“Why are you here, then?” I have asked myself that question almost every day for a year. Why am I single and living in Toledo? No kids. No warrants. I could feasibly go anywhere. I could move into a tent town in North Dakota and frack for a living. I could make donuts in Portland. I could join the Columbus boom of jobs and luxury condominiums. But I’m here, in Toledo, living out my untethered years in a city that no one has fought over since President Andrew Jackson forced a compromise with Michigan in 1836. I’m here, and I’m having a hell of a time.
I wasn’t the one asking the question this time. I was at Bretz, a gay bar on Adams Street on the night of the Gay Pride festival and this particular man could not understand why I was there if I was straight. “Why are you here if you aren’t gay?” he asked. He was trying to set up his single guy friend, and I was in the way.
Toledo is one of those places where people stick to what they know. South- siders go to south side bars. East-siders burn down east-side bars. And, apparently, straight guys don’t go to gay bars. “I came with a friend,” I said. It was the easiest way to avoid a conversation on the raucous dance floor with a Miley Cyrus dance remix blasting through both my ears. I’ll provide him with sensitivity training next time.
Bretz is a wild time on any given Thursday. Drinks are cheap and accented with food coloring. The dance floor is open and non-criticizing. The drag queens are confrontational in a non-threatening, theatrical kind of way. And the music never stops. So, on a Saturday, on the gayest night of the year, the place was more electric than a live wire.
Only a half-hour earlier, I was playing rigged carnival games at the German-American Festival. This was where I burned my mouth with freshly fried funnel cakes and soothed my wounds with German draught Dopplebocks in a boot- shaped glass. Fields were full of sauerkraut and schnitzel. People were strapped in lederhosen and suspenders. Toledo has more festivals than weekend days on a calendar. And if you’re single or a politician, you go to all of them.
It was the best Saturday I had had in awhile. I danced to techno remixes of every song Ryan Seacrest will play on the radio. I watched a pretzel eating contest that—I swear to you now—I will enter and win next year. I caught up with friends while we waited in port-o-potty lines and during the cheap cab ride between venues. I had more fun than I knew what to do with. In Toledo.
Toledoans often say that Toledo is a great place to grow up, and to raise a family. But what about all those years in between? Did these people all live somewhere else and then move back like salmon when they were ready to spawn? Did they just go to Mud Hens games every night until they felt like it was time to settle down? There must be more, right?
Yes. Yes, there is. And I’m going to tell you about it.
Dorian Slaybod is 27, a local attorney, single, and happily living in Toledo.