The Atlanta Post-Mortem: Precious and Many

Above: A Lutheran church with a jazz trio? In Atlanta?

A disclaimer: Like everyone--save for just newborn babies--I have baggage and I carry it with me. In the case of Atlanta, I carry the baggage that many children of the black exodus from the South carry. Many of us grew up hearing stories and seeing pictures about how the South was the land of inequality and bigotry. There is an image in my head of everywhere south of the Virginian suburbs of DC down to just north of Orlando being a land where minorities, and blacks in particular have to be a bit on edge. These days with the South being a huge booming region--a cab driver in Atlanta told me that the city has just grown absurdly in 10 years--old cultural biases are changing with the influx of new immigrants. With this in mind, I went to Atlanta.

It became apparent to me that Atlanta is in many ways a Southeastern version of Chicago: it's this huge city in the middle of a bunch of nowheres and 2nd tier cities (although Charlotte is probably gaining on them) that are between DC and Tampa. Like Chicago and New York, it attracts a vast majority of its residents from the smaller cities and towns nearby, which leads to what you could call the "medium fish syndrome." These are people who were big fish in small ponds, but become small-to-medium in a big one, even though they think they're still big.

In other words, I'm not necessarily saying there's attitude, but there's a definite disconnect between reality and the perception.

Let me set the scene: Go figure that when I decide to go South, Atlanta is walloped by a snow and ice storm and the temperature struggles to get above 35 for most of the time I'm there...and that is during the day. I'm thinking that it's going to be in the 50s, and on the day I arrive Atlanta is actually colder than it was in New York when I left! So all my hopes of being a smug Yankee (in relation to the cold) were dashed. If that wasn't weird enough, it seemed damn near impossible to hear anyone with a drawl--even on the local news. They've got a 1001 counties down there and it wasn't until the next day that I heard a Bubba.

Above: That damn park which makes taxi drivers happy and flat-footed drunks like me wince in pain.

Atlanta is clearly a city not designed for the flat-footed, like myself. I went to go find some Chasers and asked someone at Outwrite (which I have to say is one of the best-stocked gay bookstores I've ever come across--they even have The Closet on display) where the nearest one is. She tells me that it's about a mile. Thinking in Manhattan terms, I reckon that's no problem. Well, that shut me up. This mile was a walk up and down what felt like a hundred hills with practically no one else on the sidewalk. It's the latter that unnerved me more than anything else. One of the reason that many New Yorkers feel safe at most hours of the day is that in most places there are always more than just a few people on the street at any given time. Eventually, I made it to a drugstore where I indulged in one of the great pleasures of traveling: cheap cigarettes. You have no idea what $24 cartons will do to someone who is used to $65-75 ones. I loaded up and that meandering didn't mean jack to me after that.

Vacations are about drinking and shopping for me no matter where I am, so I chose a hotel that looked on the map like I'd be able to stumble back drunk to. Well, it was in stumbling distance to a few. Y'see, there's this huge park in the middle of what one would call the gay areas of Atlanta. (It's so big that it divides what would be one gay neighbourhood into three.)

The first stop on the list was Bulldogs, which much to my total surprise is basically the only black gay bar in Atlanta proper. Seriously. Atlanta has just 1 black gay bar. I'd like to spin this in a positive, hippie way and say that it's an indicator of how far along racial integration has come in the gay community, but outside of Bulldogs more often than not I was the only minority (out of all shades) in any given place except for Bulldogs. That just seemed weird to me. A transplant to the city explained to me that blacks have no problem going to any bar, but if that was the case where were they?

I kind of like Bulldogs though. It was a nice shotgun-style bar that had MGD, which combined with indoor smoking makes it HEAVEN. Moreso, one of the bartenders is an aspiring screenwriter who is trying to pitch an East Coast black gay dramedy to HBO, which: a) I really would like to see come to air; and b) HBO really needs. He shared my view of Queer as Folk which boiled down to saying "in Pittsburgh?" after every episode.

The nexus of Atlanta's gay life, however is Blake's which looks like your standard issue UK gay pub outside of London or Manchester, but with Southerners acting like Milwaukeeans. It also was where that disconnect I mentioned earlier really came into play, although that was also quite apparent at Bulldogs as well. Blake's may not have had MGD, but they had videos and smoking so it was fine by me until it got really crowded. As much as I like to blend into the background, I don't want to be practically invisible so that people can flick their hair right into my face and not realise that they have just whacked a person. (Once, I can forgive, four times with several "excuse me"s is just being needlessly arrogant.)

