Iceland flickers from the exotic to familiar, and back.

Daylight stretches for 16 hours, and it’s already fall and the days have been shortening for a few months.  This is not the midnight sun, but it still feels like the day lasts forever. There are long stretches of coastline that are more uninhabited than any place I’ve seen.  When you look at a map, it suggests that there are quite a few small towns dotting the coastal plains, but as you drive past, those are just farms.  Each farm name is listed on a map, though it is just a cluster of two or three buildings.

A group of gay guys on Sunday night in the basement of a Reykjavik nightclub are nearly indistinguishable from urban gays in Brooklyn or Silverlake.  A few muscular guys wear tight T-shirts and tight tapered jeans.  Some of the skinnier hipster guys wear loose shirts that stretch well below their waist in an H&M or Urban Outfitter silhouette.  Blond and red hair (this is Iceland) is spiked or gelled into curves, just like at home.

The music goes from 80’s new wave like New Order, to Lykke Li, to Britney, without skipping a beat.  Well, a few beats are skipped – the level of DJing in Iceland is wildly variable at different clubs.  It was reassuring to be surrounded by gay urban familiarity, but exciting to not understand a single word of the melodic and opaque language being bantered about.

Road signs are unreadable if you are only familiar with the Latin alphabet.  It took a few days to figure out how to translate some words into Google Maps because you had to guess what letters sounded most like their Icelandic counterparts.

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The Official Pride Party (yes, that was actually the name of the party) was in a restaurant along the harbor.  Tables were removed to create something of a dance floor, and moving lights were mounted awkwardly on a waist dividing wall between the upper level and the lower level, facing upwards.  The lights swept in patterns, periodically blinding you as they shone up into your eyes.

After a few hours of listening to bad transitions from old Rihanna to Icelandic pop, and disco to a (pretty amazing) mashup of Enya and Chemical Brothers, we decided to try another spot.  The crowd had veered straight, an odd mashup of straight drunk people celebrating Pride but apparently without any gay friends to really drunk lesbians and pods of gay tourists from the states, slightly unsure if they should have fun or mock the event.

Reading a newspaper “Guide to Pride” is never going to be that informative, so a good gay traveler heads to Grindr and starts chatting with guys who look like they might be fun at a bar (or elsewhere after the bar.) As we left the event, we dragged along the cute kilted Scot with his friendly Argentinian friend, an American straight girl from the OC and an Australian gay guy marooned for one night from a straight cruise docked at port, and one aggressive and bitchy Hungarian guy with his older boyfriend.  I told them that the only information I had was that a really cute local guy on Grindr was heading to this bar with his friends.  No promises.

The upstairs of Paloma was packed, with a largely straight hipster crowd.  Lots of beards and/or man buns.  The girls were especially drunk and unable to navigate the dance floor without pushing by you.  The Dj was great, though a little obscure EDM for my taste, without a ton of words.

We discovered the basement level an hour later, where the gays were clustered, dancing to 80’s new wave and Icelandic pop hits.  Runar, the aforementioned handsome local from Grindr finally showed up with his posse of 10.  Runar was a ginger blond, built like a Viking, stocky and muscular, but with delicately pretty cheekbones, big biceps and black pants that were painted on, in a good way.  I understood about half of his friend’s names, like Egil and Gunnar.  All of them spoke perfect English.  I couldn’t tell that Runar had any accent at all.

The group migrated back upstairs, to take over the center of the dance floor on the “straight level.”  Shirts came off (which apparently is not common in Iceland, even for gay guys), and the Pride flag was firmly planted.  A few drunk girls were firmly maneuvered back to the outskirts when they thought that gay guys taking their shirts off meant that they wanted pushy straight girls to lambada with them.

The evening lasted almost til light (which isn’t saying much since the nights were very short.)  I won’t say who plundered who because I’m a gentleman, but let’s just say that we may have gotten our revenge on the Viking raiders.

Friends we met at Pride. (No, not the Viking…I’m not going to kiss and tell.)

Even in Iceland, the rainbow road leads us to our people.