And To Think, We're Missing All Those Great Conversations We Used To Have With Strangers In Bars

Hello from Madrid.

Tonight is our first big night out in Chueca, Madrid’s gay neighborhood. We’re already armed with the necessary basic vocabulary (“activo” = “top”; “pasivo” = “bottom”; “vodka y seltzer” = “vodka soda”; “Quiero alimentarte yeyo y mirarte cuando te haces una paja” = “I want to feed you blow and watch you jerk off.”) and we have a variety of small bills, so if this is anything like the East Village, we should be okay in an emergency.

Except we’re not exactly sure how, in Spain, one gay convinces another gay to go home with him. Not that we can take anybody home – we sleep on a squeaky single bed in a walk-through with a roommate who keeps the intervening door open because he “likes to hear us sleep.” But we’d like to know just in case someone makes the moves on us. Clearly, merely standing near someone and bouncing your shoulders to “SexyBack” while occasionally making fleeting eye contact (which was the foreplay mode du jour in NYC when we left) isn’t going to cut the mustardo here in España. And, probably, our go-to story about the time Adrian Grenier bought us a margarita at Starlight is going to lose a little in translation. So what’s a skinny gay expat to do?

We guess we’ll do what Hemingway always did: use small words, get drunk, and, if there are any complaints later in the game, assure them you’re only just using the “the tip of the iceberg.”