Sing-Alongs

Sometimes, you just feel as though you’ve lost yourself somewhere along the road. I experimented with drag (bye bye Chérie Bakewell), I reinvented myself as a moderna, and I partied like it was 1999, but something deep inside felt wrong. 

I’m not a drag queen. I’m not a moderna. And I’m not a party animal. I’m but a Doctor Who freak who wears rubber bands on his right wrist and enjoys nothing more than playing Poi in a park, surrounded by mates, a guitar and a bottle of beer close by. I’m what they refer to in Madrid as a perroflauta—a hippy detached from the material world who gets lost in literature and art.  

My new favourite word, the name perroflauta comes from the traditional image of a hippy street performer with a flute in their back pocket and a dog by their side (perro=dog ; flauta= flute; perroflauta = dog-flute dude!). Their kingdom destroyed ever since they were forced out of Parque Retiro where they played the drums, I had no idea where I would find one now. Time for a quest!  Just like the new Doctor Who, the new me would search the sky for my kind. So I called up my mates. 

First on the list: Jorge. He laughed. “There’s no one else like you out there” was all he had to say. 

Second, third, fourth, fifth... I called everyone I knew, I even created a Facebook page. Unfortunately, everybody seemed to be of Jorge’s opinion. I was alone. Hippy, geeky gays, I realised, were either all hiding or extinct.   

Then on Thursday morning, I received an email telling me that every Thursday night a group of gay men and lesbians, all tired of the same old nonsense and hoping to have discussions that didn’t involve Lady Gaga, gathered together around 10ish in the Hotel Senator outside Gran Via tube station. I leapt with glee. Perhaps these folks could be the answer to my question. I imagined meeting them in a smoky atmosphere, reciting Rimbaud’s poetry and drinking absinthe.  

Disappointingly, there was no Rimbaud and no absinthe, but I did discover the nicest group of guys you would care to meet. A cynic would view their group as trickery. The cynic would be wrong. It was the most sexually unthreatening gathering, I’ve ever been to. They welcomed me with open arms and made me feel at ease. I think I learned more about Madrid's culture and history there than I have in all my time in the city. 

The columnist in me wanted to know more about them. They’d been meeting every single Thursday for the last 12 years, creating a kind of family: always there, always reliable, never fleeting, offering an alternative to the ambiente (gay scene) that was both refreshing and welcomed. (Contact the GayFrenz at madrid.frenz@yahoo.es) 

They also told me that, contrary to London, there was no gay arty scene in the capital. After having parted ways with my new friends, I walked home; saddened that, unlike bears and modernas, my kind didn’t have their own scene. These guys, nice as they were, were not the laying on the grass slash guitar drumming hippy types.  

The quest was not over. A quest never is. I’ll find them...