What is the gayest car there is? On the lesbian side, do you even hesitate before the words Mazda Miata come spilling forth? I don’t think you do.
Turns out it’s not just the ladies who recognize the Miata’s queer vibe. A New York Times piece published earlier this month tells the tale of a straight actor in LA who left his black MX-5 Miata convertible at home and rented a Cadillac Escalade for a date ’cause he’d been told too often that his Miata made him look gay. Quelle surprise!
Once, outside a lezzie bar, I saw a truck cab from an 18-wheeler pull up right across the street from the entrance. Like some lesbian had just dropped off a load of WalMart dressers and couldn’t wait for a frosty one. But it was even more glorious than that — on the door of the truck cab, in gorgeous professionally painted bubble-letter pink script, for all the world to see, was the driver’s name. Yes, this wasn’t just any 18-wheeler parked there. This was the one belonging to “Tammy.”
Clearly I have to count that as the biggest lezmobile I’ve ever seen.
Now, finally, after years of clunky cab driver conversations (through which I became so good at talking about the weatherI could have been a meteorologist), after years of waiting in the subzero for a distant speck of a streetcar on the horizon and one too many trips on the subway in such proximity to other riders as to smell Herbal Essence shampoo or an exhaled Tim Horton’s coffee, I decided to take the plunge and get a car.
You think it’s hard to choose an outfit this time of year, try finding a car to represent you out in the world, especially after 12 years of living without one.
I worried with each one — Is it too soccermom, is it too daddy-wants-to-have-an-affair? Is it too masculine, feminine, straight, kooky?
You never realize it, but a car is like an ensemble. It tells a lot, whether you like it or not.
Gay boys? What do you drive? I know I haven’t seen many of you cruising the boulevard in a Ford Focus. But what says hip homo man? Is it the Mini Cooper? The Dodge Charger? The Nissan Longdong Shlong?
Ladies? We all know nothing says “My Mommy’s a lesbian” quite like the Subaru Outback. But what else? The Ford Mustang? The Kia Poontang? The Chevy Carpetmuncher? Trust me, I considered them all.
‘Cause a car is like a personality you can place on top of your own. But you must choose carefully. Like too much cologne, it can enter a room before you do. And like Glo By J Lo it can also clear it.
For anyone who’s giving me a “must be nice, oh, poor Jane Ford and her bourgeois privileged middle-class problems.” Let me just say, I hear you. Oh, wait! Now, I don’t. I just rolled up my power window!
Keeps out the riffraff.
It all started with a rental. My lovely British wife and I moved recently and in order to get everything up to the new place we rented a car for a week. But not just any car — a champagne-coloured minivan.
That was like wearing a straight lady suit and marching around town. I was myself when I got in it, but when I drove it down the street I became someone else. I even drove past a good friend. I honked and waved, trying to get her attention. But she couldn’t have imagined I would be inside. She looked at me blankly, probably wondering who she knew from 905. I even may have gotten just a whisper of the finger.
Nothing says “soccer mom with chunky highlights and too young for her Juicy Jeans” quite like a champagne-coloured minivan. I may as well have had a bumpersticker saying “My child is an honour student and I lifted my top at Mardi Gras ’92.” This car said, “She’s sort of a PTA lady… who sort of made out with her college roommate.”
Speaking of college girls making out, I have to say, all this straight girls making out and experimenting with other women and the whole “coolness” of bisexuality in younger women, I find really fascinating. And by fascinating I mean fantastic!
Please, did you think I’d do a lesbo diatribe? What is better than hot girls making out? I don’t care if you’re bisexual for a night or a week or 15 minutes. I’m like the Gap greeter. “Hi, and welcome! Would you like to see something in your size?”
For those of us who may or may not have spent a lot of time and energy in past years converting cute straight girls, and I’m not saying I did or didn’t (but we all know I did), this whole trend is like a gift from heaven. All the effort has been removed. It’s like that robot vacuum cleaner that makes its own way around the room. It’s glorious.
But I digress.
So after a lot of careful consideration, the car was purchased. It’s something in between the Plymouth Cher and the Kia Poontang with just a smidgeon of the Mitsubishi Indigo Girls.
Hey, you may see me drive by with my top down. It’s not a convertible, I think that’s just the champagne minivan side of me talking.
Why you can trust Xtra
