ROYAL RESIDENCE 23 = Including SF Fag Parade Coverage ================================================================= THE ROYAL RESIDENCE ================================================================= [ You can write to me at and not at the address at head of this post or letter. If you are receiving this article as email, please report technical problems to Bradley Chapman, Royal Male Man at . ] This is episode 23. WARNING: If you print this rant to share with the computer-impaired, use an old dot matrix printer you don't mind seeing melt -- and use asbestos sheet in place of paper. Sunday was the day of the San Francisco Gay, Lesbian & Transgender Pride Parade aka the June Freak Show. Aha! you say - - Da Kaween is full of self-hatred for being a faggot! Ergo, Da Kaween is probably also full of self-hatred for being a one- legged messed-up gimp. No, no and NO. First, I enjoy being a dicksmoker. I think being queer is often accompanied by a sensitivity for the ironic and a longing for fellowship not known in the majority of straight people. Second, I don't mind being one-legged, or having what is the minor inconvenience of managing diabetes. What gets to me is the bullshit which comes with it of having to contend with people who, when confronted with a wheelchair, act as though they left their brain in their other pants. I do get pissed at the peripheral nerve pain I sometimes have and the cataracts forming which are making it increasingly difficult for me to use Windoze-based programs. (I use an MS/DOS word processor to type this crap.) One of my loyal subjects takes issue with my forward stance as a gimp in public-- Hi Paul, I just read RR-22 and I have to tell you I'm uncomfortable with the first part. You are setting yourself up to be The Voice of the Disabled Community for a lot of tasteless people, and the thing is, you're not representing *my* viewpoint very well at all. It's easy to advise someone to be assertive, confrontational, blah blah blah. But the thing you may not be thinking of is, you appear to have a lot of energy. You're not trying to move an entire body with 1/8th of its total muscle groups. You can take a deep breath. You can cough unassisted. See, me and many other disabled people can't do those things and we simply don't have the energy to get into several battles every time we leave our doors. I for one have to pick my fights carefully becuase one big hassle will exhaust me, and if I have two I may have to struggle that evening to feed myself independently, or would be unable to do something relaxing or fun that evening. Do you see my point? Some of us want to reserve our severely limited energies for positive, enjoyable activities and we can't afford to spend it on curbcut hassles, etc. Also, some disabled people have spouses / partners / caregivers who don't want to witness (or be identified with by proximity) a nasty scene or three every time they go out to have a Good Time. Many of us are on relationship precipices and can't afford publicly embarrassing behaviors that make our companions shrink away even further. I would much prefer to see you advocating for the people reading the RR series to take a careful look at their surroundings when THEY go out and ask themselves: Could Pauless get in here? Are people wrongly using facilities designated for people with disabilities? And if the answers are unacceptable, then the TABs (temporarily able bodied) should go forth and make some complaints. That way it's not always ppl in wheelchairs whining about no access, it's an ambulatory patron saying his friend can't come here and spend $$$ and he may take his biznezz elsewhere. end of rant....... My loyal reader puts up with conditions I don't have to deal with. She is dead on that the TABs -- bipeds, I call them -- need to squawk, too. Whatever you guys do to promote easy access for us will make things easier for you as well. Why does there need to be one or two "decorative" steps in front of this or that portal when a ramp porch would have worked as well and would have served everyone? The proprietor, likely as not, will have to have watch-your-step signs and an insurance rider on his doorstep thang in case someone missteps and falls down because he or she expected the threshold to be level as they usually are. At San Francisco Shopping Centre, the doors on Market Street are without steps and are wide enough to admit even wide wheelchairs. The problem with them is that they are massive solid brass and glass and are difficult to handle from a sitting position. The doors on Fifth Street are the same but there is usually a security thrall there to open the door. On this side there are steps inside and a US$10,000 lift for wheelchairs. This is quite good and proper accessibility provided everything goes according to plan. It would have been cheaper and more direct to equip a pair of Market Street (level) doors with a blue handicapped button to trigger motors to open the doors. A couple blocks away the FAO Schwarz Toy Store's main floor is lower than the surrounding sidewalk. Bipeds walk down three steps inside. Gimps use a cleverly designed L-shaped ramp to the side. In the crook of the L is a pleasant merchandising area. The installation of this ramp took almost no sales space because it was done well. On the lower level of SF Centre, there is another expensive lift at the side of steps to the transit station. There is plenty of room for a folded ramp instead of this lift which my experience has shown to be unreliable. You budding architects need a gimp on your staff to opine on your accessibility schemes. Just because it says thus and so in the ADA doesn't mean it works. I called the June Freak Show office to find