Superyó

By Marke B.

superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO

Yeah, I spent half of January in Madrid, kicking back among the mind-blowing art and architecture, noshing on some killer Spanish tapas, breaking it down Cali-style on the packed dance floors, and fiddling around in the dark back rooms. Wanna fight about it? I'd been all over Barcelona and Bilbao (where I accidentally inhaled a giant Richard Serra sculpture and thus birthed the world's first "Guggenheimlich maneuver"). But I'd never been to Madrid, despite its reputation for being Europe's club ground zero, mostly because I feared everyone there wore pastels unironically.

But the time for erecting those obstacles to taste has passed. Madrid is fab (and the folks no longer wear pastels — they wear yellow- and gray-washed pin-striped jeans, patchy collared shirts, and well-mussed mullets with a single dread hanging down the back). Hunky Beau and I saddled up the ol' Lufthansa and floated over for our friends' big gay socialist wedding (they can do that there), and we still got in enough dancing and prancing to make it slightly interesting to you. Once we touched down, we were immediately swallowed by the epic romance and endless energy that is a non-Republican regime.

Every evening, the salmon-tinted alabaster buildings of Cheuca (Madrid's version of the Castro) melt into the deep peach sunsets, and the sprawling, narrow streets bristle with raucous bars and clubs. Why Not? is Madrid's home base for cute barhoppers — it's the size of a metro car, with low, ornately carved ceilings and DJs who happily take a mash-up ax to Madonna's "Hung Up." The Eagle is just like the legendary gay biker Eagle Tavern here — except everyone's naked and doing it hardcore-style. Not for the faint of heart (or knee). And LL bustles with young hustlers and otherworldly drag shows — you've never seen girls work harder than while lip-synching to Menudo through a shower of tossed Euro coins.

Although I'm quite familiar with the Spanish tongue, I don't speak a lick of Espagnola. Maybe that's why I keep getting quail eggs on my burrito. Luckily, Hunky Beau, sexy polyglot that he is, soon had us surrounded by enough cute boys to fill a vat of draught vermouth. That's the big thing there — vermouth on tap. Hit up great bar Angel Sierra for the best in town. Also: gin and tonics. When you order one, Madrid bartenders basically pour you a highball full of gin and hand you a little bottle of Schwepps and a lemon. J'adore le Spain! Then, after six hours plus of drinking and clubhopping, Madrileños meet up at the local all-night chocolateria to down little cups of syrupy cocoa with fistfuls of fresh, hot churros. San Francisco needs that. It was frickin' bliss.

Alas, we missed out on two of Madrid's biggest clubs, Space of Sound, the block-long electronica mecca of Europe, and Pacha, which publishes its own giant, glossy monthly magazine and has famous-designer fashion spectacles practically every night. And we arrived too late to hit Pride, the giant pansexual monthly that takes over a medieval palace. But we did make it to the cavernous, neon-polka-dotted underground Club Cool, where Heavy Delta techno is already fashionably retro. I actually tore it up to a circuity treatment of Section 25's 1987 Factory Records nugget "Bad News Week." (The fact that I was surrounded by busty Brazilian trannies, whipping their long, blond feathered hair into Raphael-like halos probably helped me through it.)

We also got thumpy at Ohm, a huge, circular club in what looks like an art deco hotel ballroom. There the cute, cubbish DJs were deep into the early-house revival, sparked by last summer's release of "The Kings of House" (Rapster) by Masters at Work. I don't know about you, but any jock who drops Todd Terry's "Can U Feel It" over Mr. Fingers's "Can U Feel It" can feel me twice. Spain loves its classic house music. We were hard-pressed to find any alternaqueer or rock clubs, although the art school district had its fair share of Mohawks and latex bondage outfits queuing up for live shows by the likes of Dogfight and Lobos Negros.

After about a week in the sunny, drunken confines of Madrid's embrace, certain thoughts begin to fill one's bobbing head ("How do I get European Union citizenship?" "I didn't sign no god-damned Constitution!" "What's the name of this boy next to me in bed again?"). But our jaunt was over much too quickly, and we soon found ourselves landing abruptly in good ol' SF — just in time to see all the large, hairy, gay men arriving for the International Bear Rendezvous and the Senate applauding a five-year-old dog named Rex, seated next to Laura Bush during the State of the Union address.

America: Leave it and love it? *