Well, if you ever wanted to see what Boystown would look like in a zombie movie, with the streets deserted, everything dark and creepy, a forbidding rain washing all the colors out, and hapless, random oddballs wandering about in search of food, welcome to Christmas Eve 2009.

The lot of us spent most of Christmas Eve volunteering, as our present to our departed friend Lionel, who made volunteerism priority numero uno in his life (with the random insertion of Spanish words into otherwise English sentences his second great love). Lionel passed away from prostate cancer (or, “prostrate cancer”, as our friend Panda insists it’s called, “since it’s so bad it leaves you prostrate, that’s why they call it that, guys. Stop laughing at me”) this past summer, and we made a promise to him that we’d keep as much of his projects going as we could, for as long as we possibly could.  He had a list of people living with HIV/AIDS for which he cleaned their apartments, ran their errands, and made sure they had ample holiday cheer.

So, bright and early, we left Buzzquarters, eventually managed to wake Panda (“It’s so damn early! Why do we have to get up so early on CHRISTMAS?  What are we, elves?  Oh, Hell to the No, I am not wearing no elf hat, you bitches are CRAZY”), and made our rounds, dressed up as the oddest assorted of elves Boystown has probably ever seen.  Sebastian found a green, ruffle-fronted tuxedo shirt from Ragstock a while back, which he wears at both Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day events (or, as he notes, “anytime anything hideous and green is required”); he rocked that shirt, with a little Peter Pan hat he decorated with a sprig of holly, which Panda kept insisting was mistletoe (“You think everything’s mistletoe, Panda.  That’s ’cause you’re lonely”). Robby went the reindeer route, with a brown velvet tracksuit with big foam antlers he bought at Hollywood Mirror on Belmont at Halsted.  Joaquin was Frosty, wearing essentially his White Party club attire, but with big black buttons on his vest and a black top hat with a carrot tied to a string around his neck that he never could get to stay attached to his face.  Panda wore a hideous Christmas sweater (“Hey, I knitted this last winter when I got food poisoning from all those bad scrimps I ate at that party I can’t remember, and I think it looks nice.  It’s not hideous, it’s my Christmas sweater, and you bitches are just jealous I didn’t make you one, up in here”).  Seriously, it was an ugly sweater.  But, in Boystown tradition, the uglier the holiday sweater, the better at Christmas (kind of like how bad still = good and “hot tranny mess” is a weird kind of compliment).

“I hate cleaning and I hate Lionel’s ghost for making me do this,” Panda griped, actually spraying more pine-scented air freshener into the air in big, Olympics ice skater grade swirls than really cleaning.  “Lionel’s ghost” didn’t make us do anything, we reminded him, for the hundredth time.  We’ve always believed that volunteering and helping someone out at Christmas is something everyone out there should do, instead of just focusing on giving and receiving gifts bought from stores.  Our friend Lionel just happened to blow everyone we’ve ever met out of the water in terms of what he could accomplish in a day, so on particular days, like Christmas, the guy left some pretty big elf shoes to fill (which, realize is a kind of oxymoron if taken literally, but we assume you know what we mean).

Nobody especially likes to clean, not even Martha Stewart, as much as she insists otherwise on TV.  People especially don’t want to clean when they are sick, if they’re even able of doing something like that.  Our friend Joe in Philly, who has HIV, couldn’t come to Chicago this Christmas as planned because he was too sick to travel; he wasn’t able to leave his house for several days because of the cold and wind, and knew his stomach would never let him get aboard a plane and sit still for the hours it would take to get here.  We reminded Panda, and ourselves, that no everyone’s so lucky at Christmas.  Some people’s bodies give out on them, and they’re left behind on holidays when so many others are out having fun, living it up, dazzled under all the colorful lights and spectacle.

Lionel made sure everyone on his list had a clean home at Christmas, got at least one little present, and had some holiday food to nosh on.  We took his list, checked it twice, didn’t care who was naughty or nice, and made sure nobody was left behind in 2009 either.  Someday, when it comes to it, we hope and pray someone in Philly takes care of Joe like that, if we aren’t able to be there for him ourselves.

