Shrug Tuesday

I just finished a very sedate, solo pub crawl along Oxford Street, my first real venture out since my health-induced hermitage a few weeks ago.

I deliberately picked an early Tuesday night – always quiet – to ensure a jostle-free experience. Still, I didn’t expect to walk into my local, the Oxford Hotel (normally full of facial hair and functioning alcoholics), to find a woman clearly in her encore years belting out ‘Where the Boys Are’. (I later discover she is Sylvana. Your guess is as good as mine.)
Disconcerting but a nice change of pace.

A mother-and-son couple sat down at the table next to me on the deck and I overheard her say, with surprised delight, ‘It’s so different, I thought it was a leather bar!’ I mentally tried to jot down more of their happy chat but then a many-times-removed ‘friend’ sat down and promptly tried to nick my beer.
I let him have it (literally) and headed on.
The Stonewall Hotel across the road looked even more unappetising than usual and by the time I got to the Colombian Hotel several doors down I really needed to take a piss.
I haven’t been in there in ages – hasn’t changed but still holds up – and noticed a high proportion of very (too?) good-looking queens in just-so T-shirts. Lots of surveillance.
Visited the bathroom – good to see they haven’t painted over the patron graffiti – saw a sideways baseball cap I couldn’t tell was ironic or not and went further down the street to the Midnight Shift, which is like the mothership of Sydney gay bars, having been there so long.

Like everywhere, it was a glass-half-empty affair. Actually, more a glass-I’m-leaving-almost-empty-so-you’ll-buy-me-another affair.

In any case, I love the Shift because it attracts older blokes and all-sorts, including Pepper Stevens, who needs her own post (later). Not to mention Asian pool sharks; one walked in with his own cue, which I think is the height of some form of cool at least. I overheard another, when some guy tried to chat him up by saying he must practise a lot, reply deadpan: ‘You don’t need to practise here.’

SIDENOTES:

During that early awkward period when you’re sitting on your own in a (just quietly) bleak gay bar, you need reading material. It doesn’t help that all on offer is LOTL (Lesbians on the Loose).

When you furnish a bar with a long stretch of cushioned seating, maybe you should place your video screens somewhere other than directly above the heads of the patrons sitting there.

It's a good thing to get rid of a see-through, Romeo+Juliet-style fishtank in the men's bathroom.

The Midnight Shift should hold a seminar (perhaps a Powerpoint presentation) for the Oxford Hotel on how to synchronise sound and visuals on those omnipresent TV screens. Surely this can’t be that hard.

I saw two groups of Japanese tourists being herded into mini-buses directly outside the Shift - after they'd been given adequate opportunity to gawk, giggle, point, desperately finish their ciggie then chuck it onto the street - before being whisked away.

The new gay Sydney tour?