rock staircase that looks jack hammered and unfinished and is usually scattered with smokers out for a quick puff in the frigid winter air. 

The bar scene has been the last place on my mind over the past ten months, but when Blaine and David showed up in Missoula, I knew that I would have to make an exception.  Being sober in AmVets presented it in an even scarier light than through drunk-goggles, so my two trips opened up my eyes in new ways. 

Once you pass through the rickety wooden door, you are met by a bouncer who scans ID’s with the commitment of a supermarket attendant.  His lackadaisical nature is made evident by the abundance of underage patrons who float around the cavernous space. 

Both Blaine and David were immediately overwhelmed by the enormity of the bar, which has no natural light and is big enough that it could exist in a hollowed out mountain.  Upon entering, there is a bar that offers Jello shots, Jaeger on tap, and cheap drinks served in plastic cups.  Just beyond that is a collection of pool tables and if you step a little further you reach the dance floor, which plays a variety of top-40 pop. 

It’s on the dance floor that the diversity of the crowd becomes apparent.  Grinding against one pole you’ll find a lesbian couple dressed in overalls that are in no way an ironic fashion statement.  Next to them you’ll see a leather daddy with a handle bar mustache observing the toothless men smoking continuous cigarettes.  Every now and then a drag queen will make her rounds, cavorting with the crowd with an explosion of hair topping off a rainbow colored gown.  Peppered between these icons of gay Montana are the college students with popped collars and beaded necklaces straight out of 1997. 

(Jes and Blaine tear it up on the dance floor.)

Since I first discovered AmVets at eighteen, I’ve often wondered where these men and women are during the day.  The diverse crowd meets only in the way that they party with such ferocity.  Even though Missoula is a liberal college town, it’s not uncommon to be given dirty looks, get mocked, or at times even assaulted because of ones sexual preference.  It’s a town that prides itself on being diverse and accepting, but one whose actions sometimes overwhelm its intentions.  The suppressed nature of homosexuality in Missoula has only a few outlets where pretenses are disrobed, and the main one is AmVets. 

To me and my friends from New York, it can seem like a very uncomfortable experience.  Whereas we are free to be ourselves, sexuality and all, in our everyday lives, in Montana it’s still legal to be fired for sexual preference.  Once ten o’ clock rolls around, the bar becomes scattered with people who are free to be themselves for a while. 

Due to my sober lifestyle at the moment, I took the time during my past two trips to observe the crowd as much as possible.  If I ever become a documentary filmmaker, AmVets will be one of my first subjects.   It’s a fascinating study in gay culture on the brink of acceptance and the freedom that an overtaken bar can possess; it’s a genuine Montana experience.

(Blaine joins me at my observation post.)

The Power of Nostalgia

DISCLAIMER:  The fast is in full swing, and my brain is a bit foggy today.  If the posts over the next few days are erratic, it's the lemonade speaking...

“I went to Hellgate.”

For anyone not familiar with Montana, that is a startling sentence.  It doesn’t reference a trip down the river Styx to play fetch with Cerberus, the three-headed dog, but instead refers to a middle, and high school that people attend in Missoula.  I have yet to hear anyone’s Middle School top that, but I’m sure something as ludicrous must be out there. 

From second grade until I left for High School, I attended Hellgate, while most of my closest friends fell into the much tamer “Washington” district.  Somehow, I still managed to create a fairly substantial group of cohorts at Hellgate.  Wearing bootleg jeans, and appearing on the cover of the Entertainment section of our newspaper in white tights didn’t do wonders for my reputation, yet compared to other gay friends of mine, nothing about my middle school years seemed especially hellacious, except the name. 

Over the past few weeks, I’ve run into five of my classmates from my middle school days and am amazed at the type of reactions it prompts in me.  I feel more alienated from them now, and look at them with a sense of wonderment that was absent during my initial friendships with most of them.  There’s a feeling of nostalgia that rises up whenever a face from my past pops up in a coffee shop or restaurant, and part of me wonders if I could ever have a substantial friendship with any of them today.   

Other than Facebook, I don’t keep in touch with the people that populated my school days here in Missoula. Through social networking sites, I’m able to see that some of them still interact with each other, most of them list their political views as “Very Conservative,” and “hunting” is a common interest.   Most of the contact I’ve had with them in the past nine years is through online communication, and that has been sparse at best. 

Because of the type of alienation that comes with being a gay adolescent, I find that it’s common for gay adults to share stories of their tumultuous upbringings.  While I certainly remember uncomfortable moments, for the most part they weren’t that far away from what the straight kids went through; I never got called “faggot” until I was almost out of my teen years. 

In eighth grade, girlfriends were more of an obligation for me than other kids, I was about as good at throwing a football as I was at building a rocket, and I kept my dancing a closely guarded secret.   Somehow through all of this I maintained a close group of friends who were jocks and cheerleaders.  My recesses were spent alternating between running around on the field praying the ball wasn’t coming my direction, and watching from the sidelines while I huddled with the onlookers (i.e. girls).  Even though much of my behavior welcomed ridicule, and my sexuality (while I wasn’t quite aware of it) was about as obvious as the fact that Missoula is surrounded by mountains, my friends chose to overlook it. 

It wasn’t until I reached Hellgate Middle School that I ever felt the need to be anything but myself.  Sexuality wasn’t something that fourth graders were concerned with in my days, and I had plenty of other things for which to be ridiculed (X-Men trading cards, Pogs obsession, the list goes on…).   Fortunately, most of my friendships were built through grade school, and I did a good enough job at masking any sense of being uncomfortable. 

