"Oh, no," he said pleasantly, "sometimes I see a woman here." "Tristan, am I going to be thrown out?" I realized with a start that I was the only female in the entire place.
There was a back room where many people seemed to be standing in the dark, and some clusters of others sitting at the bar. We went to the bar and ordered drinks, and I looked around. Inside, once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could make out groups of men standing singly and together, beer in their hands, watching a pool game in the center of the room. Tristan opened the door with a flourish and I followed him in. A bunch of helium balloons was tied to the door, but there were no signs. Apart from the pumping bass you could feel down to your bowels, the bar seemed closed.
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Ten minutes later, we were standing with John in front of a bar with covered windows in a quiet, dark section of the Quarter. Did you see how much money those guys were throwing at her to do the splits in front of their faces? I was just waiting for the lion tamer to pop out from behind a curtain." He stood up. "I felt like I was at the circus last night," I said. "Hey, why don't you take me to a place tonight that you would go?" We'd been to a rather tepid strip club on Bourbon Street the previous night, the highlight of which seemed to be strippers doing splits and lunges and wrapping their legs around their head. I fished the olives out of my bloody mary and ate them. "Jesus, even the dishwashers here are characters out of 'Streetcar Named Desire,'" I said. ''Cause den I'd be wanting to do the sistah.'" Tristan shook his head. Then he says that she wants him to move in with her and her sister. 'And I ain't even put da wood on her yet,' he says. 'Cause den I'd put dem through the same hell dey put me through.' He goes on to say that his girlfriend of two days told him that she loved him. He says in this Cajun drawl - I can barely understand the man - 'I wish I was a girl. Last night at work, I'm talking to this dishwasher. Men are all the same anywhere you go." Tristan had moved here from San Francisco three months ago with his boyfriend, John, and was still going through the highs and lows of living in a foreign land with no friends or support system.
"If you like frat boys or gay men, you'll do all right. Among all the kitschy bars selling Jello-shots to go and the tinny fake piano music emanating from nowhere, being in the French Quarter was like "New OrleansLand." "So what are the men like here in New Orleans?" Where was this seedy sexual underbelly I'd heard so much about? "I do feel like I'm in Disney World," I said. Tristan whisked me away to the French Quarter almost immediately, where we now sat in Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, the oldest tavern in the United States - wood plank floors, flickering candles and tourists, tourists, tourists. I'd come to New Orleans to visit Tristan and John in their newly adopted "Living in the South is strange," Tristan was saying, "but New Orleans is even stranger.