Sparkle: The Queerest Book You'll Ever Love by Rob Rosen

amen to that, my friend. And do you want to know something, Sparkle?” I asked. “I think I figured out what Gay Rule #4 is.”
    “Yeah, Secret, and just what might that be?”
    “That straight people and gay people are different. We’re better. Hey, that would make a great slogan: We’re here. We’re queer. We’re better.   Pretty nifty, don’t you think?”
    “Needs some tweaking, Sweetie, but we’ll work on it.”
    “Looking forward to it, Sparkle,” I replied, patting his back. “Looking forward to it.”

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Three
    From Fags to Riches
     
    So I bet you’re wondering from the nifty little title above what I did exactly to go from my near state of destitution to the aforementioned riches . Okay, riches might have been a slight overstatement. Let’s just say that I was no longer broke. See, Sparkle did indeed take care of me, just as he promised he would. How, you are no doubt asking, did he manage to do that? Well, before you make any judgments, let me just say on my own behalf that this is going to sound much worse than it actually was. Okay, so here goes: I became Sparkle’s, um… Sparkle’s… well, his houseboy, if you must know. (For a while, we toyed with calling me Glint to his Sparkle, but that, thankfully, didn’t pan out. Besides, I had a feeling that Secret would be my name for quite some time to come.)
    In any case, it was just temporary until something better came along, and I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. And, hell, it paid much more than I could ever have earned at Joe Joe’s. Besides, as you’re soon to find out, it was just a stepping-stone to the next better thing that did indeed come along.
    Basically, I cleaned his apartment, paid his bills (which were considerable), kept his date book (even more considerable), and ran his errands. All of this, believe it or not, kept me fairly busy, but it also afforded me a lot of down time. Probably the best part about it, looking back, was that I never had to go to work before ten o’clock, the hour at which Sparkle usually woke up. I also got to meet a ton of truly interesting, if not outright bizarre, people, because Sparkle, it turned out, had a lot more going on than met the eye.
    My very first excursion into the wilderness that was (and still hopefully is) Sparkle’s life was the very first time I went to brunch with him and some of his friends. Brunch, if you’re new to the madcap world of queer, is to the gay man what church is to a Catholic: something you do every Sunday whether you want to or not. And, I was soon to find out, Sparkle never, ever missed brunch. He was like the mailman of brunch: come rain, or sleet, or even jail (followed by bail, long story… wait), Sparkle was at a brunch or throwing a brunch. This also was one of my duties: to put brunches together. (You should be able to include that on a résumé, by the way: throws a fabulous brunch . It’s not easy, mind you.)
    Now that first brunch, it was a doozie. We went to Jellies, rhymes with nellies, which is just what that restaurant was full of that day. I’d never been around so many queens before in a single afternoon. Joe Joe’s was much butcher and more rugged; Jellies was pure zaniness compared to that place. And Jellies had something Joe Joe’s didn’t have: a full bar. Honestly, whoever had the idea to put a bar and a restaurant together, well, that guy should get a Nobel Prize or something. Because, I’m here to say, brunch without booze is like sex without coming.  Why bother?
    If you’ve never been to San Francisco, there’s something you should know: space is at a premium here. Offices are cramped, apartments are tiny (with bedrooms that are closets), and restaurants have their tables so packed together that by the time you’re done eating you’ve just had your first date with a guy you didn’t even arrive with. Jellies was just such a place. As a matter of fact, if you didn’t have a