I can’t help  but use comparisons when I first get to know a city.  It’s like comparing a new date to your ex-boyfriend.  Hof Street felt like the Williamsburg/Silverlake of Cape Town, with hipster coffee and farm to table restaurants spilling out onto the sidewalk.   And of course, as we walked from gay bar to bar, I compared Green Point to Chelsea in the late 90s or the current Weho.

Gay culture is fascinating to me whenever I travel.  I don’t need (or actually want) every gay bar to be the same (though they often are the same), or for them all to feel like copies of Babylon from Queer As Folk (let’s be honest, no bar feels like that, not even LA or NY at their best).  So, checking out bars in Cape Town, as anywhere, was like an anthropological study of my own species.

There was Beefcakes, the replica of SoCal’s Hamburger Mary’s, where shirtless muscle boys served groups of straight girls watching drag queen shows.  We struggled to see any real live gay guys.  There was the new staple of urban gay life – the popular dance bar Crew – staffed exclusively by beautiful straight men in their underwear who bat their eyelashes and work their chiseled gay-adjacent looks to coax a few extra dollars out of our pockets, to make money to get through…school?

The contagion of gay bar owners hiring straight eye candy is apparently a global pandemic.  Don’t you know we’d rather get served by a gay 7 than a heatersexual 10?  It’s not integration, it’s insulting.

At least the straight bartenders still haven’t invaded the backroom/leather bars like Barcode, where you have to check your clothes at the door.

Though the break up took months, the final phase began when the friend who knows me best in the world casually told me that I deserved everything that I wanted.  It was 2pm on a 100 degree Palm Springs  day with 10 or 12 of my friends lounging around the pool.  And he didn’t even say it about Michael, per se.

My eyes filled instantly and unexpectedly with tears.  Yawar took me back to a bedroom and closed the door.  It is only the friends who know you best who can tell you a basic truth, that you know intellectually, but make you actually understand that truth in your heart.  He said nothing that I didn’t already know.  I knew that I deserved everything I wanted, I just wasn’t living that truth.

A half hour and an embarrassing quantity of tears later, he left me to gather myself and rejoin my friends.  You know you look a mess when your friends see your red eyes and ask whether you’ve been doing drugs by yourself in the bedroom for the last 30 minutes.  “No, but do you have any?”

It takes only minutes to drive out of Cape Town and into the hillsides and quaint towns on the way to Cape Point.  If you can’t help but anthropomorphize adorable little animals, then Boulder’s Beach is a required stop.  The colony of African penguins that walk drunkenly just below the tourist boardwalk are endlessly “aww”-inspiring.  When Michael travels, the cuteness of the animals that he sees is a primary metric of trip success.  And let’s not even talk about baby animals.  He lives.

OMG, penguins.

Though it may not geographically be the southernmost point of Africa, or the actual separation of the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, the lighthouse on the Cape of Good Hope feels like the edge of the world.

Looking out from the lighthouse at the Cape of Good Hope

The Cape of Good Hope

Okay, I don’t always do the requisite tourist photo set up…but I did this time.

I’m far away!

When you compare baboons and humans, one is smarter than the other.  I’m just not sure which it is.  Drivers to the Cape caution tourists to never carry food around because the baboons are not afraid of people and will take it.  Two minutes after we were warned, a huge male baboon bounded off the roof of the funicular building and ripped a plastic bag of fruit away from a hapless Japanese tourist.  For a moment, the dumber one of the two thought he would try to keep his grapefruit from the snarling, fanged adversary.  Luckily, the doughy, defenseless, upright “evolved” mammal changed his mind and let the baboon have it.

This is a very small baboon.  The one on the right, I mean.

Take a Xanax before driving Chapman’s Peak Drive back to Cape Town.  The scenery is spectacular as you hug sheer cliffs and a road that was rebuilt after a section of it fell into the ocean.

I am bruised when love ends, no matter how the last chapter is written.  For a time, I walk through the world without much of a skin, vulnerable to pain and tears and fears of being alone and misplaced infatuations.  I will go on a date with the wrong person and be confused when I realize within days that I just wanted someone to like me again.  I will walk down 5^th Avenue and both cry and laugh when a plane skywrites “Marry Me?” above the city.  I will wonder whether anyone will make a grand gesture towards me.  I will try to separate from my emotions, but they’ll sit right on the surface, waiting to be  triggered by 2 beers into an avalanche of tears and phone calls to someone who doesn’t deserve the drenching.

Life is a series of realizations that you knew intellectually first, and then eventually accepted into the deepest part of you.

I never thought I would be single again in my 40’s.  I’ve always placed a romantic relationship at the top of my list of things that were important to me.  I never chose work over love.  I never chose being single for the thrill of being single.  I tried to never leave a place for regret to fill later – that I hadn’t worked hard enough, compromised enough, loved diligently or passionately enough.

But, I still haven’t made it work with one of my “ones.”

Michael and I

Next time:  Lions and Lessons