A Queer Quarantine Tale: The Legend of Papa Dick in San Francisco

Like all of us, I am fucking up on Zoom a lot. Every time I hop on a call, one of my pets decides it’s the perfect time to stand behind me and start steam-cleaning their butthole. And who can forget the time I made that butthole joke at the start of a webinar I was hosting without realizing we were recording and had gone live. Oh, quarantine!

I think some people are benefitting from the apocalypse, besides my pets and their buttholes, all of whom are getting a lot of screen time (the dogs have begun negotiations with the cat to unionize and form an OnlyFans). For example, I don’t know if you have seen any recent ads with the Energizer Bunny in them, but he has clearly gone through a glow up. I think Energizer’s sales came roaring back as we all began stockpiling our bunkers, so he got his bag and then got a revenge body. If you don’t remember what he looks like, allow me to paint a very horny picture. He’s Barbie pink, and his fur is looking glossy. He’s got shades, slides, and a big round ass, all very on-trend. He’s so glam historians will undoubtedly ask: was the Energizer Bunny the only true power bottom?

If you didn’t know the Energizer Bunny was gay, then you have a terrible gaydar; he has even been linked to personal trainer and notorious jock, Tony “The Top” Tiger. However, don’t feel poorly about yourself, gentle reader, your gaydar is still probably better than someone I love very much who has an absolutely appalling one - my father.

My dad was a sailor stationed in San Francisco in the 1970s - arguably one of the gayest sentences ever written. He is an extraordinarily blind kind of heterosexual, like a Jonas Brother. You didn’t know they were straight, or brothers, but they’ve all married women. It would never occur to my dad that he could be romantic with another man, and because of that, he has a difficult time imagining that other men could feel differently. We know he’s straight for several reasons, one of the most prominent being that you don’t marry women three separate times without at least being able to commit to a bit.

Sometimes he’ll pepper his conversations with wistful stories about San Francisco in the 1970s where it’s clear that every man around him was trying to stuff him like a jockstrap. I’m sure there were entire bathroom stalls in the Castro devoted to lists of gentlemen signing up to Golden Gate Bridge my dad. Golden Gate Bridge: an Eiffel tower with a San Francisco twist! Try it at your next cocktail party.

My family can see one of these stories coming when my dad calls someone “a really nice guy.” Here is an abbreviated list of “really nice guys” who very obviously wanted to fuck him, a fact he is completely unaware of:

His landlord

His favorite commissary clerk

His lawyer

His librarian

His butcher

His baker

His uniform maker

The guy who ran the gym on base

The guy who ran the auto shop on base

Every single sailor who worked for him AND

The rear admiral that he reported to (that title is not a joke, that was just his boss’ rank)

“Wow, your dad had it going on,” you might say. Of course he did, he looks like me in a different wig.

So one day, I was in the car with my dad driving to north San Francisco. We passed a pizza shop just outside of the Castro, the neighborhood where he had spent more than a decade being an oblivious cock tease.

My dad points and says, “there’s my favorite pizza place! The guy who worked there was just the nicest guy. Anytime I came in, he always gave me free pizza, and one time he even showed me how to make it. He took me to the back, and he taught me how to mix the dough. I didn’t get it at first, because there’s a very particular way you have to massage the dough to make sure it’s firm enough. I wouldn’t have gotten it if he didn’t stand behind me and guide my hands, it’s a very special technique.”

I look around at the rainbow flags gently flickering in the wind, contemplating what my dad would look like as Demi Moore in the pottery wheel scene of Ghost.

“Dad, it kind of sounds like he was hitting on you.”

“No, it wasn’t like that. In the 70s San Francisco was just a vibrant city full of young men embracing physical fitness and healthy living. It was a tight-knit community of men who really reveled in each other’s company.”

Sure, I thought. That last line is essentially the tagline of a bathhouse, but what the fuck do I know?

“After he showed me how to make pizza, he took me to a gentlemen’s club down the street. And wouldn’t you know it, we ran into a bunch of guys from my crew at the shipyard, just the nicest guys. We danced the night away. I don’t remember very much of it, but it was a good male bonding experience.”

By this point, as an ally, I’m looking at my dad like Jesus Christ, what did this guy have to do to suck your dick? Instead, I say “Dad, he took you to a gay club. All of those men, everyone on your crew, they were all gay.”

He pauses for a second, his mustache twitching suspiciously. He is a tremendous male walrus suddenly realizing that the other male in his huddle wanted to wrestle for something more than dominance and sport, the only reasons to wrestle he can understand. “Do you really think so?”

“Yes Dad, and you don’t realize stuff like this all the time - Chasten Buttigieg is Pete’s husband, not his brother, Rupaul is not a woman, and the pizza guy was gay. He took you to a gay club. I’m so glad you had fun, but I can’t believe you didn’t notice.”

“Well, I could be gay and I wouldn’t notice.”