out whether they had a section set aside for gimps so that we could see the craziness unfettered. They did and said to go to Market and Sansome Streets by ten o'clock (an hour before start time) because the reservation list was full and they would fill in the no-show spots from a stand-by list. When we arrived at the gimp section, we found no one in charge much less calling names or confirming reservations. What we did find was that the potty line passed directly behind the gimp row. It was nice to have an audience of sorts. I got some compliments on my hat designed by Mr Cheez. He took a plain black baseball hat and sprayed it with glue and covered it with glitter. It was F A B U L O U S. What Imelda Marcos is to shoes, Jan Wahl, film critic for KRON-TV is to hats. She was in the parade in an open car and saw my hat glittering away in the sun. We waved at each other. To set off my hat I had attached a pair of miniature handcuffs and the one- inch jade penis which my detractors say was modeled from life. Around my neck I had a purple segmented chain and a chromium- plated bead chain with my silver pacifier dangling. I realize this paraphenalia gives a plethora of mixed signals. I'm versatile, so fuck me. I also noticed that the handicapped-accessible porta-potty was level with the ground. Here is a perfect example of an item built two ways depending upon whether you can crawl into a cramped little outhouse a foot off the ground or have to roll in. Why did these plastic shit houses ever have to be built up off the ground to begin with? -- it is conclusively proven they don't have to be. You bipeds may now begin to whine and bitch and march for universally-accessible turd temples. Go on! Get to it! The Eighth Wonder of the World is not the Luxor gambling parlor in Lost Wages but the ability of the SFPD to barricade both sides of two miles of Market Street continuously. We wonder where do these fences sit when they aren't in use. It must be a big warehouse. The gimp section didn't have barricades. I guess we were on our honor not to fire up our hand controls and charge a homely drag queen or try to catch a well-hung hunk. Electric wheelchairs are handy for your friends. A canvas sack on the back of my chair serves as a trunk [ boot ] for everybody else's stuffez. I carted two small folding stools for Mr Cheez and Mikey the Hettie to sit on. I also had a tin box of 150 cookies hung on back there. Party hearty! As we waited the hour before the official start of the parade, we noted several wags had climbed on top a bus shelter across the street to have a perfect view of the craziness. Another nearby group must not have gotten it out of their system completely at Club Universe because they had a boombox throbbing out disco. Disco is back. No fashionable fag can live without it -- again! We old queens got over it twenty years ago but the young bunnies have brought it back. Damn. Where are my earplugs...? There were at least a half dozen merchandise carts on the loose vending queer junques such as Cat-in-the-Hat style stovepipe hats in rainbow colors, two-foot plastic trumpets (they make an awful noise but they sure do work), and rainbow flags. One of the madly discoing dykes across the street had a multi-colored harlequin hat I could have killed her for. This parade always begins with the Dykes on Bikes. There were at least a hundred big-titted mamas on Harleys and such, often with their girlfriend riding along behind. Mikey the Hetties was there specifically to see the Dykes because some of them ride bare-chested and Mikey is a titty freak to end all titty freaks. He got his eyes full but should have stayed around for the women against breast cancer troupe. They came along the barricades shaking their cans for donations. The one who hustled us had the best pair of pink watermelons I have seen in years. Mr Cheez shut hus eyes for fear of being blinded by the sight. I was thinderstruck. Hell, I thought I had areolae and tittyballs. My charms are those of a four year-old compared to this mama with her five-gallon jugs, saucer areolae and fig-sized titties. Eeeeek. I saw my first female cop lieutenant. She was just a-bossin' all the fellas around. The cop assigned to our sector was Chinese and quite a cutie. Also hanging around nearby were a whiteboy and an exotic who appeared to be Mongol or Russian. Both Mr Cheez and I were considering what we might do to get a deep cavity search. I thought they weren't going to fence in us gimps but the Chinese cop finally came by with a roll of yellow tape and tied us up (I wish). One of the first bunches to show up after the Dykes on Bikes were the Mikes on Bikes. (I heard there was a group later on of lesbian golfers who called themselves Dykes on Spikes.) After these two groups we waited ten minutes for anything else. Some impatient souls across the street began chanting-- Two four six eight, We hate the fucking wait! Then here came three people with a banner saying they were the co-chairpersons of the parade committee. I wondered if they were three ruffians from the Tenderloin. They couldn't hold the banner straight (pardon the expression) and they were quite scruffy -- not the sort of image you'd think leaders of anything would want to set forth. I was wondering where was the grand marshall. Don't parades have a grand marshall? Where was Da Mayor? Did ole Fancy-pants take off for Hong Kong again? I mean, some of us might want to recall his powdered and plucked ass but this is not excuse for him to stiff the fag constituency. The A-Gays must like him at least even if he does nothing for us poor queens, not even send a form postcard when we write him a serious and respectful letter. Mikey had to remind me