Cautionary tales for 'omelette makers'

It helps to know the slang for dyke when visiting foreign countries, writes Stephanie Theobald

Cautionary tales for 'omelette makers'


I was walking through a park in Barcelona recently with a couple of female friends when an old man appeared and said something to one of them about an omelette. My friend, who has rusty O-level Spanish, was puzzled by this. Remembering a chapter in her school textbook about how, when you are on a train in Spain, you are supposed to offer everyone in the carriage a piece of your chorizo sandwich or a slice of your tortilla, she thought that maybe he was offering her, albeit grumpily, some of his lunch.

I explained that what he was saying was not tortilla but tortillera or 'omelette maker' which is Spanish slang for dyke. She said she quite liked being an 'omelette maker'. Normally in Spain the men think she's straight and she's una puta (whore).

One of the morals of this tale is to learn some slang when you visit foreign countries so you know when you're being offered a hamburger by a friendly local and when you are being queer-bashed. ('Omelette maker' doesn't work in all Spanish-speaking countries. In Mexico, for instance, you are a 'shoe'.)

The main point, though, seems to be that you can never predict what's coming your way as a gay or lesbian traveller. Of my two friends, the one the old man clocked as an 'omelette maker' had long hair and was wearing a skirt and high heels, whereas her girlfriend was the one with the classic dykey look of cropped hair, jeans and fat behind. I thought it was pretty modern of him - as if he had been attending secret gender studies night classes.

In my experience, a lot of the worries you might have as a gay traveller are unfounded. Such as the worry of bringing back a woman to your hotel room when you have had a lucky night out and the concierge giving you grief about it. In fact, the only time a concierge has ever given me grief about this was when, during my days in the twilight world of heterosexuality, I tried to bring an Italian squaddie back to my hotel in Venice. The Catholic patriarch of a concierge wouldn't let me, although you could tell that had it been a woman he wouldn't have been too sure where the Bible stood on that one.

Another good thing about being a gay traveller is that you can show up anywhere in the world and, no matter how much of a freak you are, you will always have somewhere to go to meet supposedly like-minded people - whether in a gay bar or even just passing in the street. You know the secret password while the straights are still stuck in a nightmare sangria bar wondering how to find the action. Having lived on and off in Barcelona for the past four years, I have always found southern Europe a good place to be gay in. Latin women prefer holding each other's hands to holding handbags and it is not unusual to see straight men strutting along with their arms around each other's shoulders. Southern Europe has never gone in for the strident 'We're here! We're queer! And we're not going shopping!' school of North American and north European gay politics, and this has its pros and cons. It means that southern Europe is like northern Europe in the 1930s, but with sun: there are a lot of lavender marriages and there is a lot of sneaking off to the gay ruins at night. It also means that people don't feel their gender is policed as much and consequently concepts of masculinity and femininity are more nebulous. It gives rise to machismo, for instance, which is the fascinating meeting of testosterone with the big girl's blouse imperative.

There are three sorts of gays abroad. First, those who find it liberating and will act in a manner they would never dream of in their own street - in the way that Vita Sackville-West and her gang used to run off to Paris with their lesbian lovers and drag up as men. The second type is freaked out by the mere fact of being abroad - by the garlic and the foreign languages - and so opts for the gay ghetto holiday concept: Mykonos, say, for the boys and South Beach, Florida, for the girls. The third type acts pretty much the same abroad as he or she does at home. This means not acting as if your partner has bubonic plague when there are straights around, in the hope that you won't be spotted as 'one of them'. It also means not copping out when you check into the hotel. 'No, we'd like a double bed, please,' might be hard the first time but it gets easier.

The only problem I ever had with the bed thing was last summer in a tiny town in Texas called Columbus. It was late and the only accommodation to be had was a place called the Baker Motel, although it could have been the Bates Motel. The owner was like a porny Scooby Doo character. It was the way his eyes started kind of salivating when we said we wanted one bed and then his whole rigmarole about if we wanted queen size or California king size which was all pretty pointless because the room was so gross - an odour of chain-smoking soldiers and hookers, with recently sprayed cockroaches still squirming on the floor - that no sex happened anyway.

My least favourite holiday destination is Negril, Jamaica, where my stay was blighted partly by being called a 'blood clot' (the Jamaican version of 'omelette maker') every time I held my girlfriend's hand and partly by being pestered when I walked around on my own about if I'd ever been sixty-nined by a Jamaican man.

My top three holiday destinations are Sitges off-season, Thailand and New York in the summer. Thailand because Buddhists are mellow, Sitges because you have a good mix of the little old ladies and their donkeys vibe, the liberal intelligentsia vibe and the international fashion bunny 'girl, you look fierce!' vibe. New York because there is Fire Island when you get bored. You must go to the Cherry Grove bit of the island, though, as opposed to the snooty-gayboys-with-good-bodies section called The Pines. Cherry Grove is filled with lesbians, chubby people and untrendy gayboys who are up for going to outdoor school disco-type clubs peopled with everyone from Timothy Leary lookalikes to Ivana Trump doubles. Plus, you can take plastic cups of pina coladas from the bars on to the beach without getting arrested by the police or having someone tell you that you need to join AA, as is often the way in America.

In the gay ghetto holiday stakes, the boys have an easier time of it than the girls. Gayboys have more money so they have the best beaches (Mykonos versus the grey sands of Eressos in Lesbos).

They also have a better brand image. Remember all that to-do in Lesbos a couple of years ago with the mayor of the island getting worked up about the Candy Bar's lesbian package tour? The 'Wet Pussy Pool Party' really did for him but you know that if all the women had rocked up with loads of spending money looking like Elizabeth Taylor the authorities would have been just fine.

Maybe it's not just a straight thing, though. The South Beach girls in Florida, who go for the glamorous Jennifer Lopez look, think that English lesbians are under-manicured alcoholics in funny clothes. But then, as you can't help but notice if you travel a lot, there's no accounting for taste.

· Sucking Shrimp by Stephanie Theobald is published by Hodder and Stoughton at £10.99.