That ability has dwindled in the past years as I’ve grown up and become more comfortable with my sexuality.  Every time I come to Montana I tend to be hyper aware of the way I am acting, as Montana isn’t the bluest of states (even though it happens to be blue right now).  That being said, the way I act doesn't change.  Seeing kids from my past reminds me that even though I wasn’t teased much, it was still one of the few times in my life where I wasn’t comfortable being myself. 

It all makes me wonder how much power nostalgia has?  Would the boys who were once able to overlook my sexuality be able to do the same now?  Even though I see my homosexuality as resting far down the list of defining characteristics of my personality, it seems that to outsiders in Montana it’s often a trait that trumps all others. 

"In A Galaxy Far, Far, Away..."

My pile of writing projects outside of the blog has been a bit overwhelming for the past few days.  Even though I didn't have to attend class last night, several papers for school have been keeping me mighty busy.  This week we were given essays on two subjects that I love: the first was about the incredible author Jonathan Franzen and the second was about....me. 

Each week we have little writing exercises and this week's assignment was to discuss something you used as a form of escape in your childhood.  After reading Jonathan Franzen's essay about his love of the "Peanuts" comics, I immediately settled on my topic.  The only thing that separates this entry from any of my other blog posts all about myself is that I had to incorporate some minor research.  So here is my paper, in all its rough glory! 

The first Target store in Montana opened its doors on my eighth birthday.  This event goes almost unparalleled in my canon of birthday memories from my childhood.  Forgoing the typical party and cake extravaganza, my mom promised me that we would tromp through the store and I’d be able to fill the basket with several choice items lining the toy aisle.  Nothing excited me more and I mark that day as the moment the comfort of the red and white aisles of Target took a hold of me. 

From that day forward I would eagerly await the weekly trip to Tarjaay (a pronunciation I believed to be a secret language of my mothers and I; you can imagine how crushed I was to find out the commonness of this mock French accent.)  Entering the red automatic doors at the front of the store was like a gun going off to start a race.  I’d walk as quickly as possible (running didn’t seem polite) to the action figure aisle and rest my eyes on the shelves stocked with “Star Wars” memorabilia.  In under a minute I could search through each pile and discover which characters would be new and welcome additions to my collection.  I don’t think my mother realized what a simple birthday shopping spree would do to her son; I had discovered how to escape into a galaxy far, far, away. 

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one.  When George Lucas created the movies in 1977 he was smart enough to secure the rights to all of the merchandising tie-ins.  “Before Luke, Leia, Han and the short furry zen-meister took to the big screen, toys tied to movies were few and far between.”  A world without movie-tie-in products was a completely unfathomable idea to me when I was eight.  All of the toys I owned were in the likenesses of the characters I saw on screen.  It’s no surprise, seeing that Lucas’ idea has earned him over “8 billion in global sales in 100 different countries” that others quickly followed suit. 

What my mother, and Lucas, could never have predicted was how much this new escape brought out the OCD side of me.  After I’d frantically plowed through the toy aisle, I would realize that other boys my age had done exactly the same, leaving the aisle looking like a tornado had stormed through it.  Rather than take my prizes and run like everyone else, I spent time organizing and cleaning up the aisles while my mother browsed duvet covers and blenders.   

This strange, methodical ritual had its advantages; the women working in the toy department quickly took notice of the little gay boy that could.  Within a few weeks I had gained access the stock room to slice open boxes of the newest shipments of 4-inch figurines.  “Star Wars” mania was at the peak of its resurgence in the toy world and rather than claw my way to a Princess Leia with the other, dirtier, boys, I enjoyed my preferential treatment. 

It’s no surprise that a science fiction movie captured my attention so undividedly; the very appeal of these movies is how far removed they are from the world we live in.  “Star Wars” is “arguably the reason that science fiction moved out of the sub-culture and into the mainstream.”  Whether people are a fan of it, or despise it, it has a special place in everyone’s life.  To this day I can still sit down with other adults and see a fire lit inside of them the moment “Star Wars” toys come up.

Somehow I’m always convinced I can beat others in terms of merchandise acquired.  The aisles of Target and the flood of “Star Wars” merchandising that began to clutter my room bled into other aspects of my life as well.  I found the stories so exciting that they began to inspire much of my young artistic life.  While most kids in Montana were outside riding bears and dancing with deer, I was in my basement choreographing a one man “Star Wars” ballet.  It’s a wonder that I’ve even become remotely socially capable as a young adult.  When I was a child I never remember feeling like an outsider, but it’s clear now to me that “Star Wars” was a comfort because it protected me from the real world.  In a land full of aliens, space fights, and slave women in gold bras attached to giant slugs, I was utterly normal. 

The toys I collected on my various trips to Target allowed me to act out all of my wildest dreams and develop my storytelling skills.  Of course, there was the occasional moment where the OCD would overtake me at home.  A Luke Skywalker figurine that began his life in a pleasant off-white robe would slowly start to change color as my hours of playtime dirtied him.  Panic overtook me and I’d rush downstairs to have my parents calm my psychotic fears. 

Toy industry insiders claim that “Star Wars” established that you could make buckets of money off of kids.  If my parents could, they would probably go back to 1977 and plead with George Lucas to leave his movies as movies and forgo his marketing empire.  I, however, wouldn’t change it for the world.  To this day I can’t enter a Target without a flood of memories and there is rarely a visit where I still don’t head to the toy section first.  Even though my “Star Wars” ballet will forever stay in my basement, the memories created by my escape into Lucas’ world will remain out in the open.