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somewhere. It’s all Brazilians now. Brazilians are the new Italians.”
    Martin groaned and went back to his beer. John was always quoting from an article he’d read somewhere, usually in some stupid fashion magazine if his turns of phrase were anything to go by, although this latest pearl of wisdom did sound more like something he’d read in one of the gay bar rags. Most people only picked up those papers to look at the pictures—John based his entire worldview on them. He never read newspapers, never watched the television news, and wasn’t remotely embarrassed to say that he had no interest in current affairs, other than who was currently fucking whom and whether or not they were likely to be found out. There were times when John’s behavior led Martin to suspect that he hadn’t been raised in the real world at all, but grown in a gay test tube. He viewed the world through a gay glass, sometimes darkly, sometimes with rainbow colors, but always with his eye firmly focused on the next opportunity he could exploit for either profit or pleasure. According to John, there were three ingredients necessary for achieving happiness as a gay man—plenty of money, a well-toned body and a boyfriend (or preferably more than one if there was enough of you to go around and you could get away with it). Right now, Martin scored a resounding nil on all three counts. The more he thought about it, agreeing to meet John for drinks this evening probably wasn’t the smartest decision he had ever made.
    To make matters worse, Kudos had never been one of Martin’s favorite gay bars. Some years before, it had been the setting for one of the biggest rows he had ever had with Christopher. It started when Christopher kept going on about how attractive all the bar staff were. Martin had responded by asking if he thought the management might consider giving him a job behind the bar—not that he wanted one, but since Christopher clearly found the bar staff here so desirable, he wanted to know where he rated in the scheme of things. Christopher had laughed and said that Martin was a little too old and a little too overweight for that kind of opportunity to ever come his way. John had heard this story several times, but that hadn’t stopped him from insisting that Kudos would be the ideal place to meet.
    “I think rent boys should be forced to pay back some of their earnings to the gay community,” John went on. “I mean, they don’t pay any income tax, so they should pay some sort of community tax. God knows, they make enough money out of other gay men. It wouldn’t hurt them to give something back. And the pressure they put on the rest of us is so unfair. I mean, it’s easy to have a perfect body when you don’t have a proper job and can spend every waking hour at the gym. And the attitude of some of them! You’d swear they were pop stars or something, the way they swan around the place. There was this one holding up the queue for the loos in the Departure Lounge at Heaven the other week. We got into a right slanging match. She told me, ‘Prostitution is the oldest profession.’ I said, ‘Yes, dear, and you’ve obviously been in it since the beginning.’”
    “I thought you had to be some sort of VIP to get into the Departure Lounge,” Martin said. “Isn’t it supposed to be members only?”
    “Oh, they’ll let anyone in these days,” John replied airily, oblivious to the fact that he didn’t exactly qualify as a VIP himself. “Someone told me they saw the Pet Shop Boys in there once, but I’ve never seen anyone remotely famous. Just a few dried-up club promoters, a couple of ‘scene celebrities’ and a load of old whores reeking of Kouros.” He paused to inspect his stomach, which was virtually nonexistent beneath a white ribbed T-shirt. “Do you think I need to lose a bit of weight?”
    “You look fine,” Martin said, wondering when the conversation was going to get back to him and his painfully new single