Listen to this articleThe road to Logan is fraught with danger and excitement and memories.
Last month I was privileged to attend the Logan Gay Pride Festival. Wow, was I impressed. It was much larger than I ever anticipated (I almost got the vapors), and I thought it was very well organized, with something to appeal to almost everybody. I know I should have been a jealous bitch because there were some pretty fierce drag queens present, but I was just overcome with joy at their success.
When I first learned about the event, I saw that it was being billed as “the first ever” Logan Gay Pride Day. I felt the need to gently remind the organizers that the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Cache Valley organized Gay Pride Days in 1995 and ’96, held on the Taggart Student Center patio on the Utah State University campus. My excuse for forgetting things is that I’m a senile old queen. Of course, in a university town like Logan, institutional memory only lasts four years. Therefore, in the intervening 20 years, there have been five new generations of community leaders over which the memories of past accomplishments by the queens of yesteryear have been lost to that great trash bin of makeup remover.
In conjunction with the Gay Pride Day in 1995, Tim Keller also organized a fantastic Gay and Lesbian Film Festival at the Taggart Student Center Auditorium that lasted an entire week, which we named Pride Fest that included about 15 movies that otherwise would never have come anywhere close to Logan. A most memorable movie was called Issues 101, the tale of a shy boy moving to a big city for the first time, joining a fraternity and eventually coming out of the closet.
In preparation for the festival, Tim and I previewed each movie to ensure we would not be showing something too racy for the Logan audience to handle. We both recalled that Issues 101 was a cute, feel-good story that would be a nice fit for the university community.
The show time for Issues 101 arrived. The audience was made up of a varied sprinkling of the LGBTQ community of Cache Valley, and then there was this mother and father, unknown to all of us, escorting their teenage son. After the family had entered the auditorium, Tim and I looked at each other trying to remember if there was any nudity in this movie. It had been about a year since we had previewed it and we couldn’t remember. The family chose seats that were halfway down and on the left of the audience. Tim and I sat in the back row. Our eyes locked on the family.
The movie began, innocent enough, but about 15 minutes in there was a fraternity initiation scene where they blindfolded the lead actor, wearing only a jockstrap, and had him give a blow job to the frat president. I guess that when we previewed the movie on a 27-inch television, the scene wasn’t all that memorable. But on the large screen, his balls were two feet across, his dick was nine feet long, and the ass sticking out of that jockstrap was as large as Mount Everest, filling up the entire screen. An innocent family was viewing all our deepest darkest secrets in public. Oh god!
Tim whispered to me, “Should I run upstairs and have the projectionist turn it off?” I replied that the damage has already been done. The entire audience was stone silent. All that could be heard was the greatly amplified slurping sound of the blow job echoing around the room as the scene went on, and on, and on. I gripped the armrests so tightly that my Lee Press-on Nails popped off with such energy that they became flying missiles throughout the theater. Where was the premature ejaculator when you really needed him?
Each and every separate thrust of the blow job was equivalent to a full-scale eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroying Pompeii, or Krakatoa destroying Java, or that one time when I fell on top of a poor unfortunate twink while trying to ice skate in Logan’s Central Park. Still, no one moved. The family just sat there, stone still.
Finally, that scene ended and the rest of the movie was much less eventful. I began to relax a little bit, thinking we may have just dodged a bullet.
As the movie let out, Tim and I went to the lobby to greet the audience. And there, standing in all his sexy uniformed glory was a Utah State University police officer, “keeping the peace.” As the family emerged from the auditorium, I was greatly relieved that they didn’t run right up to the police officer and make a complaint. They came up to Tim and I and the mother said, “Well, if you were going to show porn, the least you could do was show good porn.” To which we all giggled … and I shit my pants!
This story leaves us with several important questions:
- Do you think that my Dame Edna fashion eyeglasses clouded my judgment of the preview?
- Does time actually warp between the small screen and the big screen?
- If I had not called the paramedics, do you think the ice skating twink could have survived the intimate encounter with my Rotundas Bodundus?
- Should I re-name my right breasticle Krakatoa, and the left one Vesuvius?
- Should I make volcano tits my new image?
- Whatever should I use for the lava?
- Similar to the secrecy of magic statute in the Harry Potter books, should we initiate a secrecy of porn statute, keeping gay porn away from the Muggles?
These and other eternal questions shall be answered in future chapters of the Perils of Petunia Pap Smear.
