where you been?

Afternoon Clouds

ANOTHER CHAPTER.......

SERGIO

When I talk with him it's like I'm there, on the shores of the med, outside the bar he used to manage in portugal, smoking a cigarette and listening to his stories that are all delivered with a strong lisp. A lisp due to a bad front tooth that he keeps telling me he's going to have pulled one of these days, when he's got the spare cash. That's why he's kinda hiding in the picture, wanting to smile but not for me to see the tooth, although I've seen the tooth many times.

He tell's me his dream, to go back home and feel accepted as a gay man, have a child, find a partner who knows what they want, feel more complete.

Back home he was taunted and made fun of for being gay and looking wierd, but like he tell's me: "I'm not wierd man I'm just me. I'm just another man. Get over it."

So he came to Brighton in England where being gay is as openly accepted as anything else.

"The gay people in britian are too aggresive, for years they have moaned about equality and then they get it and what do they want to do with it, they want to be seperate from the rest, treated differently, like the whole gay pride thing man, look at me I'm gay and I'm different and it's okay now, wheres the equality in this? If it's so openly accepted now and theres no problems there shouldn't be a need for festivals. I'm gay, and some festival doesn't mean a fuck to me man. Yes it's more accepted here in britian now but look what I have to do as a foreigner to stay here."

To me, a british national his english is good, I have no problem understanding him. But to most brits he still sounds very much from another country. Therefore the kind of work he picks up is mostly low paid and manual. He is currently working in a small hotel where he is anything the general manager wants him to be, all for five pounds an hour: Breakfast cook, barman, room service, porter, waiter, glass collector, dishwasher, the list goes on. "I don't mind though really," he tell's me. "It's all experience for me, and I know one day I will go back home and will have become a different man, the kind of man that can live with just about anything."

HEART!