"I think it's a sneer more than a smile," I said. We were sitting in the lounge chairs in our towels, looking at magazines. "Not a smile at all. No way."

"She's smiling allright, like the cat that ate the damned canary" Brad said.

"Well, we know what she DIDN'T eat." I said (laughs all around).

"Jesus, look at that guy!" said Brad. I watched him pass. "Jesus" I answered.

Sunday afternoons at the sauna often lead to such topics but neither of us can get too excited about Camilla Parker-Bowles. She is going to be a PRINCESS CONSORT which is dumb. Princess Consort? That's like calling an aging drag queen a princess (Camilla kind of looks like an aging drag queen).

Gay people like William, tolerate Harry, yawn about Charles, could care less about Camilla and adored Diana. How does it happen? Why Judy and not Liza? Why Bette and Babs and Cher? Why Sir Elton and not Billy? Who knows how these things get started.

Camilla. Yawn. She's about as exciting as Wallace Simpson.

Just as I was about to say "the whole thing bores me silly," the guy walked past again. "Jesus" said Brad. "Yeah" I said.

"If he walks by a third time I'm following him into the steam room" Brad said.

"Go for it" I said.

He did and Brad did.

After about five minutes Brad came out. He sat down and looked at me with a sort of grin on his face.

"You were fast" I said. "Way fast" (not a compliment among our tribe).

"He wants to meet you." said Brad.

"You're kidding me."

"Nope. I'm not."

I went in the steam room and there he was. Waiting. Leaning against the wall, one leg up, flexed at the knee, flat foot against the tile. He was beautiful.

I stood next to him, casual-like and he looked over and smiled. Then he said hello. He's American! No mistaking the mid west accent.

Brad can't pick up an American to save his life but the German boys love him. Me, I'm king of the French, the Italian and the American pick up but can't get a German guy to look at me (except Sinead's hairdresser who thinks I'm hot).

As Mark and I were headed back to my rented room, we passed Brad, by now chatting with a German Jude Law. They watched us pass and the German guy said "Jesus."

When I said goodbye to Luke I thought it was going to be tough having him gone. It is but I feel oddly close to him anyway. He's such a friend and even though he's in New York and I am here, I feel close. We are emailing. That's the way of our postmodern friendship these days.

We exchanged St. Valentine's emails today which was nice. In his, I learned that he and his gal pal Veronica are going to a broadway show (where she plays the lead) and their new "couple friends" Hugh and Patrick are going with them. They will sit with the still as handsome as ever Luke while Veronica sings and dances her heart out on this closing night. Then they will all go out afterwards. What a happy foursome!

Now what are the odds of Luke falling in with homosexuals again? He is certainly not a red state kind of guy, that's for sure.

In a sense, having queer friends elevates one. It's terribly hip and even more hip if you pretend it's not hip and in fact isn't out of the ordinary at all. Gay slumming in the new conservative century. Closets for everyone! How terribly chic!

We know that they know and they know that we know and we all know that THEY don't know and won't and that THEY don't get it but we do because we all know. If it weren't so chic it could sure get tiring.

Have a nice Valentines date Luke and if you feel someone caressing your leg during the show, just go with it, it's probably Hugh thinking you're Patrick or vice versa.

Speaking of that, Luca and I are going to Venice and Verona. We are going to stay at the Hotel Aurora on Piazza Erbe (room 14) in Verona and at the Hotel Agli Alboretti in Venice.

Luca is Italian, originally from Milano and is working in Munich. He's a jazz piano player and handsomely latin (but not too hairy). I want him to meet Scott and Flannery because they will like him. Scott will analyze everything through good natured lenses and Flannery will lean forward into earnest conversations. I love Scott and Flannery and I do not say the "L" word lightly. I love them the same way I love Luke and Mick and Sinead and the absent minded professor and earth mother. Though I do not always see a lot of them, these people are my world here... my family.

I love Joe in a different way but now we are both used to the fact that as in two other key relationships at key times in my life the Marine Corps has administered the death knell to this, yet another military love affair. I will not do it again. I refuse to fall in love with another military man. Period.

Venice depresses Luke but I find it elevating. Glorious decay and remembered decadence. Maybe it's a gay thing although Venice is anything but a gay town. It's a conservative backwater, its population having shrunk to around 60,000 residents. It has been surviving on the respirator of tourism for the past few hundered years but doing so quite handsomely thank you very much.

During early Lent is just the time to go. The place is empty. It's the residents and you. I want to photograph, write, walk, lay in Luca's arms and enjoy carnal pleasures like eating and drinking too much. And other things. Not to put too fine a point on it.