We know you see a “Christmas in Boystown” recap and expect to hear nonstop tales of fun and frivolity, so we don’t mean to be downers (“Or Blitzens”, Panda insists we add), but it’s really important to us to keep urging you to make volunteerism part of your holidays, in whatever way you can.  If you are headed to a big family party where there will be plenty of food and room for merriment, is it too big of a favor to ask you to check with your neighbors on either saide, especially if they are elderly, and ask them if they want to come too?  Is it really too hard to knock on the doors on the floor of your building to make sure everyone who wants to go to a Christmas party has a party to go to?  Can’t you think of one person you know who doesn’t have family, or whose family doesn’t accept them, and can’t you maybe ask them to tag along on your holiday adventures?

Who knows what the future holds for any of us, but mark our words, so long as there’s breath in our bodies and we’ve the ability to put on ridiculous costumes and go out into the cold to make sure Christmas stops by every house we know of in Boystown, you better believe we’re going to keep Lionel’s spirit alive by being as ridiculously Christmas-y as possible year after year. We’ve be thrilled if some of you started putting a little bit of Boystown into your own towns, too, wherever they may be.  Costumes help, but the real magic comes from the heart, and from angels like Lionel who will always inspire us.

So, after a fairly long day tuckering ourselves out like this, we realized pretty much every store had closed by three o’clock Christmas Eve, and found ourselves at the corner of Halsted and Roscoe staring at a pretty much deserted Boystown.  Pie Hole, our favorite pizza shop, was closed, and we were disappointed because we wanted more than anything to order up a big “Christmas Pizza” from them:  BBQ sauce, sweet potatoes, marshmallows, and cinnamon.  Pie Hole’s all decked out for the holidays, with tinsel and multi-colored lights decorating all the exposed pipes and industrial accents in the place, with little red and white trees huddled in forests here and there atop the display cases and counters.  But, none of that helps us very much when it’s closed, and we’re hungry on a holiday.

Looking up and down the street, we saw Nookie’s Tree, our favorite diner (even if we don’t especially care for all the staff) also dark, with Halsted’s and the other restaurants on the street we like shuttered too.  If it was snowing, it would have felt like that scene in “It’s A Wonderful Life” where George Bailey ran down the street shouting “Merry Christmas, Bijou Theater!  Merry Christmas Drug Store! Merry Christmas house where the crazy person lives!”.  We stood in the middle of the street, empty of traffic, thinking, “Merry Christmas, Roscoes’ wooden Indian in the window!  Merry Christmas, Beatniks’ awesome window displays of Christmas costumes that inspired our very own Christmas costumes!  Merry Christmas, Batteries Not Include and Lee Kay’s latest awesome Hannakhah window decorations!”.  Most of us, of course, only thought these things, but Panda actually shouted them.  “What, there’s totally no one out here.  No one can hear me.  Why I gotta be all quiet all the time anyway?:

The only thing open in Boystown was Mark’s Chop Suey restaurant, sandwiched between Sidetrack’s and the den of pretension that is MiniBar (where a certain young Congressman from Peoria likes to hang out showing everyone how not-gay he is.  “You’re talking about Aaron Schock, right? ‘Cause everyone already knows that, geesh”). Chinese food on Christmas Eve is actually, surprisingly enough, a tradition in almost all of our childhoods:  maybe it’s because our families always forgot everything closed early that day, except Chinese restaurants.  “Oooh, let me at that orange chicken,” Panda purred, shoving his way through the door like Oprah after, well, orange chicken.  Robby had a yen for some General Tsao, while Sebastian wanted pepper steak and Joaquin had no idea what was going on because he was texting somebody about some after-party later that night. Which is all he does, mostly.

The restaurant was packed, with equal parts people who looked like they wanted to kill themselves because they didn’t have families who wanted them around for the holidays, and people who were thrilled to not be anywhere near their families at Christmas.  We were a weird medium of the two, with some of us coming from places where our families still don’t accept we’re gay and don’t want us around “until this phase is over” and those of us who don’t really have anyone else in the world, except ourselves, and all of our friends.  Robby is, of course, the exception, since his mom, Patricia, puts Debbie Novotny to shame and is the very embodiment of the best there is in PFLAG.  Sebastian’s parents haven’t spoken to him in years, and his mother tells everyone back in Cleveland he has a new fiance every year, with that girl eventually having to “move away for business”, to somewhere obscure and exotic, so a new “relationship” can be conjured in his mother’s imagination for him.  Joaquin’s parents just don’t acknowledge he’s gay, and instead call his boyfriends’ his “roommates”.  “They totally aren’t stupid or anything, and they know what’s up, but they make me not talk about it, even though my brother is gay too and is in the Marines and is a big nelly queen, but he’s a Marine, so nobody says anything and pretends he’s straight too.  My dad’s a big alkie and my mom’s diabetic but drinks Pepsi all day, so it’s pretty much set on “denial” at my house 24/7″.

