The Guncle

by Steven Rowley

in the aptly named Movie Colony neighborhood south of Tamarisk Road.

In the old studio days, actors who were under contract were not allowed to travel more than one hundred miles from Los Angeles in case a picture needed them on short notice. Palm Springs sat exactly on that line, one hundred miles as the crow flies; it became an escape—as far away as actors dared go.

Guncle Rule number five: If a gay man hands you his phone, look only at what he’s showing you. If it’s a photo, don’t swipe. And for god’s sake, don’t open any unfamiliar apps.”

it seemed, at least to Patrick, that a throuple was not the sort of something you enter when life still felt full of possibility.

For instance, what was the last day you were a child?”

“Who says your last day as a child was carefree?” “Because if it wasn’t you’d already be partially grown up.”

“I hear you never forget,” Patrick offered, referring to John’s riding a bike, but perhaps equally about trusting people—a thought that made him shudder.

there was something about being responsible for children that clearly delineated your adulthood from any notion that you were still a child.

Boys can do girl things and girls can do boy things. That’s not even a Guncle Rule, there shouldn’t even be boy things and girl things to begin with. People should just do what they want.”

Patrick would have preferred any number of other establishments—Copley’s, for instance, on Cary Grant’s old estate—but Lulu’s large, colorful street presence caught the children’s eyes.

Lulu’s reminded Patrick of a cafeteria in a futuristic spaceship, as if people should be lined up at steam tables and carving stations dressed in utilitarian jumpsuits with neat lapels in primary colors after putting in a hard day’s work fixing warp drives and flux capacitors.

Or rather, it looked like what someone in the late 1960s thought the cafeteria in a futuristic spaceship would look like, based perhaps on spending too much time watching Star Trek episodes in their stateroom aboard a gay cruise.

“Cleansing?” “Like seasoning a cast-iron pan. It bakes off the hardened layers of grime.”

“You’re so dumb and you’re going to be rewarded for it, because dumb men fail upward.”

Self-love for gay people can be an act of survival. You think it made me unserious, while you toiled away in the nonprofit world, or raised money for any number of causes. But when the whole world is designed to point out that you’re different, it can be a way to endure.”

“Everyone seems genuinely happy here. I’m baseline distrustful of it.”

Gay people have a sad history, but most of us, we overcome it. We’re kicked out of our small-town families, then embrace cities and make new families and build brilliant lives. We were beaten, and so we became strong, and now our bodies are envied. A generation wiped out by a virus, but our lives are still a celebration—we made frosé a thing, for god’s sake. We’re discriminated against, we become a political power. That sort of thing. We thrive, all of us.

"We were beaten, and so we became strong. Now our bodies are envied."

“Grief orbits the heart. Some days the circle is greater. Those are the good days. You have room to move and dance and breathe. Some days the circle is tighter. Those are the hard ones.” Greg stabbed aimlessly at the banana pie. “They’re all hard ones.”