In response to Cheryl's hilarious story about Frank's dad in a panic over his hair being pink, I thought this one might be interesting too:

Remember the late 70's - early 80's? Do you? Remember how things shifted the further away from the city you got?

I took one of my first field trips in late '79 with a friend. We went on Bart to Concord to check out this leather shop where they were supposed to have wrist bands and studs and things which weren't "cock rings" (we were slightly homophobic ourselves in those days.)

We stepped out of the station into Condordland, and found ourselves in bright sunlight with out heavy jackets (his leather, mine rubber) neon yellow pants, a magenta t-shirt, huge cowboy boots draped in dog chains, and my brown matted vaseline hair stiicking up everywhere.

Smelled like trouble.

"Hey faggot!" we hear from behind us.

Well, we were thinking lowriders, gang members, wife beater wearing guys with chains in hair nets, something frightening. But when we turned around to see who was shouting at us we found a grown man, maybe 30, in tight jeans, a skin tight v-neck shirt, a big huge chrome belt buckle, cop sun glasses, close cropped hair, and a massive handle bar moustache.

"faggot?" I said.

"Yeah! You little faggots!" he shouted. "Go back to Faggot-land!"

We laughed. But we did, indeed, get back on the Bart train and forgot all about the non cock-ring variety of leather wrist bands.

Thing is, that guy looked like the lead singer from the Village People. He looked like FreddyMercury's cousin. He looked like all the nice men who were taking such good care of me on Polk street back then. Who was this man, this man wearing the costume of a weekend top, looking for love? Why was he shouting "Faggot" at us?

We were very confused.

In hind sigh, I think he was just jealous, and felt that our presence in Concord, land of the hard, the muscle car, permenant home of Foreigner's fan club, we were some how outing him, threatening to expose his look.

I know people have a lot of persona problems, and often sexual identity is one on the hardest to come to terms with. I've had my own issues with this, and can understand. But something I'll never really be able to get my head around is the image of this full grown man dressed like a biker queen yelling "Faggot" at me and Mike in the 90 degree Concord sun.

This was the first time I noticed this irony, and we talked about it in our early teen-age way, but there was more. Lots more. Whenever I heard "Faggot" shouted at me from behind over the following years, it was almost always from the mouth of a cop with a huge moustache, some guy in skin tight jeans presenting his package (I suppose he imagined) to the ladies, or a young, confused boy who probably wanted to caress my face sweetly, and share his innermost expression of himself with me.

I liked punk better when we were walking challenges to people's bullshit.

What's your faggot story?