May, here in the Upper Midwest, is when spring finally starts. The trees are budding out all over Median Lake, crocuses are poking up from flowerbeds, and that pile of snow in the parking lot behind City Hall is melted down to its stubborn, pyramidal core of gravel and ice. Gardeners have been putting in all the tomatoes they started on their kitchen windowsills back in April — Mother’s Day weekend, that’s the date to get them in the ground, and spend the next two months dreaming of big, juicy slices of heirloom beefsteaks for caprese and BLTs, brilliant red Romas to can for sauce.
It’s also time for Median Lake Pride, second to last weekend of May. Yes, Pride is traditionally in June. But when you’re planning Pride in a town midway between Des Moines and Minneapolis, and within road-trip distance of Milwaukee and Chicago, you have to make some accommodation. We know better than to try to compete with the big cities, even if we do know how to put on a show in Median Lake.
And, honey, it has not been a quiet Pride Week in Median Lake.
Steven Kramer has been working on the Pride planning committee since back in March. They meet Friday afternoons in the back room of Jane’s Addictions, the bookstore slash coffee shop owned and operated by Jan Rosales and Moira Bender, the committee co-chairs. So then after meetings, Steven has to hoof it four blocks up Main Street to Third Avenue, past Larsson Brothers Hardware, to get ready for Disco Night at the Rainbow Garland Tavern.
Normally Steven can set up the DJ booth while Chase Miller, the Garland’s go-go dancer, tends bar. Chase works days as a trainer at the Vault, the fancy gym in the old Farmers and Merchants Bank building, and he never books a client later than 5pm. A few Fridays ago, though, Chase didn’t show until almost seven-thirty, leaving Steven to serve the early birds himself.
Chase apologized when he finally hustled in and ducked into the back to get undressed for work. He took his place at the bar, still brushing glitter highlighting onto his pecs. “I got distracted,” he said.
“You mean dick-stracted?” said Steven.
“I do not!” Chase said. “G and T, William?” he asked Bill Burkhardt, who’d just taken his regular seat at the bar. “You know I know how to schedule my gentlemen callers,” he said as he added the tonic.
“I do?” said Bill.
“Not you, hon,” said Chase.
Steven rolled his eyes and hit “play” on a dance remix of “The Lusty Month of May.”
As the night wore on, though, Chase’s denials started to gain plausibility via sheer repetition. By the time he got up on the platform with the dancer pole to start gyrating to “Break my Soul”, Steven just about believed him. But it wasn’t until Chase had twirled and twerked through four sets — with vodka soda breaks in between — that he finally explained himself. He’d lost track of time having dinner with his great aunt.
“I thought your family was in Michigan,” said Steven.
“Yeah,” Chase said, pouring himself a second, vodka-less, soda. “Okay. She’s not really my great aunt. But its’s kind of like she is?”
Chase had made a genuine intergenerational friendship.
Earlier that week he’d taken a new route home from the gym, just to see a different part of town. And he’d happened upon a little old lady on her knees by a flowerbed, totally absorbed in plotting out what looked like letters with garden stakes and string.
Chase couldn’t help himself. He stopped behind her and silently spelled it out: L-E-T- – G-O- – A-N-D- – L-E-T- – G-O-D? “Oh YAAAAAS, girlfriend! I love it.”
Chase is a trainer and a dancer, so he’s seen some impressive moves, but he’d never seen someone jump that high from a kneeling position.
He helped the lady up and made sure there were no broken bones — he’s got a first aid certification, too — and apologized profusely. The lady said don’t worry about it, and introduced herself as Gladys. “As in Knight?!” Chase gasped.
“Oh, don’t I wish,” she said, laughing. He asked about the flowerbed. She said she liked to use the front beds for messages, and that one was just what felt right this year: Let go and let God. “I need to stop worrying and take life as it comes,” Gladys said. “That’s what my granddaughter keeps telling me.”
“Good advice!” said Chase, who could tell you the season and broadcast date for the episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race in which “Let go and let God” was a minor punchline. He asked Gladys what she was going to actually plant to spell it out, and she said she was still thinking about it, but why don’t they discuss options over a cup of tea? And, well, he couldn’t see why not.
She brought him in and sat him down on the living room couch, then ducked into the kitchen to start the kettle, and Chase realized he could be sitting in his own grandmother’s living room.
The couch was the same kind of overstuffed floral brocade as Grandma Miller’ had had’s sofa, and Gladys also kept the most recent issues of National Geographic and Good News Magazine on her coffee table. There was an upright piano along one wall next to the stereo system, and a glass-fronted curio cabinet full of photographs and porcelain figurines. Grandma Miller had collected limited-edition anthropomorphic frogs; Gladys favored kittens with horrifyingly cute oversized eyes.
