by Ethan Johnson
August 26, 2000

"Son, I like my beer cold, my music loud, and my homosexuals flaaaaaaming!" -Homer J. Simpson

This past Saturday Mar and I went to Lucky's Diner for breakfast. The place was crowded, the wait for a table was about 15 minutes, and there were quite a few people squeezed into various nooks and crannies waiting to be seated without being "in the way".

We stood next to a circle of five guys all talking about different things, including the Jennifer Lopez movie The Cell, which Mar and I had decided that we wanted to see. One of the guys was busy trying to ruin the movie for me (inadvertently) and I was busy tuning them out so that the movie wouldn't be a total bust. Finally, Mar broke my concentration and whispered in my ear, "I'm so glad you're a heterosexual male."

"Why?" I asked.

She said, "Because we're practically surrounded by gay men! Haven't you noticed?"

Truth be told, I hadn't. First of all, it was too early in the morning for "noticing" much of anything. Second, Goofus next to me was spoiling the movie I wanted to go see, so I was doing my damndest to not pay any attention to the crowd next to me (let alone the rest of the restaurant), and third, I'm just oblivious to stuff like that.

Mar's comment caused me to notice all sorts of things. Those guys were gay! And there was graffiti on one of the walls in the restaurant, with pro-gay and lesbian messages! There were collection jars for AIDS research! Every table had same-sex patrons! They could have been brothers, or fathers and sons, but now, they fell into the "gay" department. Every touch, every stare, every innocuous comment was immediately deemed gay, gay, GAY!

So we sat down at our table, and were greeted by our gay waiter. Mar ordered orange juice. I ordered Coke (straight-up). Mar took a sip of her juice, and offered me some. I took a sip, and looked at the red tumbler with orange juice sloshing gently around. The juice seemed different somehow. This juice could have been served at the most "regular" of restaurants, and I wouldn't have batted an eyelash. But now, somehow this seemingly innocent juice was the "gay elixir", made in black cauldrons by gay minions of the Gay Empire.

Which is ridiculous and irrational, of course.

Now just a few days before we went to Lucky's (which has damn fine breakfast, by the way, and it was pretty reasonable for a whole lotta food), I was struck with the thought that one of my co-workers might be gay. Nothing screamed "not straight" to me necessarily, but something seemed, well, different. Then I thought, "so what? So what if he IS gay, or isn't, or whatever floats his boat? What does that have to do with anything, least of all our work relationship?" So I patted myself on the back for being so "enlightened".

But that's the problem, I suppose. I've never had any gay friends, and since I'm so phenomenally oblivious (really), everyone who was gay in my midst went unnoticed until one day they were gone, and I found out after the fact that "so-and-so is gay." But just like eating a mysterious food foisted off on you by neighborhood pranksters that actually tastes good, even when you find out that it was [insert gross-out food item here], so it goes with gay people I have known. They were either fun to be around or colossal jerks, but their sexual orientation had nothing to do with making that determination of their character.

And even now as I write this article (sure to offend millions), I've begun to digest the whole Diner experience and I'm thinking, so what if every man, woman, and even child in that place was gay (except me and Mar)? Was the food "different" because there were gay people in the building? Was the service any better or worse than any restaurant we'd normally eat at? Was the atmosphere so oppressive and smothering with gay and lesbian ideologies that I wanted to convert to some far-out religion that persecutes people who are different than they are?

Well, the fact is, I'd have to honestly answer "no" to all of the above. If anything, even being the poster-boy for "straightness", I felt a sort of pride that gays and lesbians could go to a place like Lucky's and hang out, and nobody makes a big deal about it. I felt for a brief shining moment that maybe widespread acceptance of the gay and lesbian "lifestyle" isn't such a pipe-dream after all, and for once people might understand that the only difference between us is sexual orientation, and little more.

And as I told Mar when we drove away from the Diner, I found it easy at first to make "dangerous" assumptions that every group of men or of women that sat together were gay, purely by association. But there was only one safe bet about Lucky's Diner: everyone who walked in the front door was hungry. Why else would you frequent a diner that makes omelettes using SIX eggs? <EM>