It's a grey morning. My boyfriend and the friends with whom we are staying are all still sound asleep in their converted house/apartment nestled in the Boston suburb of Somerville. I quietly leave the house as the school bell across the street announces the start of the day, summoning all the kids in from the wet tarmac, damp from last night's rain. I make my way to Diesel Café, a well-known, frequented lesbian coffeehouse on the high street leading to the T, Boston's subway system.
Diesel's long, wide hallway-like interior is painted a pale baby blue and bridges the gap nicely between being both an urban, comfortable coffee shop and a successful transgressive watering hole. The place feels like a cross between Prism, the lesbian bar just north of Edmonton's city centre, and Garneau's Sugarbowl. There is a motorcycle perched above the front door, an extensive exotic tea list, pool tables, unisex bathrooms and an old school photo booth.
Behind the counter womyn with biker activist chic hair, who for the most part look like they could whip up a mean quiche and change cat litter without a breaking a sweat, take your order without ever mugging a face that could be taken for anything other than genuine.
I sit down with my coffee and watch the morning unfold as queers and non-queers alike grab a coffee, type away on their laptops, attempt awkward conversation with strangers, text friends, study and just generally live their lives.
Sitting on a patio with my boyfriend and one of our hosts the day before, I found myself transfixed in the same way I was at the coffee shop, just sitting witnessing the everyday happenings of Boston. We were in the Back Bay area just off of Newbury Street in front of Trinity Church on Boylston (picture a busier, more upscale, historic New England version of Edmonton's 124 Street).
The street was a thick moving river of young and middle-age office workers brushing and bumping past each other in office attire and sensible shoes as they made their way home. Creating a colourful obstacle, a fork in the river of commuters, a group of queer kids were holding court near the curb, streaming out from the building that housed the Boston Youth Organizing Group. In all their awkward teenage repressed versus expressed glory they looked just like the queer kids that hang out at Edmonton's Pride Centre. Homemade rainbow accessories punctuating quasi styles of goth, rock star, preppy or whatever they can muster on limited budgets and trial and error.
As we lingered on the patio I watched their comfortably familiar behaviour; the cliques congealing, the non-smokers trying to loudly shame the smokers, the subtle pairing-off for quick romantic trysts, the protective darting looks to passersby, the raptures of laughter. The familiarity ended when something akin to a grey El Camino pulled up violently and parked where the queer kids had gathered. A tight-jawed army man in full fatigues—army boots and everything—forcefully bounded out of the car onto the sidewalk. He stood there for a beat, but there was no time to create a tension-filled narrative that may have included a stare-down between the army man and the queer kids. Before I knew it the army man become one of the queer kids, his hard face melting into a boyish grin as he hugged the other kids. He seemed impossibly young to believe that his small frame had seen war, but there he was.
The Boston Globe barely missed being shut down while I was there, coming up at the last minute with $10 million in cost-saving measures to save it from the chopping block. I think about this, considering how, like payphones and record stores, newspapers are becoming relics of bygone days. It's increasingly the same with conventional ways of living queer. Boston doesn't seem to have a gay area per se, as does New York, Montréal and Toronto. Instead, as I saw at Diesel Café and with the queer kids on the curb, in Boston there is space for queerness to exist everywhere. Increasingly I think this will be the way it is. Cities like Edmonton and Boston leapfrogging gay ghettoization in exchange for overall more liberal cites.
As our friend, my boyfriend and I leave the patio I spy the army boy now across the street sitting on the church plaza stoop. He's changed from his fatigues, and now looks like a milk-and-honey-fed prairie boy in a rolled-up-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. He's sitting close to a young transitioning Hispanic girl. Their peach fuzz arms linked and crossed as they light each other's cigarettes, deeply inhaling. They throw their heads back laughing as they exhale, the smoke rising into the atmosphere, dissipating into the pastel early evening sky.
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