“Tea will be just a moment,” said Gladys, coming in to place a plate of cookies on the coffee table. “How about some music?” And she put a CD in the stereo, and Chase just about fell off the couch. It was the same album Grandma Miller had played while she set up for Sunday dinner: the Mennonite Hour Singers, a capella four-part harmony, not a one of the songs less than a century old, most right out of the hymnal he’d known from church.
“Lift Your Glad Voices,” they sang. Chase couldn’t even say how long it had been since he’d heard that song, much less sung along, standing in the pews beside his parents. He’d never really learned how to harmonize, just picked a place on the staff and tried to keep up, and in a congregation of two hundred it all somehow came together.
He choked a bit.
“Are you all right, dear?” Gladys was standing over him, looking concerned.
Chase shook his head and assured her he was fine, just surprised by recognition. “I haven’t heard this since I left home,” he said.
“Well!” said Gladys. “I’m glad I picked that CD, then.” And she picked up the plate of cookies and made him take one.
“Let us break bread together,” sang the Mennonite Hour chorus.
So Chase spent another hour or more over tea and cookies with Gladys, chatting about nothing in particular — she told him about her quilting circle at Lakeview United Methodist, and about her granddaughter Eva, who’s starting a job on the faculty at Median Lake State College in the fall. He told her how he’d come to Minnesota for college and then ended up staying when a friend decided to start a gym in the old Farmers and Merchants bank building. He didn’t tell her why he hadn’t looked for something back in Michigan, and she didn’t ask.
Eventually he heard a clock chime — Gladys had an actual mechanical grandfather clock in the front hallway — and he realized he needed to get ready for his shift at the Garland. He made his excuses and Gladys just smiled and said she’d enjoyed talking. Maybe he could come by for dinner later in the week?
And he’d said yes!
“So you were at dinner with Gladys tonight?” Steven asked, when Chase had told him all this.
“Yep! I helped plant the flowerbed, and she made hotdish.”
Of course she had.
Steven was flabbergasted. Not by the hotdish, but by the thought of the exceptionally fit man currently standing in front of him in nothing but spangled briefs, drinking tea with a grandmotherly lady who collected cat figurines. Which, okay, yes, if there’s one thing a gay man knows how to do, it’s code-switch. But he’d never seen this side of Chase. They work together most nights, and Chase tells Steven all about his funniest training clients and his most awkward adventures with “gentlemen callers”. But he’s never really talked about his family.
“It’s just sort of nice, you know?” Chase said, vaguely, and Steven suddenly had an insight.
“How long has it been since you saw your grandma?” he asked.
Well, she’d died years ago. And that was actually the last time Steven had been back in Michigan — her funeral. “Oh, hon,” said Steven. “I’m sorry.”
No, said Chase, that’s just how it was. “My folks don’t really want to hear about my life, since I came out.”
“Oh, hon,” Steven said again. Another thought struck him. “Chase,” he said, “Chase, did you ever come out to your grandma?”
“Yeah, I didn’t?” Chase looked glum. “The last I saw her, right before I left for college, I thought maybe I would.” But she’d brought out cookies, and wanted to talk about all his plans, and he couldn’t bring himself to break the mood.
“Oh, hon,” Steven said, for lack of anything better to say. “You know, she might have been happy to have you trust her with that.”
“She would not,” said Chase.
Steven had a third thought, somehow more terrible than the previous two. He stepped around the bar and poured a fresh vodka soda for Chase, and another one for himself. And he gave Chase a moment to sip the drink before he asked: “So does Gladys know?”
Chase pursed his lips. “I mean. She met me in my gym clothes.” He has an influencer deal with a workout-wear brand that makes hot pink shorts with a two-inch inseam. “Literally the first word I said to her was YASSS.”
Steven raised an eyebrow. “Would that have meant anything to your grandma?”
Chase took an intense interest in his vodka soda.
“Oh,” said Steven. “Oh, hon.”
They spent the rest of that Disco Night arguing about Gladys. Chase insisted that she could in principle have clocked him — he is, after all, clockable at a hundred paces — but as Steven kept pointing out, heterosexuals have notoriously bad gaydar, especially heterosexuals of the more venerable generations. So fine, maybe, Chase would concede, but did that mean he had to come out to Gladys? Why did he need to announce his sexual orientation to this sweet little old lady he’d only known for a week?
To which Steven said, why do you need to not come out to this lady you’ve only known for a week?