Panda’s parents are both deceased, with his mom being PFLAG to the end and his dad passing on before he ever came out.  With no brothers and sisters, Panda gets the saddest at the holidays, so we make sure to drag his ugly sweatered butt around with us on holiday adventures whether he likes it or not.  “Even if it means making me clean,” Panda snipes.  “Especially if it means making you clean,” Robby notes.  Though, as we’ve said, “cleaning” to Panda means just spraying pine-freshener into the air and collapsing on a stranger’s couch to eat their Christmas cookies.

At dinner, the holiday mood was broken by a big, muscled black man in the corner, sitting at a table with several other black people, complaining about how racism ruins his life and holds him down every day of the year.  He was rude to the Chinese waitress, and pretended he couldn’t understand her when she spoke (more clearly than Panda, we note). Whatever he does, he must be in some kind of union, because he went on and on about stewards, and how they were always trying to screw  him over, and gave all the best shifts to “Indians and Filipinos, who think they white, but they ain’t white”.  Literally, we took notes as he spoke to get quotes right because we’re well aware we’ll get hatemail for reporting what black people actually say in public to perpetuate the delusions of racism forever dancing through their heads.  As our food was ordered, served, eaten, and cleared away, this man spent the better part of an hour in a diatribe against Haitians, in particular, “for being black but actin’ all white”.  He was upset, apparently, that a Haitian was promoted to supervisor instead of him, since “that damn Haitian only got one pair of pants and two shirts, and he be wearing them all the time, and they made him boss and told me to go f*** myself ’cause I ain’t act white enough.  Well, I gots more than one pairs of pants and I gots a whole closet of shirts, so f*** them, acting all white”.

It was surreal.

At more than one point, Sebastian wanted to get up and tell this grievance-monger to put a sock in it so everyone could enjoy their meal, but Robby stopped him because “we didn’t need another Sebastian Gray bar fight or mugging at Christmas”, as entertaining as they admittedly are.  This eludes to the fact that last Christmas Sebastian got mugged in New York while stopping off to get wine to take to Robby’s sister Ann-Louise’s Christmas Eve party.  Three big black men knocked him down, stole his phone, video camera, digital camera, wallet, money, and “those bastards even took the wine!”.  The year before that, on Christmas Eve in some random bar in Iowa, one of the current president’s supporters took a swing at Sebastian after calling him a racist for supporting Hillary Clinton over Dr. Utopia.  So, the guy’s not had a very good run on Christmases the last few years.

We finished our meal at Mark’s, and the black man was still ranting and raving about everyone being against him because he’s black, never once realizing he’s not being promoted, possibly, because he’s a bad worker with a worse attitude.  Sebastian wanted to tell him this, but it was his Christmas gift to us that he held his tongue and we left the place in peace, with no one beaten or mugged by grievance-mongers and none of us ending up on the evening news in any way, shape or form.

We went to Sidetrack’s next, which is our favorite bar in Boystown.  It’s also the largest gay bar in North America, and was recently ranked the fourth best gay bar in the world by Logo and MTV. The owners Art, Pepe, and Chuck are great, and remain strong supporters of the LGBTQ community, particulary through Equality Illinois which tries, unsuccessfully, to grant equal rights to lesbians and gays in this supposedly rock-solid blue state (because Democrats take such good care of the gay community). Sidetrack’s once dumped a distributor of liquor because that company refused to give to HIV/AIDS charities; they used to sell a drink called the Absolut Krush made with Absolut Kurrant, so popular that Sidetracks became the number one retailer of Absolut Kurrant in the world.  But, the distributor bawlked at matching Art’s donations to charity, so Art bawlked at renewing their contact, and went with a distributor for Kettle One instead, making Kettle One Kurrant the biggest selling kurrant liquor in the world.

