Weekend In Philly

I’ve been to Philadelphia twice, once on a business trip that revealed the city after dark, once to walk the downtown area on a lovely spring day. Both experiences were memorable for different reasons, and each of them charmed me. When my friend Matt asked me to join he, a mutual friend, and his boyfriend for a weekend in Philly and a sleepover at his parent’s place in New Jersey (just across the river), I jumped at the chance. I don’t know Matt and his confederates that well (I think I shocked him when I accepted), but I needed to unplug from my laptop, get out of the District, and kick-start my spring in the worst way. The chance to deepen my relationship with Philly seemed like the perfect answer. I was correct.

Taking the tram from New Jersey, I look at the skyline and realize that Philadelphia is laid out the way I expect of a major city. It looks like New York, only a quarter built from the lack of high rises. I still don’t grasp the layout, but I’m impressed by the density of the place. Buildings are old and huddled around streets wrapped tightly between them. Unlike DC, when I travel the sidewalks I feel as though I am in a real city.

My first time in the heart of Philly was a drive through at night. Then, the city reminded me of New Orleans, a shape-shifter between day and night with an almost human personality. At night, they are dirty cities that love dark corners and hide a mysterious nature inside them, leaving travelers not numbed to their heartbeat to wonder curiously, but not enough to come closer. In daylight, they flirt with green eyes and old world charm. I begin to suspect an infidelity between the two cities. An affair lost to history--masculine, noble Philly carrying the weight of a young nation’s pride, enamored with the exotic ingénue of loose morals situated in the loins of our country, the mouth of the Mississippi. It could never work. I walk in the warm spring air and wonder if their tryst produced children. I consider the cities between them but find few potential bastards.

Coming from DC, the gay scene in Philly is a culture shock. I visit three bars: Bump, Taverna (?), and Woody’s. Bump is described to me as “a blue collar Halo,” and the description is fitting. The bar is larger than Halo, lined with windows, just as modern, and it serves food to sharply dressed men sitting in booths. The blue collar is also evident, as two young men in their mid 20s were trashed and simulating fellatio on the floor in front of the bar—and it wasn’t even 10 o’clock. I reference this act to a friend of Matt’s who recently moved from DC to Philly, who is with us. He confirms that this is why he rarely goes out in this town. “The people are tacky and completely uninteresting,” he tells me. I can’t say I’ve spent enough time in Philly to corroborate such a general statement, but from a distance, they seem interesting enough. Particularly when I stand next to the bar and see a shirtless man walking across the street wearing a Mexican wrestling mask and tights. Seems like my kind of town.

I go to another bar called “Taverna” (I think this is the name), which is located in an alley blocked off to traffic. Unlike DC, Philly has alleys that are darkly attractive and teeming with life. This particular bar has two dueling pianos on the packed first floor, a basement club where straight senior citizen couples enter and exit (again, charming considering the location), and a dance floor upstairs where a bachelor auction is taking place when we arrive. This is where the night turns for me, on my 4th and 5th drinks. Me and my friend Eric smuggle drinks outside under our pullovers and we make our way to Woody’s, the famous Philly gay bar that I’ve heard about for years, but to this point have never visited.

Woody’s is impressive, with a square footage near that of TOWN. Unlike TOWN, and every other bar in Philly for that matter, the men dress differently than they do in DC. There’s a laid back, blue collar vibe to Philly that permeates even the gay community. While I don’t see evidence of coarse or rowdy behavior that I’m told is common for Philadelphia, I can see from the crowd’s rough edges how such a reality might manifest itself. The closest I come to Philly attitude is while eating pizza in a hopeless attempt at sobering myself. While supporting myself against a pole, one gay guy sneers at my group and labels us “heinous.” Considering our behavior inside the club, I’m willing to let it slide. I can only imagine what he would have said if he saw me later in the night after returning to the New Jersey suburbs, where I deface a church by ripping off its banner and parading down the street with it wrapped around my body as though I’ve won the miss CBN pageant.

The Equality Forum is seven days of Gay & Lesbian programs and events which takes place every year in Philadelphia. On Sunday I go to the street fair, which is similar to what takes place during DC pride. The booths are the same—community organizations and products for sale—but in Philly the beer is cheaper, doesn’t require tickets, you aren’t forced to segregate yourself in a ‘beer tent”, and they serve hard liquor. Philly wins big points for this.

Not only was my party blessed with good weather, but we have a convertible as well. Add the fun times and the interesting topography of the city, and only one thing remains to make my date with Philly complete: cheese steak. There are two giants in the cheese steak game, and as it happens they are located across the street from each other. “Pat’s King of Steaks” is the original, and “Geno’s” is the newcomer (although they have both been around for some time, I understand). Geno’s seems like the family friendly one, a clean digital color copy to Pat’s dirty old black and white. Pat’s is supposedly more authentic and the owner of Geno’s is a racist, so we eat at Pat’s. I can’t say if Geno’s is any better, but I was quite pleased nevertheless. I look forward to going back and having it with cheez whiz instead of American.

While eating my cheese steak I look over to a building next door that has the headshots of half a dozen men who haven’t been famous since at least the 70s. Frankie Avalon and Chubby Checker are the only ones I recognize by name, but the others are familiar. I ask Matt what the deal is, and he tells me that Philly is known for its crooners, and that his mom was going to listen to one of the men on the wall this weekend. I can only imagine how old he is. It’s at this moment that Philly clicks for me. Music deeply connects me to my own culture, as it does for most people with theirs. You get a sense of a people and their place when you hear their native music, and making the connection between Italian crooners, doo-wop American Bandstand energy, and the just-around-the-block neighborhood feeling of Philly allows me to put the city in a context that thus far is unique in my understanding of Northeastern cities. I understand why people would want to call this place home.