my fairy godmother

When I looked at my calendar for July and saw that I will not be in town this year for the Pride celebration (yes, in San Diego it's in July), I realized how much I have distanced myself from this annual celebration of being. Just being.

It made me think about my first Pride parade. It was in San Francisco. It was so overwhelming, but not in a bad way. It was like diving into a huge ball of pink cotton candy: the sweetness, the fluff, and the sugar high. Stimulation overload.

I must have taken four or five 36-shot rolls of film (the word film sounds so archaic now) and spent a lot of money (more than I could afford) because I just had to take them to the 1-hour developing place. Talk about immediate gratification. Thank god for digital photography today, or I wouldn't be able to afford to get my grande mocha.

I went to that Pride parade with my fairy godmother, Tom. Doctor Tom Polcari was my landlord. He is a doctor of divinity (or something like that). A pastor. A nudist.

He introduced me to San Francisco. I rented a room in his five-bedroom house near Lake Merritt in Oakland. I knew that it was a clothing-optional household when I signed the lease, and even though I knew I wouldn't be exercising that option at all, I decided to live there anyway. A clothing-optional gay house, and I was in the navy, still just peeking out of the closet.

Each room in the house had a name. The room I was going to rent was the Flamingo Room. I didn't put two and two together so I was surprised when I walked in and saw that it was painted flamingo pink. Hello. It scared me a little bit, that pink room. So I decided to use the color as my excuse and left a message to let Tom know that I had decided against moving in. At that point I was still not sure about the clothing-optional thing.

The next day I got a call from Tom. "Why don't you come over and check out the room again," he said in his nasal sing-song voice.

I couldn't refuse. My urge to come out of the closet turned out to be stronger than my fear of being found out by my commander. I drove to the house, walked up to the front door, and rang the doorbell even though the door was half open.

"Just come on in, Norm," I heard him call from the second floor where the Flamingo room was. I walked in, took my shoes off (house rule, and I liked that) and walked up the stairs.

Tom was in the middle of the room, with a big smile on his face, a pink bead necklace the size of cherries, a cut-off T-shirt, and nothing from the waist down except his belly button.

"What do you think?" he asked proudly. In my flustered state I managed to examine the new clean white walls of the room. "I painted it white to convince you to move in. The pink was a bit too bold, anyway." I had never been in a room talking about paint color with a half-naked man.

Don't get me wrong. Tom must have been a good-looking man in his younger, fresher days. But to somebody who grew up in the Philippines (where we wore jeans even on the hottest days) and was just coming out of the closet, it was a little too jarring. But at the same time, something about the craziness of the situation made me think that maybe this might work out.

I signed the lease and moved in the following week.

After five months of attempts at fitful adjustment, I moved out. I was still too afraid to be found out in the military. One of my housemates was HIV-positive, the first one I have ever met -- my ignorance scared me. I shared the bathroom with three people -- I wanted my privacy. Geoff, who stayed in a room downstairs, always ate my food in the fridge -- it grossed me out that he touched my stuff.

After about a year -- a tour in the Middle East and sharing an apartment with a navy buddy -- I moved back in, this time knowing what to expect. I gradually got used to Tom's eccentricities. He is a label queen but not in the brand name sense. He put labels on cabinet doors and drawers ("dishes", "pots", etc.) . The shelves in the fridge had our names, though it didn't work with Geoff. He still ate our food.

Tom walked around the house naked (nobody else did). He wore makeup, plastic jewelry, speedos, and combat boots while detailing his car or tuning up the lawn mower in the backyard.

Once in a while he would corner me into going with him to the MacDonald's in Orinda or Walnut Creek, and he would wear his army fatigues, full make-up, and dime-size cubic zirconium earrings. That was his way of teaching the suburban teenagers about tolerance. It's a surprise we never got kicked out, or worse, beaten up.

He showed me how to get to the Castro district. He always invited me to the Sunday tea-dance at the I-Beam in Haight-Ashbury, and I always went with him. I peppered him with questions on the way to and from the city, and he gave me answers like a mentor.

We were kicked out of clubs a few times because he couldn't resist stripping all his clothes off, with only a bandanna covering his family jewels. I guess he thought all places were clothing-optional like our house. Or maybe he was teaching everyone about tolerance. Even in gay clubs.

I tagged along to the set of the cable access TV show The Lavender Lounge where he danced in the background with all the beautiful young dancers. He gave me audio tapes of his preachings in the Berkeley campus. He detailed my car.

When he decided to get a new toupee, he asked for my opinion. He confessed to me his deep crush for our neighbor, Mr. Abinati, who, Tom lamented, just recently proposed to his long-time girlfriend. Tom actually officiated their wedding ceremony a few years later.

I guess every time Tom taught tolerance to the suburbian teens or to the bouncers in the San Francisco gay clubs, he was teaching me. He made me see aspects of the community that the mainstream gay men -- young, beautiful and glamorous -- don't want to deal with: drag, older gay men, HIV. He prepared me for my first Pride parade (and the rest of the gay world) where the leather harnesses, stainless steel contraptions, body piercings, or bejeweled anatomical parts didn't make me gasp.

Or judge.