Who's the Mack?

I'm willing to bet none of you have ever had your picture in an Indian style and living magazine. Well Josh, Spaz, and I have.


We were in Chennai standing around the lobby of our hotel waiting for our rickshaw driver, when we were approached by a beautiful young Indian woman and asked if we had a few minutes to spare. She said she’d like to have our picture taken in the bar for a local magazine. We were curious, and so we followed her into the hotel bar, the Leather Bar.

When I first saw the name of the place I was rather shocked, but very curious because homosexuality is illegal in India and I couldn’t wait to see what a gay-bar would be like here. I imagined the old smoke filled, speakeasy-type places I’d read about, where young men met in secrecy. Would we have to tell a password to a pair of eyes behind a peep hole to gain entrance? And why is this Leather Bar so openly displayed in the lobby of a nice hotel? I though maybe the speakeasy was in the back, the name of the bar an irony only understood by the initiated.

As we followed this woman in her neatly pressed blue sari it hit me: Why did she ask us of all people to pose for this picture? She thought we were gay, didn’t she? We were to become poster boys for the jet setting, intercontinental, gay, leather bar crowd. Perhaps I could give some young man somewhere the courage to come out to his Hindu parents.

Not that I wasn’t enjoying the thought of having my own fan club (perhaps based in Malaysia somewhere) but I thought it a little improper to misrepresent myself and was looking for a good time to tell the woman that she should find her mascots elsewhere. My delusions of glory soon came crashing down as we entered the Leather Bar and it became blatantly obvious that there was no irony intended at all in the name. It was just a bar with lots of leather. The chairs, the benches, the stools, a bumper around the edge of the bar were all black leather. Even the walls were leather; a grey suede.

She wanted us to be sitting at the bar, all three of us drinking one of the establishment’s flaming drinks at the same time. As you can see from the picture, this involved a several drink glasses precariously balanced atop one another. One liqueur after another was slowly drizzled over the tower. Finally the bartender lit it up and we stuck our straws in and tried to finish it before the straws melted or our eyebrows burned. The photographer wanted to do a couple of different takes, so we had to repeat the process again. The first drink tasted of citrus and the second was more like coffee. It was about 11:00AM and neither one of these tastes was very appealing.

I did manage to keep from retching, and the photos turned out fine. Afterwards we went back into the lobby of the hotel with the woman. She was in her twenties and had a lot of energy. A little too much energy for me, but since Spaz was the only one of us who's single, Josh and I set about trying to get her to invite him out.

The nickname Spaz did not just materialize out of thin air. The woman tried to tell us about some parties she was promoting and Spaz kept asking her where we should go to get sushi. She politely steered the conversation back to clubs where she liked to go dancing and Spaz, steered the conversation right back to sushi. He wouldn't shut up about the fucking sushi. I wouldn’t normally give a shit one way or the other, but he wastes an awful lot of my time complaining about his involuntary celibacy. So after banging our heads against that wall for a while, Josh and I decided it wasn’t our problem.

Needless to say Spaz did not get laid. But at least we got our photo in the magazine.