Club Diva

My Beloved Daughter is what is known at a lipstick lesbian. For her, fashion is sacred. When she was four, I tried to buy her this adorable little flannel shirt. She checked it out, then looked me in the eye and said, “You can buy it, but I won’t wear it.”

BD came out to me when she was a senior in college. Actually, I kind of yanked the closet door open and hollered, “Come out of there!” She’d been involved in the BiGLM movement at school, but I actually didn’t think too much about it until she was elected Secretary. Then, one day over the phone, I asked her, “So, when are you planning to tell me that you’re gay?”

And she said, “I was afraid if I told you, you wouldn’t love me any more.”

Thinking about that, even today, makes my heart just fold in on itself. I can’t even imagine not loving her, and I can’t understand how she could think that could ever happen.

“There is nothing you can do,” I said, “nothing you can be, that can ever change how much I love you. Even if I have to visit you in prison, I’ll still love you.”

After that promising beginning, however, it hasn’t always been effortless. I say thoughtless things (like the time I invited her and Phinn to my house for Mother’s Day, assuming that her Life Partner would spend the day with her own mother, only to be told, “She wants to spend the day with her son, Mom.” Duh.)

They live about sixty miles from me and one day she called to say that she and some friends were coming to Dayton to visit a club. The friends had a male impersonator act, and they were to talk to the club owner about a gig. Did Old Dog and I want to go out to dinner with them?

Sure.

Dinner was pleasant, no Joe Biden moments on my part, but afterwards, BD said, “Do you know how to get to Club Diva?”

I froze. “Club Diva?”

She immediately became defensive. “Yes, Club Diva. Do you have a problem with that?”

I couldn’t back away from this confrontation fast enough. “Nooo, no problem at all,” I assured her.

Club Diva is a dive bar in one of the most redneck sections of town. Hoodchick’s brother-in-law used to cruise the joint, figuring his chances for a pickup had to be good where the ratio of women to men ran so much in his favor. (Not that I’m calling Hoodchick’s BIL a redneck – I can think of other words that are a lot more definitive.)

Old Dog gave them directions (I don’t do geography) and off they went.

The next morning when I gave her a call to see how things went, she was furious.

“Why didn’t you tell me what kind of place it was?” she demanded.

“What do you mean?”

In the tone of one describing an encounter with a Nazi war criminal, she said, “There were women there in polyester blazers, Mom. And mullets.”

Which just goes to show that we’re all prejudiced against something.