They didn’t reach any agreement by the end of the night. As they locked up the bar, Chase announced that he didn’t care what Steven thought, he had plans for dinner with Gladys again next Thursday, and he wasn’t going to do anything to mess with that appointment.
“I’m not saying you can’t go to dinner,” said Steven. “I’m just saying you can’t keep seeing her without letting her know who you are.”
“It’s none of your business what she knows or what she doesn’t!” Chase snapped.
“I can’t believe you’re going back in the closet for hotdish!” Steven said.
“I am not!” said Chase. “I’m going back in the closet for — for my grandma.” And he flounced away before Steven could come up with a retort.
Chase pointedly did not mention Gladys on his next several shifts at the Garland. But then this past Thursday night he came in for Drag Bingo looking distinctly sheepish. Steven noticed, but decided he’d let Chase make the first move. Anyway, he was busy getting into face to host bingo in his drag persona, Tater Tot Hot Pants. Chase was there to spin the bingo cage and to wear nothing but a jock strap and a Twins cap.
Chase made it through two whole rounds of bingo before he cracked. On the next intermission he explained that he’d had dinner with Gladys again, but this time he hadn’t been the only guest. Gladys had invited her granddaughter Eva.
“I don’t want to say I told you so,” said Tater Tot. “Okay, fine, yes, I do: I told you so! She tried to set you two up, didn’t she?”
Chase nodded.
When Tater Tot stopped laughing, which was only a bit performative, she asked, “so did Eva know what was going on?”
She’d certainly seemed to, Chase said, though the two of them hadn’t gotten a moment away from Gladys to compare notes.
“Hon,” said Tater Tot. “What is your plan here? You can’t pretend to start dating Eva!”
Chase admitted that seemed like a bad choice.
“Maybe we could go on one date, and then just ‘decide’ we’re not a match,” he said.
“No!” Tater Tot snatched up a sheaf of cocktail napkins from the bar and flapped it back and forth across his face. (Tater Tot is more, shall we say, expressive than Steven.) “Bad idea! First, you need Eva to sign on, and second, you know that’s not going to stop Gladys from trying to get you together. That’s not what grandmothers of eligible young ladies do when they’ve found a nice, polite, handsome, not-at-all-conspicuously-single young man.”
Chase had to agree that these were all irrefutable points. He’d either have to stop visiting Gladys or tell her plainly why he was not the prospective grandson-in-law she wanted.
“But I just can’t,” he said. “Gladys is so nice! I like visiting her.”
“Hon,” said Tater Tot. “The truth shall set you free.”
But now it was Pride weekend, and Chase was so busy that he didn’t need to decide what to do about Gladys. Friday Disco Night was the opening event, and the Garland was packed until closing. Saturday morning The Vault sponsored a 5k race around downtown and a group-training special afterwards, and somehow Chase was in charge of both. Saturday Night was another big one for the Garland, with a gaggle of guest queens and go-gos down from the Twin Cities. And then finally Sunday morning was the Pride Festival and parade.
The festival is just a dozen or so booths from local businesses and nonprofits, set up in Lakefront Park, and the parade marches from the far end of downtown up Main Street to arrive at the festival entrance. It’s nothing on the scale of what you see in the Twin Cities or Chicago or even Des Moines, but the Pride committee rounds up a good list of marchers.
Like any good Pride parade, there’s a vanguard of Dykes on Bikes, though in our case the bikes have been bicycles ever since the Dykes voted to go carbon-neutral. There’s usually a couple state legislators — or candidates, when the DFL is out of office — marching with Mayor Munson. There’s parents and their queer kids of all ages representing Median Lake PFLAG, students from the Pride Center at Median Lake State College, and a squadron of femmes on rollerblades from the Median Lake roller derby team, Skates on the Plains. There’s a delegation from First Avenue Lutheran, the church with the Pride flag out front, carrying a banner that reads “God is love”. The visiting queens and their go-go dancers prance and twirl down the street, passing out favors. There’s only one actual float, though, and of course it’s for the Rainbow Garland Tavern.
The Garland’s float is near the back of the parade, to get the crowd as warmed-up as possible before the last big group of marchers. It’s basically a bedazzled flatbed truck with a sound system fitted on to play Steven’s best disco mix at full volume, the bed packed with Garland staff and regulars dancing in various states of undress. Tater Tot Hot Pants presides from a platform up by the cab, doing her best parade wave and tossing strands of rainbow beads to the crowd. At the other end, for the first time this year, there’s another platform, where Chase dances. Chase had talked Steven — who then persuaded the rest of the Pride committee — into installing the platform, with a dancer pole.