One thing I noticed in Atlanta is that men seem to come in either two shapes: short and squat or tall and lanky. I started to wonder where the taffy puller was in Atlanta, and why so many men seemed to be victims of it. It was just bizarre. I was either looking up or looking down.

There is new rule that I think I'll apply whenever I travel: be very wary of bars that have Myspace pages. Blake's had one as did another stop I made on Saturday night: WETBar. Now, I don't know what the connection is between Myspace and bars, but while I get the need to reach out to your customers, it just seemed odd for bars to use Myspace. Granted Myspace is--in theory--a social networking site (albeit one mostly for high schoolers and long-distance friends), and bars are social places, for a bar to have one just seems a touch...squicky. WETBar was described in my guidebook in a way that lead me to believe that it was Atlanta's version of Splash--no pun intended. It certainly has Splash's multiple bars and dance spaces, but not quite. Splash, for better or worse, always seems to have a strong sexual undercurrent. WETBar had a strong undercurrent of cute. Cute as evidenced by the plethora of men in tight glittering t-shirts, most of whom looked like they needed to go on an eating binge over at the Publix across the street.

I don't like cute.

I made it over to the dance area where even though it was verging on midnight no one was dancing. A perky guy with a lip piercing asked if I danced and frowned when I told him that I wasn't drunk enough. He got up and went to the dance floor and did several acrobatic moves that I wouldn't even dare attempt within the confines of my own apartment. Making his way back he stated that this is very typical for Atlanta, in that the natives are too shy to do anything but stand and model due to peer pressure, even though they may be tapping their feet and swinging their hips to the beat. Emboldened by that statement, plus the fact that no one knew me, I downed my Red Stripe (no MGD available) and joined him on the dance floor. By the time I called it a night, the dance floor had gone from empty to a smattering, so it was a minor success.

WETBar had videos and smoking indoors, so I didn't mind the place overall. In fact, I actually had a sub-lebrity sighting: Andrew from The Amazing Race 3. He may very well google those terms, so I'll leave my impressions with "I saw him" and not go further.

In a strange about-face from my usual booze and cruise vacations, I actually did tourist things in Atlanta. Well, two tourist things: The World of Coca-Cola and The CNN tour.

The World of Coca-Cola was particularly a journey into the taboo for me, since I grew up in a staunch Pepsi household where it was a testimony to my mother's liberalism that I didn't get mocked for liking Cherry Coke. Since there is no World of Pepsi, I made due with the other one.

I needn't have bothered. Good lord was it boring. You'd think they'd but more effort into a blatant attempt of marketing-as-education (I found it a bit strange and slightly disheartening to see so many schoolbuses there), but no. The World of Coca-Cola was about as interesting as a watching water boil. For starters, they don't even address one of the big rumours: did Coke at one time have cocaine? Indeed while it is interesting to taste all the various types of Coca-cola products from around the world, all I really learned from it is that Diet Coke tastes vile with or without caffeine and that Cherry Coke & Barq's will continue to be my only forays into Coca-Cola land, at least beverage-wise.

Then there was the CNN Studio Tour which I can basically summarise with these photos:

My inquiries about an Anderson Cooper brand cock ring were met with puzzled looks.

Let's be honest here: Anderson can caper on about being a serious journalist as much as he wants but when your name (I don't care if that's technically the show's name, it's basically his) is plastered over girls' t-shirts, mugs, sweaters, blankets, and everything else under the sun, your crediblity is out the damn window. If he wants to follow in his mother's footsteps then at least be upfront about it.

Not like I didn't make my own lapses in judgment. I ate at Chick Fil-A, the fast food chain owned by a deranged religious conservative (I think it's because his last name is "Cathy") who shuts down all his franchises on Sunday. Even worse, I really liked it, because that key lime pie and those nuggets were unbelievably good. Dammit.

Lest you think I just like Bulldogs, I have to say there were two other places I would've stopped by more often if it weren't for that damn park.

Amsterdam seemed like The View on steroids (no pun intended): A huge rectangular bar and a separate dance area. Everyone there seemed even-keeled, the type for whom S&M is a sexual practice not an attitude. It also seemed nicely integrated across the spectrum, with friendly bartenders. I couldn't quite figure out why it was called Amsterdam as there didn't seem to be anything particularly Dutch about it--the only specials were with Smirnoff, nor was there an air of sexual frankness. I guess the fact that it was very cozy in feel might make it Dutch.

Nearby there was Miss Q's, a billard parlour/bar that had the same cozy, friendly feeling not to mention several hilarious overheard conversations between queens going at it over a billard table.

And that so that you know, and that your children, and their children will know, is my impression of Atlanta.*

* No, I didn't go to Hoedowns.