Ask Anyone

A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED PLACE

My partner loves to have sex in public places, but I’m new in town. Can you recommend some spots? (Please bear in mind that I’m a bit of a germophobe.) —Al Fresco

The Webmaster says: Thanks to Joel Giambra’s festive, Christmas-colored budgets of 2004, the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library had to lay off over 200 employees—many of whom would otherwise be wandering around the Central Library and visiting all its secluded corners. With the library pages gone, there’s not a whole lot of reason for anybody to wander through the Obsolete Government Reports section on the second floor anymore, nor is the first-floor Foreign Fiction department very popular. If you can still get it up in the presence of USGS field reports and Pablo Neruda, more power to you.

The Food Reviewer says: In the name of journalism and because I know Webmaster’s addicted to making bad ideas sound good, I called his bluff and challenged him to come field-test the library with me. Also I could use a date, and I hear they’ve got a nice little sandwich shop in the library now, and besides, geeks make me hot.

Wouldn’t you know, the place is riddled with security cameras? And there’s a whole wall of fisheye mirrors in the second-floor business science and technology center so the librarians can see anyone between the shelves.

I think the library workers all think we’re terrorists now, looking for hidden spots all over the place, but once they review the security cam footage, if they’ve got an entrepreneurial spirit and a Web site, their money worries are over. (Especially if the trend takes off now the word’s out. It’s a whole new way to support our cultural institutions…)

The Gay Perspective: Try Toronto. It’s very clean.

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THE WHEEL DEAL

I’m a bartender, which means I listen to people’s intimate conversations all night long. Recently two regulars come in, a biker dude and his girlfriend, and they started drinking shots and beers and arguing. Apparently he had taken her to a pig roast the previous weekend and was feeling hurt because she’d left the party on the back of some other guy’s bike. She said she was just getting a ride home from the guy, not sleeping with him, so no big deal. He thought it was a big deal, and the argument got louder and louder, and more stultifyingly repetitive, as the night wore on. Who was right? —Ava Nutter

The Rollergirl says: I’m no expert on motorcycle etiquette, per se, but I do think that, as this is no longer the Victorian era, it is expected that a man and a woman can have friendly relationships with other members of the opposite sex without being presumed to be cheating. However, the man has something of a point, in that usually the woman sitting behind the man is that man’s partner, and so if a number of people saw her on the back of this other person’s bike, it might seem to imply that she was now his, and so his issue may well not be so much that she was on the bike, as that she was seen to be on the bike, which would lead a number of mutual acquaintances to assume she had changed partners.

In short, they’re both right. All that aside, the obvious solution is that this woman needs her own bike so that there is no mixed message over whose woman she is—she can be her own woman, and then the debate can center, more logically, over who she was banging in the bathroom, or something similarly unambiguous.

The Gadget Guy says: I can’t tell who’s right without knowing what bike the other guy was riding.

Let’s say he’s got a brand-new Harley Softail, just like every middle-aged “rebel” and his financial consultant. Lame! Sure it looks and runs great—he only takes it out of the garage so he can get a decent parking spot on Chippewa. Thing’s got about as much sex appeal as Fat Elvis, and the girl’s a damned fool.

Now let’s say it’s a ’79 Vespa P200E that looks better than it runs (and it don’t look too good neither). This is not an “image bike”—believe me—but this guy knows how to have a good time. Not only is she right to leave with him, but she’s a damned fool for coming back.

But the real question here is: If you can’t deal with drunk bikers arguing over stupid things, what are you doing tending bar?

The Gay Perspective: You dance with the boy who took you to the party. If the three were not interested to go home together, then Biker Gal should have allowed Biker Dude One to take her home from the pig roast, feigning headache if necessary. She then would have been free to hook up with Biker Dude Two, after having brushed her teeth, of course. What she did instead was rude, hurtful and untidy. (I trust after the drunken conversation this bartender overheard, nobody drove anyone anywhere, right?

Ask Anyone is local advice by and for local people. If you have a question for our panel of experts, please send it along to advice@artvoice.com.

Questions or Comments for Artvoice? Send e-mail to editorial@artvoice.com • Article last modified 8/8/2007 Issue Navigation> Issue Index > v6n32: All the City's a Stage (8/9/07) > Ask Anyone This Week's Issue • Artvoice Daily • Events Calendar • Classifieds