Indianapolis, Indiana

The World Traveller Series I ~ Episode 20

by Brett Hayhoe

There is a particular kind of friendship that the Pride movement produces — one forged not in proximity or convenience but in shared conviction. The people you meet through InterPride are not people you have stumbled across. They have made choices about what they believe in, and those choices have brought them, improbably, to the same rooms as you, in cities scattered across every corner of the world. The friendships that form in those rooms tend to hold.

Chris and Michael are two such friends. They are also, as it happens, among the finest hosts a traveller could reasonably hope to find — which is a quality that only became apparent upon arrival, and which exceeded every expectation by a considerable margin.

Indianapolis was on the itinerary as the site of a forthcoming InterPride Annual General Meeting and World Conference. The visit was a site inspection — a working trip, purposeful and structured. What it turned out to be was considerably more than that.

The Welcome — A Room Fit for a Royalist

The question of where to stay during a site inspection is generally resolved by proximity to the conference venues and a reasonable standard of hotel room. On this occasion, a different arrangement presented itself: Chris and Michael offered their home. The offer was accepted without hesitation, because offers of that kind — made without calculation, from people you trust — deserve to be accepted without hesitation.

What no amount of trust or prior acquaintance had prepared for was the room itself.

Chris and Michael, being the kind of people who pay attention to the things that matter to the people they care about, had done something quite remarkable. Knowing the depth of the monarchist and royalist conviction that has characterised a good portion of this writer’s life, they had decorated the guest room accordingly. Picture frames had been sourced, filled with images of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and arranged alongside other significant members of the Windsor Mountbatten family. The room was, in every sense, a considered gesture — personal, generous, and entirely unexpected.

The thrill that accompanied stepping into that room does not diminish in the remembering. It is the kind of welcome that stays with a person — not because of its extravagance, which was not the point, but because of what it communicated. These are friends who had listened. Who remembered. Who translated that memory into something tangible. That is a rare quality in anyone.

The Site Inspection — Indianapolis Makes Its Case

A pre-conference site inspection follows a recognisable structure. The host committee presents their venue, the event locations, the city’s capacity to accommodate a gathering of international scale. The visiting delegation assesses, asks questions, forms impressions. It is purposeful work, and Indianapolis approached it with the seriousness it deserved.

The city, and the state of Indiana more broadly, acquitted themselves well. The tourist landmarks and public spaces are beautiful in their own quiet, Midwestern way — the Statehouse, the Monument Circle, the Cultural Trail threading through the urban grid. Indianapolis has the quality of a city that does not need to announce itself. It simply is what it is, and what it is is rather good.

Indiana is, politically, a Republican stronghold — a fact that would register as unremarkable in most contexts but carries particular significance when the event being inspected is an InterPride World Conference. The movement’s gatherings have, as a general rule, tended to land in cities and states that sit comfortably to the left of centre. Indianapolis represented something of a departure from that pattern.

It was, if anything, a welcome one. Right-of-centre politics in the Australian context operates differently — with considerably less of the heat and drama that attaches to the same position in the United States — and the political character of the city was not uncomfortable in any way. There is something clarifying, in fact, about a conference that takes place outside its natural habitat. The work is the same. The world it is trying to reach is considerably larger.

Beyond the Itinerary — The Indianapolis Chris and Michael Knew

The formal component of the visit — the site inspection, the delegation briefings, the venue walkthroughs — occupied the days. The evenings belonged to Chris and Michael, and Chris and Michael had an entirely different Indianapolis in mind.

The distinction between the city a visitor sees and the city a resident knows is, in most places, a significant one. Chris and Michael made it their project to close that gap. What followed was an introduction to the Indianapolis that does not appear in the visitor’s guide: restaurants and cafes of a quality that would be unremarkable in New York and remarkable almost anywhere else; nightclubs that operated at a level well above what a city of Indianapolis’s reputation might lead one to expect; and, most memorably, an encounter with several members of Indianapolis drag royalty, whose level of performance and personal presence would hold up in any city in the world.

These are the experiences that travel produces when the right people are involved. The venues are memorable, certainly — but it is the people who create the context that makes those venues something more than a room with food or music in it. Chris and Michael are that kind of people.

New York — Jackson Heights and the Man Who Would Not Let Me Sleep in the Gutter

The return journey to Melbourne, as was customary on American itineraries, included a stopover in New York City. Alan — a constant and valued presence in the New York chapter of this travelling life — was, as always, available for the kind of late-night adventure that New York both enables and rewards.

The destination, as on more than one previous occasion, was Jackson Heights — a neighbourhood in Queens that has cultivated a reputation for doing several things simultaneously: it is known for a certain edge, for some of the best gay bars in the city, and for the kind of atmosphere that makes arriving by daylight seem like a missed opportunity. Alan and I had our favourites. Caja Musicale and Friends Tavern were both revisited.

The evening proceeded with the enthusiasm that good company and good bars tend to produce. It proceeded, in fact, with perhaps more enthusiasm than was strictly advisable, such that upon departing Caja Musicale in the early hours, the footpath outside proved rather less stable than footpaths generally are — and the gutter, for a brief and undignified moment, appeared to have presented itself as a reasonable resting place.

It did not have the opportunity. A man of considerable size and considerable warmth — a gorgeous Latino gentleman whose instincts were entirely those of a protector — was immediately and impeccably present. He gathered the situation, and the traveller, into his large and capable arms, and delivered the following assessment with both authority and kindness: “Pappi, choo can’t sleep here.”

He handed me, with some ceremony, to Alan.

Alan took me home.

It is, in the catalogue of travel memories, one that produces a smile every time it surfaces. There is something about being rescued from a gutter by a stranger’s unsolicited kindness that restores a person’s faith in several things at once. The man whose name was never learned deserves his place in the record. He earned it.

Conclusion

Indianapolis is not a city that announces itself. It does not have the skyline of a Chicago or the mythology of a New York. What it has is a genuinely liveable quality — a sense of a city going about its life with competence and without pretension — and, in Chris and Michael, two people who demonstrated what the Pride movement at its best actually produces: friendships of substance, rooted in shared values, expressed in the most personal and generous of gestures.

A room full of Royal portraits. Drag queens who would stop a show in any city in the world. A Midwestern Republican state hosting a global conference for LGBTIQA+ equality. And, at the end of it all, a gutter in Queens and a man with the arms of a giant and the instincts of a guardian angel.

The World Traveller Series has produced stranger combinations. It has rarely produced better ones.

The World Traveller Series is written and produced by Brett Hayhoe — publisher, editor and administrator of Q Magazine. Read more at Q Magazine Blogs — Ask Brett Podcasts — Ask Brett | YouTube