It's A Big, Gay Country By Mike Roselle

If you read yesterday’s piece by Josh, you would have been led to believe that I was out of control at a gay bar, and that I acted like a sissy. Josh is only half right, because if you know me, you know that while sometimes it may seem I’m out of control, I am never really am. These kinds of untrue rumors are what caused me to be fired from my last job, and are now threatening my current job. Let me tell you what really happened.<>We decided to visit AmVets because it was rumored to be where gays hung out. Everyone knows this, evidently, but the people who run the bar. I didn’t realize that if we told everybody AmVets is a gay bar that the gay people would have to go to the Old Post, where the juke box isn’t as good and there’s no Karaoke. While I never signed up to sing a Karaoke song, it is true that I did pick “Okie from Muskogee”. If you are going to sing “Okie From Muskogee” in a gay bar that’s not sure if it is a gay bar, then you had better be ready to sing your heart out. I did. I had the crowd behind me. Several people were actually listing to me sing my heart out. Then my knee went out. I fell to the floor. I screamed in pain. I asked them to call an ambulance. They were laughing. They thought this was all a big joke. I screamed some more.

Josh, as we have mentioned many times before, is a guide. To be a guide, you must be trained as a “First Responder”. His keen first responder training told him I needed to go home, lie down and put some ice on it and keep my knee elevated over my head for a couple of days. He was right, but he still needs to read the chapter on bedside manners. That’s if they apply to screaming idiots on the dance floor of what is rumored to be a gay bar in Montana. To all my gay Lowbagger friends in Missoula, and Craig I am talking to you, I did not mean to be a buzz kill, and if they will let me back in, I will finish singing “Okie From Muskogee” at the Am Vets someday.

Great Falls has a really good gay bar too, but there are hardly ever any gays in it. It is usually full of Cowboys, or people who say they are. If you saw these guys in San Francisco, you’d think that they were gay. That’s because I used to dress that way in San Francisco. I kept getting hit on by gay guys, and no women would talk to me. I stopped dressing like that. But no, in Montana wearing tight pants, shoes with pointy toes and paying three-hundred dollars for a hat that doesn’t keep your ears warm doesn’t mean you are gay, or a Cowboy. But it doesn’t mean your not.

Since the Sip ‘n Dip is a Tiki Bar from the bar up to and including the ceiling, and a Cowboy Bar from the tables to the floor, one could see how so many people get confused when they walk into the Sip ‘n Dip. And in case you are not yet confused enough, there is a Mermaid swimming in a tank behind the bar. Don’t worry, animal rights people, I already called PETA and they say there are no such things as Mermaids, and if there were, this would be pretty much the job to have. But this night the Mermaid was out fighting fires, pretty much the only other job in Great Falls that pays in the summer, and it pays better. 

I have mentioned before in this space that Wayne-O made me go on the Wild Missouri River with a bunch of good-looking Wilderness Homos summer before last. I did not mention that the trip was quite fun, and no one hit on me, even the good looking women river guides who were not lesbians. The guy guys knew how to put up their tents and take them down without having to bug them, which is very unusual for clients on a Lewis and Clark trip. All of them had been in the great outdoors before, even in rugged country. Imagine! None of them had every seen  anything like the Sip ‘n Dip.

The experience at the Sip ‘n Dip was pretty much the opposite of what happened at the AmVets the other night. These Cowboys did not like guys dancing with each other, especially Big Country in his cowboy hat, shaking what his mama gave him with his shirt off. Big Country is not gay, but several of the Wilderness Homos said that they wished he was. They liked to watch him pack up the boats in the morning in his speedos while they drank their coffee. Tonight he definitely looked gay dancing with the good-looking Wilderness Homos in the Sip ‘n Dip, and the Cowboys did not seem to like it. Big Country paid no attention. His eyes were fixed on the spinning crystal ball right over his head. If you knew Big Country you would no why those Cowboys did not worry him. He is a big Alabama farm boy and I never knew a big Alabama farm boy who had to be worried about having his ass kicked by a bunch of poser Cowboys in Tiki Bar in Montana that looks like, but is not, a gay bar. So if you are gay and want to go to the Sip ‘n Dip, you should take Big Country with you. He likes to dance.

Mike Roselle talked seriously about purchasing another pair of cowboy boots the other day.