Rodrigo and the crow are trying to fix me up with the fish king's ex now that Luke is out of the picture. It's the funniest thing. I TOLD them I am gay. I TOLD them I am in the early stages of seeing someone. I TOLD them that if I were going to be interested in a woman it would be either a tall thin black woman (doctor or lawyer) or Luke's mom (sorry Luke but she IS hot and she IS nice) but beyond all that, I could care for women and am not going to switch teams at this late date. Good Grief.

Apparently the fish king is back in the picture too. His pal who was working for Yukos jumped ship several months ago (before the court sold off all the assets) and is now working for LUKOIL. My god he has landed on his feet! (Why do I feel like Dominick Dunne just now?)

The fish king's ex has teased me with a phone call. How did she get my number? RodRIGO! (I'll bet the crow put him up to this)

She has told me that she wishes to meet me for coffee or dinner (I declined) and now she dangles the carrot of tranlsation contracts in front of my very nose! And a big contract.

Nothing that has to do with Russians and money comes without strings attached and anything that has to do with the fish king, his ex, LUCOIL or Yukos especially comes with strings attached. I wonder how they feel about translator homosexuals rebuffing the amorous advances of well healed and well spoiled ex wifes who also aren't so bad looking in a straight kind of way. Jesus I'm not going there.

I sure do wish my epal Dave would email me here, through the blog (buzz.nelson@gmail.com) because I cannot get into YAHOO and I have lost all contact with him and I have three new tattoos to tell him about and other things. I love you Dave. Happy Valentines Day. You too Luke, and Mick, and Sinead, and VERONICA, and Scott, and Flannery. ... and BRAD. You are ALL my valentines and I love you. I love you too absent minded professor and earth mother. Don't be pissed because I said you last.

Chemistry is a funny thing. You go to your hunky barber and you think he's flirting with you and you're gay and when you think about it you decide that he's just hunky and you're projecting and being stupid so you talk yourself out of the whole thing.

A lot of people don't trust chemistry. I have more and more faith in it. Chemistry, biology and all the other sciences.

I was at the sauna last night chatting up my Italian pal Marco (who was there with his boyfriend in their perennial quest for the perfect threesome). Then it happened. I heard a voice - sort of familiar - from behind. "That's a great looking haircut!" the voice said. I turned around. My hunky barber. Chemistry. We kissed and it was, as they say, ON.

Later I thought maybe I've made a mistake. What's it going to be like going to the barber now?

There's an insistent rain today. It's melting the snow. I'm glad I'm not outside, I hate the rain. I prefer snow to rain any day.

It's a sad thing to see a man so drunk he falls down the stairs but it happens. It's not just because it was Mardi Gras either. I've seen this guy before.

Sinead and Mick wouldn't have been caught dead in the place for all the cigarette smoke but God help me, I love it. Not least of which is because the Italian waiters are gorgeous and they flirt with me like nobody's business (I think Carlo who works the pizza oven is onto me though).

That guy was there again. I've seen him time and again out on the town with his horsey faced woman. They are bossy as hell and always a problem. I've been known to back out the door quietly if I see them before I am seated. They are that obnoxious and frankly I don't understand why the restaurant keeps letting them in. Especially on Mardi Gras. Fasching Dienstag (doesn't it sound just AWFUL in German?)... Carnevale.

The boys at the Italian joint close up shop a little early (11 PM) on Carnevale and then the party gets underway for the staff, their families and guests. I'm lucky enough to be a guest for the second year running and this time, my current squeeze got invited too. Probably because he's from Milano and charming not to mention good looking. LUCA. *sigh*

When it comes to looks and style those Italians are thick as theives. They could care less for gay but you'd better have a good looking white shirt, a great watch, sharp trousers and shoes and if you wear glasses they'd better be good ones. (I get mine at the fashion forward Ottica Urbani in Venice).

I took my guitar. I play great guitar. Mostly I'm a jazz guitar player but I can play Italian love songs like Grant took Richmond. LUCA loves it when I play Italian songs. Whereas I've never known him to be not in the mood, were he not, that would put him in which is silly because he's never not.

Those boys at the restaurant love my playing too and this Italian group that played for the party knows me. We play gypsy music too, not just Italian music. They're great. We're great.

That's when it happened. The pig man with his horsey woman came in the door thinking they were open still and, perceiving a party, proceeded to inflict himself upon the company.

