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A Party for the Ages

A brief anecdote: Last Saturday night, I attended an unbelievable party at my girlfriend Jill A. and my buddy Mike F.‘s apartment. It was perhaps the best soiree I’ve been to here at latitude zero.

Jill and Mike live with an Ecuadorian woman; she’s friends with a great number of gay men from Cuenca. The party consisted of the four of us–and about 25 gay Cuencanos (and, briefly, approximately 10 Ecuadorian lesbians).

The highlight of the evening was when a bunch of guys (no, I wasn’t one of them) turned the living room into a catwalk and strutted their stuff, two by two and one by one, to the delight of the thronging crowd. (“Estamos modelando!!” they exclaimed repeatedly.)

Most of the self-styled runway models had ditched their shirts. And all of them were grooving to the tunes thumping out of the stereo: lots and lots of Madonna and a little ABBA thrown in for good measure. It was an extraordinary scene. Gay culture is very underground here, where the Catholic church and Latino notions of masculinity reign supreme, and I’d never seen such outward displays of flamboyance.

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