On Christmas Eve, we had the bartender Aimee pull red-and-green layered frozen drinks for us, so they’d be Christmas striped concoctions to walk around with in big glass mugs (she also mixes up the best peppermint-chocolate martinis in town, which are also holiday-tinged, and guaranteeed to knock Panda on his butt.  Lightweight).

Thursday nights at Sidetrack’s are comedy nights, where the VJs spin little clips from various old shows, on Christmas Eve having an appropriately Christmas-themed lineup.  There were lots of holiday episodes of America’s Funniest Home Videos, clips from Will & Grace, Friends, Mamma’s Family, Golden Girls, and other sitcoms with holiday specials.  Here and there, some great holiday music was slipped in, too, which was fun.  All around the bar, Sidetrack’s had the most interesting holiday flowers, too, which Joaquin noticed.  No poinsettias in sight, though.  Instead, these were weird, Seussian, twirling plants that looked like miniature Christmas trees, but at the bottoms of each plant there were small red flowers, unopened, that looked like something from another planet.  In the little silver boxes the plants lived in, small white flowers that looked like miniature Audrey IIs grouped at the base of the Seussian swirls, with little twigs and sticks giving it a wintery feel.  They were so elegant, simple, and beautiful, complimenting the cheery, understated holiday decorations throughout the cavernous bar. They also reminded us, simultaneously, of the artificial prehistoric plants sprinkled about in the diaramas of old natural history museums in the Midwest.

Most of the patrons of Sidetrack’s wore red and green of some kind, with people falling along a spectrum from outright Christmas costumes to just green shirts and red velvet jackets, or red shirts with green mohair jackets, and women in peppermint striped dresses of assorted lengths on their own spectrums (whose finery was all wasted on this crowd, if man-catching was on the agenda in addition to holiday spirit).

This, of course, being an evening with Sebastian in a bar, two separate “nationality experts” approached him, demanding to know “what ethnicity” he is and “where (his) family is from?”.  “I’m American, and my family is from Ohio,” Sebastian answered, for literally the millionth time, at least, since moving to Chicago five years ago.  For some reason, the racists and bigots of this city cannot control their urges to come running across a crowded cherry-paneled bar, festooned with holiday lights, to demand to know what Sebastian Gray “is”.  It’s, at this point, like something from Greek myths, where, for whatever reason, he’s pursued by these gadflies even on days reserved for glad-tidings and holiday merriment.  “They make me hate life, they really and truly do, these people.  I hate going out, I hate answering their f***ing questions, I hate that even on Christmas Eve I have to put up with these jacktards,” Sebastian said, to none of us in particular, nursing the last reddish-green layer in his holiday cocktail.  Panda, scrappy as always, especially after a few of those choco-peppermint-inis, told one of the “nationality experts” Sebastian’s from the North Pole, and that everyone at the North Pole thinks that nationality expert should just go and, well, you know Panda well enough to guess how he finished that. “Have some more Yule Log” is not it, we guarantee.

Of course, being Panda, towards the end of the night he wanted to go to the Lucky Horseshoe on Christmas Eve, because it’s just not a holiday without holiday-themed strippers.  Our friend Dash dances there, and he’d been on medical leave for a while, after having a car accident.  So, Dash missed being a blue and white Hannakhah stripper a few weeks ago, and somehow forgot his Naughty Elf costume on Christmas Eve, dancing in a little black speedo while the other guys were all decked out in red and green outfits, little elf hats, and strategically placed candy canes of all shapes and sizes. “I love Christmas,” Panda said more than once, as, oddly, “A Christmas Story” played up on the big screen behind the dancers.  That’s standard operating procedure for Lucky Horseshoe, to have random movies playing during the night that in no way feel like they belong in a gay strip club.  Sometimes, they play Real Housewives or Top Chef, too, which is even more bizarre.  Sebastian looked up at the screen at one point and said, “Oh, that’s the old Higbee’s Building in Cleveland,” where the movie was shot, including the scene where the main character goes to see Santa and ends up being pushed down a slide by some elves, not getting what he wanted.

No matter how far from home we ever get, both physically or emotionally, on the holidays Cleveland (and Pittsburgh, Rochester, San Antonio, and other “home towns”) always have a way of popping up unexpectedly like that, in the most bizarre places imaginable.

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