Valentine's in Folsom

Venturing in Folsom the day following Valentine's Day enabled me to find out what people did without interrupting their loving moments.  In the popular biker bar, Hole in the Wall, the loving ambience still glowed on those who had a special night, and just the same, did not on those who did nothing special.

When I asked a middle-aged man standing at the bar with butt-hugging pants how his Valentine's Day had gone, he responded that it was nothing special since he gets his loving pretty much every other day.

"From your significant other?"

"Something like that..."

Another man with a tough look and leather jacket told me of his romantic dinner with his partner: candle-lit, rose pedals sprinkled on the table cloth, and copious amounts of beer, their drink of choice.

But the most interesting story was of a young guy, 28-years-old and fairly new to the city from Missouri.  His name was Jimmy, and he left the Midwest to escape persecution for basically "being a faggot," as he said in his southern accent.  He told me that for Valentine's he went out for drinks with his new boyfriend.  They didn't exchange flowers or chocolates, but instead Jimmy gave his boyfriend a leash.

"A leash?" I asked him.

"Yeah," he said, "And I asked him, 'Will you hold my leash?'"

I should have known what he was talking about (being schooled about the leather S&M world by a leatherman I befriended recently) but I didn't want to assume that this leash was to be tied to the spiked dog collar he was wearing.  I though that to be romantic...in a weird, kinky way.

But Jimmy didn't get the response he expected, or better yet, wanted.  Turns out, his boyfriend is nothing like him.  He's not into leather, not into leashes, and not even out of the closet. He's a younger Latino-Italian guy who wears stylish clothes, well-groomed, and certainly not comfortable walking down the Castro holding another guy's leash.  Totally different from Jimmy who usually walks the streets of San Francisco- not only Folsom or the Castro- in jeans, a shirt usually with obscenities all over it, beanie, a leather trench coat, and, recently, a collar, signifying he is "owned."

Of course he was hurt and felt rejected, but what did that mean, I asked him?

"Pretty much," he said while taking a sip of his beer, "that he's just not my type."

And this just confirmed that, contrary to popular belief, not all "fags" are the same.