that Willie, Da Mayor, did something for all us poor people. He fixed the MUNI, the buses. It used to be that you could get a printed schedule book showing, for example, that the 27-Bryant came by Point Z at 10:27, 10:37, 10:47 and 10:57, etc. Da Mayor fixed that because they weren't doing it. He decreed the MUNI schedule will show, for example, the 27- Bryant runs every ten minutes. Gee, Willie, why is it Miss Kooky stands in the evening winds for 45 minutes chilling her girdle waiting on one? Meanwhile, back at the parade... By this time all sorts of bipeds and their spawn of Satan have infiltrated the gimp section, causing Mr Cheez and me to move further up against the tape. We had three fat obnoxious lesbians next to us who went into brainless jerk mode whenever a float came by with disco pounding. An hour into the parade proper the dykes were about three rainbow sheets to the wind from the Zema they were guzzling out of naked cans. Where is the fucking Chinese cop? Why isn't he hauling them away for public drunkenness and imbibing from an open container? Oh, I get it: The cops are there to stand around in clumps and be letched by the uniform queens. The day was saved (barely) by the scampering drag queens and mostly-naked hot men on the flatbed trucks and tired "cable cars" (take 'tired' any way you want). Everybody says the parade is too commercial. Shit, if it weren't for the troupes and the thrown-together "floats" sponsored by gay-owned/patronized businesses, the whole thing would degenerate into a political sideshow, chiefly for lesbian causes. The males still know how to have fun at this clambake but the lesbians are making it into a Mommy Dearest harangue with all their causes and their nastiness. Meanwhile, the Three Disgraces next to us are boogie-ing and hollering to the point where I am about deaf and Mr Cheez is about to be knocked off his seat. What is it with fat black womyn? Do they all get a Mexican jumping bean planted in their taco at birth so they can't ever sit or stand still? How do we get out of here? The space for the potty line doesn't exist. It's all been taken up by eight or ten-deep hordes of normals gawking. I have had to tell one rugrat three times to quit climbing on the back of my wheelchair. At least three dykes -- decent ones -- have insinuated themselves into sitting on the pavement in front of me so they can be First. I gave the dykes two seconds to get their munchable parts up off the floor cuz Da Kaween is blowing this popstand. I lifted the yellow ribbon and moved out. Mr Cheez yelled at me to wait for him. He put his seat and his leather jacket (on which he sat lest it grow legs and boogie off into the sunset) in the trunk and off we went looking for a break in the barricades. We had to go two blocks to find one. We never did connect with The Concubine who slaved her tits over a hot stove all week making chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies to sell at the parade. Theoretically, at least, Concubine sold the first half and made maybe US$150. We still have the other half of the warehouse on my chair. Mr Cheez bankrolled the Cookie Caper and was looking like a nervous banker who'd just let a mortgage for a trailer park. All the while there had been these scraggly-ass parade people running around looking officious in their wadded-looking yellow and purple teeshirts proclaiming themselves SAFETY CO-CHAIR or MEDICAL CO-CHAIR respectively. I implored Mr Cheez that if I had a heart attack, don't call the queens in purple. Oh, I get it: Everybody as co-boss. No wonder this parade sucked so bad; it was truly the product of a committee of committees! None of the officious queens, yellow or purple, could help us. They said go see the cops. The cops kept telling us to go farther. This is a dangerous thing to tell anyone at the annual freak show... Finally we found a break at Third Street and practically had to beg the coonlets to get out of the fucking way. Well, we were there an hour early for nothing, and we endured two hours of parade proper for not very much reward. It went on for two hours more. They said the spectator count this year was a cool half million. I wouldn't be surprised. Even if it totaled only half that, why did we have to be surrounded by the rudest people there? The Concubine never did come get the second half of the cookie inventory. As for Mr Cheez and me, we will hole up in the Royal Residence next year in front of the teevee and let Miss Gabbert, the queen who owns Channel 20, gush all about it as her cameras point and stare. We will drink exotic nectars and consume rare sweetmeats in royal comfort. No longer will we in some outmoded spirit of oneness and fellowship mix with the masses to cheer on the daring. We can truly say now we've been there and done that. Mr Cheez is donating the second half of the cookies to the activities lady here at the RR for distribution to the residents. It seems Concubine sold the first half and couldn't account for the proceeds. They should have grossed about $300 from this venture and Cheez should have recouped his grubstake for the ingredients at least. I think Concubine got with her street urchin girfrens and had a meth party. Concubine made up some lame story, got found out, and has been kicked out of the palace. Tony's Famous Cookies are history as is Tonnetta Concubine herself. It's a shame, really. Concubine and Mr Cheez had a great symbiosis going even if Concubine sometimes worked magick by making things disappear... Mr Cheez put up with this to a point but US$150 in one swoop was too much. Mr Cheez threw her and her shit out. The locks have been changed. =================================================================