In One Person

preached tolerance, but Amsterdam truly practiced it—even
flaunted
it. As I spoke, a long barge glided by on one of the canals; an all-girls’ rock band was playing onboard, and there were women wearing transparent leotards and waving to us onshore. The women were waving dildoes.
    But my cynical Dutch friend gave me a tired (and barely tolerant) look; he seemed as indifferent to the gay goings-on as the mostly foreign-born prostitutes in the windows and doorways of de Wallen, Amsterdam’s red-light district.
    “Amsterdam is so
over
,” my Dutch friend said. “The new scene for gays in Europe is Madrid.”
    “Madrid,” I repeated, the way I do. I was an old bi guy in his sixties, living in Vermont. What did I know about the new scene for gays in Europe? (What did I know about any frigging scene?)
    I T WAS ON SEÑOR Bovary’s recommendation that I stayed at the Santo Mauro in Madrid; it was a pretty, quiet hotel on the Zurbano—a narrow, tree-lined street (a residential but boring-looking neighborhood) “within walking distance of Chueca.” Well, it was a
long
walk to Chueca, “the gay district of Madrid”—as Señor Bovary described Chueca in his email to me. Bovary’s typed letter, which was mailed to Uncle Bob at Favorite River’s Office of Alumni Affairs, had not included a return address—just an email address and Señor Bovary’s cell-phone number.
    The initial contact, by letter, and my follow-up email communication with my father’s enduring partner, suggested a curious combination of the old-fashioned and the contemporary.
    “I believe that the Bovary character is your dad’s age, Billy,” Uncle Bob had forewarned me. I knew, from the 1940
Owl
, that William Francis Dean had been born in 1924, which meant that my father and Señor Bovary were eighty-six. (I also knew from the same ’40
Owl
that Franny Dean had wanted to be a “performer,” but performing
what?)
    From the emails of “the Bovary character,” as the Racquet Man had called my dad’s lover, I understood that my father had not been informed of my coming to Madrid; this was entirely Señor Bovary’s idea, and I was following his instructions. “Have a walk around Chueca on the day you arrive. Go to bed early that first night. I’ll meet you for dinner on your second night. We’ll take a stroll; we’ll end up in Chueca, and I’ll bring you to the club. If your father knew you were coming, it would just make him self-conscious,” Señor Bovary’s email said.
    What
club? I wondered.
    “Franny wasn’t a bad guy, Billy,” Uncle Bob had told me, when I was still a student at Favorite River. “He was just a little light in his loafers, if you know what I mean.” Probably the place Bovary was taking me in Chueca was
that
sort of club. But what
kind
of gay club was it? (Even an old bi guy in Vermont knows there’s more than one kind of gay club.)
    In the late afternoon in Chueca, most of the shops were still closed for siesta in the ninety-degree heat; it was a dry heat, however—very agreeable to a visitor coming to Madrid from the blackfly season in Vermont. I had the feeling that the Calle de Hortaleza was a busy street of commercialized gay sex; it had a sex-tourism atmosphere, even at the siesta time of day. There were some lone older men around, and only occasional groups of young gay guys; there would have been more of both types on a weekend, but this was a workday afternoon. There was not much of a lesbian presence—not that I could see, but this was my first look at Chueca.
    There was a nightclub called A Noite on Hortaleza, near the corner of the Calle de Augusto Figueroa, but you don’t notice nightclubs during the day. It was the out-of-place Portuguese name of the club that caught my eye—
a noite
means “the night” in Portuguese—and those tattered billboards advertising shows, including one with drag queens.
    The streets between the Gran Vía and the metro station in the Plaza de Chueca were crowded with bars and sex shops and gay clothing stores. Taglia, the wig shop on the Calle de Hortaleza, was opposite a bodybuilders’ gym. I saw that Tintin T-shirts were popular, and—on the corner of the Calle de Hernán Cortés—there were male mannequins in thongs in the storefront window. (There’s one thing I’m glad to be too old for: thongs.)
    Fighting jet lag, I was just trying to get through the day and to stay up late enough to have an early dinner at my hotel before I went to bed. I was