When Nico, the owner, explained that it was a private gathering, the boozy bastard got loud (in loutish German vernacular) and was weaving about while waving his arms in the air. Before anyone knew what had happened he fell down the stairs in a hell of a crash. It almost knocked over the Venus di Milo lamp on the landing and did knock over the table and four chairs off to the side, at the bottom. The woman was braying after the man and hurling teutonic insults at Nico.

Nico was having none of it. He shut the door and returned to his guests. We launched into a kick ass version of "Minor Swing."

Somehow the descent of that ass made us all feel a little better because we each nurture our own hatred of those two. I wonder if they will go back? It's not the first time he has been that drunk and not the first time he has fallen down those stairs.

But last night, the Fat Tuesday night before Ash Wednesday and forty days of fasting and penitence, I think that maybe, just maybe... Nico might have given him a little push.

Later (four in the morning later) when we went to bed, Luca kissed me on the neck and said "I'll never push you down the stairs baby."

I learned about gay sex and GOOGLE from my big brother. One when he gave me the book "Everything you always wanted to blah blah blah" when I was still a teenager and the other later as it did not exist when I was a teenager. I've found both useful. It's a case of unitended consequence though.

My brother, a devout Christian, is mortified by the gay part and would be more mortified if he knew about some of the things I've GOOGLE'd.

The thing that prompted me thinking about this was a conversation I had with Mick and Sinead and SCOTT (enter SCOTT) on Friday night. The phone rang. It was Sinead inviting me to meet them for dinner.

I hadn't seen Sinead for an age and I hadn't seen Mick for a longer age. I saw Scott and his wife, Flannery before New Year's. Flannery couldn't come to dinner though. She's at her sinecure on a remote isle of the realm researching something or other.

Flannery is GERMAN but I thought she was SCOTTISH and I thought Scott was GERMAN. Then I heard them speak and I knew that Flannery was SCOTTISH and that Scott was BRITISH.

Scott has the inflection of an oxford don while Flannery sails verbally forth in a cutter blown by the winds of a lusty brogue. My GOD! Her language rolls over you. What a gal!

Later I found out that Flannery is GERMAN. I also realized that as long as I had known about Scott I had known on some level that he is SCOTTISH. I like his name. Scott. It means "wanderer" in Gaelic (a gaul told me that).

But none of this is getting any closer to gay sex or GOOGLE.

While at dinner, we were having a lusty discussion about Wanda Wadowski, a bleach blonde with big tits and a voracious appetite that used to work where we work. Wanda has bedded a lot of men. Me not included, neither Scott. Nor Mick. That doesn't mean she didn't try though. In my case she has real bragging rights because she is the only woman to ever put her tongue a lot of the way down my throat. (While it was happening I thought she had been an iguana in a past life. She has a lot of tounge).

Pretty soon I'll get to the GOOGLE part.

We were having such a great time with our Wanda stories. You'd have thought we were all dining on meow mix.

But then it happened. I said the "d" word. In context, of course. "Dildo." There it was. Now, gay people say this word a lot. In context, of course. But Sinead. Oh, Sinead! It was delicious. She had - for just the slightest moment - a stricken look and then a smile and then she said "I think that woman at the table next to us heard everything you said!"

I looked over. There, face down and ass up in a big plate of food and praising Jesus, sat one of the most baptist women I've ever seen. She was dressed so rigidly that she could have been John Ashcroft's wife out on the town. Taking my own turn to eavesdrop, I perceived dipthongs and wide vowels. Southerners, on vacation in our Shirley Temple of a town in the ALPS. Good GOD.

If I hadn't been with polite dinner company (by polite I mean NOT gay) I would have loudly recounted my recent adventures in homo-landia leaving out no detail. (I wonder, if hearing Scott's lovely british accent, she thought he was my husband? Many people who love Jesus think all people with British accents are gay).

Mick was charming. Amused and charming. Sinead was delightful and Scott, well, he's just a peach. We ordered more wine all around and dove headlong into the redmeat of more Wanda stories. Loud Wanda stories.

That's when I started to think of my brother the Christian and that LOOK he gave me the day he found Mike and me out on the deck snogging (that "snogging" is for you, Scott - see, I have vocabulary).

When I got home, I thought I would GOOGLE a little bit. Sinead told me that women don't use the "d" word, they say "vibrator." Therefore, I GOOGLE'd "vibrator" and GOOGLE'd the "d" word. The results were interesting, including several articles about the "d" word written by women. Hm. I think what Sinead meant was that POLITE women don't use the "d" word.

I'll bet Wanda uses the "d" word.