Painting fingernails

Labor Day weekend a couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to do something that I never got to do as a kid.

I went to camp.

No, you didn’t read incorrectly. It was actually summer camp, although it was only for a few days. There was swimming, treasure hunts, sleeping in bunkhouses, campfires and singing songs, roasting marshmallows and eating s’mores (although I have never had a s’more in my life) and talent shows. Daytime events included workshops on taking digital pictures and massage therapy. Some guys even took classes on mini-cake making with using an Easy-Bake® oven and the correct way to apply make-up when one is wearing drag or doing a drag show.

Oh, I guess I should have mentioned….it was camp for gay men only. Well, anyone who identified as gay, bi or transgendered to male.

Gay Camp is held once a year and the year I attended it was at Camp Hannibal Lechter (and still is). Ok, maybe the name of the camp is really Solomon Schechter, but my version makes it seem like so much more fun. Of course, the good folks running the camp for us weren’t anything like Hannibal Lechter, but it makes for a much more interesting story when painted my wa

Speaking of painting, and the real point of this blog entry….

One of the things that some of the 130 guys that were there did was paint their fingernails. The point of the weekend was that we were all in our own [gay] space and could be free to do whatever we wanted. And for a lot of men, that freedom meant that we could paint our fingernails if we wanted.

There were a lot of pretty colors, too. After all, they had all been picked out by gay guys for a gay weekend!

I have to admit that I did not paint my nails. I was too “straight” for that. While I did not look down on my fellow brothers for doing so, I felt it was not for me. Even amongst the gayest of the queers, I felt like I had a façade to maintain. I was jealous, too, of the guys that were free enough to walk about with ten different colors adorning the tips of their fingers. Manly guys that could kick most any dude’s ass and they were walking around with nail polish on, and yet I could not go that road.

Pity, isn’t it, that some of us choose to live this way? Usually it is not the things that we do that give us regrets, but the things that we do not do.

Next time, I will throw caution to the win and paint my nails.