I'm writing this at Snack Bar, a SoCo restaurant for the vehicularly starved: you watch automobiles, a great many of them, trundle past in their lazily Texan way, fake hubcaps determinedly revolving around an axis on which ego, brawn, and parental disaffection are distributed in equal measure. You could come here at 8:45 pm, oblivious to the lateness of the time or the appropriateness of your sartorial state, seeking only to get "some work done". Does that hostess make eyes at you, or is it just part of her job description? "Did you want to get one more before we close?" "Sure, why not?" But the true achievement of this bar-restaurant hybrid is its rather liberal sensibility, in which sprays of red- and blue-ly lit water replace ceiling fans, in which the twenty-eight year-olds still get carded, if obsequiously so. "Are you over 21," the waitress states, knowing full well that you are, knowing full well that you are obliged, required, to respond: "Wow! No one has carded me in two years," to which she replies with an incoherent sentence that includes the word "doll" in it. "Love" would be more British, less personal. She knows this.
Included in this sensibility is a tolerance towards the gaily gay, the cheerfully left-behind. Here we find a couple making out, only on closer examination one of them has pigtails, the other breasts. Is this the purgatory of the homosexually alienated? They are in fact both of the same, indeterminate sex. The man or woman with breasts has a set of biceps that would put a certain Ripudaman Manchanda to shame, and yet the girl/boy with pigtails is only, or at most, eighteen. Did he/she get carded? More importantly, does he/she go to UT? Surely he/she's part of the liberal arts Plan 2, if at all.
My question, rather inconsequential: Where are these people when you're ready to observe them? When your PhD is not, as it is now, nearly, but perilously, complete? When your nights do not involve breathless exchanges with your advisor? If the University of Texas at Austin starves you of anything, it is the full view of lesbians, or gay people, unashamedly necking, in full view of the buff inhabitants of Gregory Gym, insensible, alarmed, at one, about to miss their Bikram Yoga Informal Class.
Hell, I'd pay to see them hold hands. In a city---town? university town?---that paper-cuts the boundary between conservative and self-consciously liberal, it may often seem as though there is no middle ground. The gay straddle this ground without needing to; without desiring to. They are in fact the last bastion of sincerity that remains in this riven not-yet city-but-not-quite-town, not just because they want to be: because they are compelled, by the Rominees, to be.
Included in this sensibility is a tolerance towards the gaily gay, the cheerfully left-behind. Here we find a couple making out, only on closer examination one of them has pigtails, the other breasts. Is this the purgatory of the homosexually alienated? They are in fact both of the same, indeterminate sex. The man or woman with breasts has a set of biceps that would put a certain Ripudaman Manchanda to shame, and yet the girl/boy with pigtails is only, or at most, eighteen. Did he/she get carded? More importantly, does he/she go to UT? Surely he/she's part of the liberal arts Plan 2, if at all.
My question, rather inconsequential: Where are these people when you're ready to observe them? When your PhD is not, as it is now, nearly, but perilously, complete? When your nights do not involve breathless exchanges with your advisor? If the University of Texas at Austin starves you of anything, it is the full view of lesbians, or gay people, unashamedly necking, in full view of the buff inhabitants of Gregory Gym, insensible, alarmed, at one, about to miss their Bikram Yoga Informal Class.
Hell, I'd pay to see them hold hands. In a city---town? university town?---that paper-cuts the boundary between conservative and self-consciously liberal, it may often seem as though there is no middle ground. The gay straddle this ground without needing to; without desiring to. They are in fact the last bastion of sincerity that remains in this riven not-yet city-but-not-quite-town, not just because they want to be: because they are compelled, by the Rominees, to be.
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