The parade got underway, and as the truck lurched forward, Tater Tot had the sudden worry that Chase had never actually practiced on the dance pole while the float was in motion. But he waited until they were up to speed before he starte to spin around the pole, and Tater Tot didn’t hear anything creak too ominously. And Chase looked every bit as good as he’d told the committee he would — he wore rainbow-striped tights and he’d painted more rainbows along his torso and arms. The widest part of a swing around the pole took him so far off the back of the truck bed he looked like a Pride flag with spectacularly defined abs. Everyone on the sidewalk went wild when they saw him.
Not all of the going wild was in the good way, unfortunately. As the float came up on the intersection with Second Avenue, Tater Tot saw the inevitable knot of protestors. Median Lake is not big enough to attact the attention of Westboro Baptist, but there are more than a few folks in town who don’t like to see Main Street full of happily half-dressed homosexuals and their friends. Tater Tot counted about a dozen of them, none apparently under the age of fifty, waving signs and banners with messages that were about as mean as we get in Minnesota: REPENT FROM WICKEDNESS, or SHAME, or LET GO OF SIN AND LET GOD IN.
Why did that last one seem familiar, Tater Tot wondered.
Behind her on the truck bed she saw that Chase had also spotted the protesters, and he was winding up to do something especially flamboyant for them. He hadn’t attempted an upside-down split from the top of the pole yet — he can barely pull that off on the stationary pole in the Garland — but if he timed it right, it’d give them the fullest possible view of his sparkly, rainbow-striped butt.
Tater Tot watched him launch into an extra-hard swing around the pole to build up momentum, once, twice, and a third time around. And then on that third swing, as he was shifting his weight for the flip, she heard him cry out, “Gladys?!”
And Tater Tot thought she heard one of the protesters say, “Chase?!”
Tater Tot saw what was going to happen so clearly that as it happened, she felt like she was seeing it a second time. She had an impulse to dive across the truck bed to catch Chase, but he was already halfway into the upside-down split, and also he’d lost the rhythm of the move in that moment of distraction. So first he lost his balance and then, as he circled upwards, he lost his grip on the pole.
He launched off the float ass-first, and Tater Tot swore afterwards that he trailed a visible cometary tail of glitter. He described a beautiful homosexual parabola, elegantly curved by the motion of the float and his original trajectory around the pole — almost to the point of cartwheeling, gaily, through the air. And he landed square in the middle of the anti-Pride protesters, as if he’d been aimed by a quarterback who was at least a four on the Kinsey Scale.
Somehow, miraculously, no one was badly hurt.
Gladys dodged, and Chase had a more or less soft landing on top of a couple of the younger protesters. He picked himself up pretty quickly and immediately went into first aid mode. The people he’d landed on were stunned enough to let him do concussion checks, but not so stunned that they didn’t eventually realize who was administering aid. Tater Tot and a couple of the Minneapolis drag artists swooped in to rescue Chase — as they recovered, the protesters were working up to being mad at Chase, but they parted like the Red Sea before the majesty of the queens.
Chase and Tater Tot got back aboard the float and it continued the drive to the park, but Chase didn’t resume dancing. For the rest of the parade route he just sat on the edge of his platform, waving half-heartedly.
When they got off the float at the festival entrance, Tater Tot gave him a hug, and she was trying to think of something not-snarky to say when up stepped a young woman in a black tee and cutoff shorts, her hair tied back with a rainbow bandana.
This was Eva, it turned out. “I don’t know if I expected it to happen this way,” she said, “but I was afraid someone was in for a disappointment as soon as Gran introduced you.”
“Your Gran seemed so nice!” Chase said.
“Oh, she is, for sure,” said Eva. “As long as you don’t talk about anything that’s happened since 1984.”
Chase chuckled in spite of himself.
“You know what she spelled out in that flowerbed last year, right?” said Eva.
“Oh god,” said Tater Tot.
“Put it this way: it was just four letters.”
Chase and Tater Tot groaned in harmony.
“Listen,” said Eva, “I used to think I had a hilariously long list of stories about Gran’s dark side, but I think you just beat the whole bunch. Want to go find some drinks and a bag of ice and we’ll see how they measure up?”
Sure, why not, said Chase. He’d even trade her some stories from growing up in Michigan, if she liked.
Tater Tot shoo’ed them off towards the beer garden. But first, she made sure Eva knew that whenever she wanted, there was a tab open for her at the Garland.
Offered with apologies (to the extent apologies are necessary) to Garrison Keillor. If you’ve made it this far, perhaps you’d like to know what’s happened other weeks in Median Lake. This is a newish thing for me, and there might be more if it goes over well? If you’ve enjoyed it, consider donating to help turn out the vote for progressive candidates this November.