In 2023, I graduated from college and moved back home. My friends and I, who were more or less in the same
position as me, made it a habit to go thrifting together at least twice a month. After all, I didn't
have a car in college, so I barely got to go thrifting, and one of my favorite chains, Half Price Books, didn't
even have locations in the state I had spent the last 3 years living in.
It didn't take long for me to learn the wonders of the clearance CD section. Most, if not all, CDs in the
clearance section were $2, and one of my first hits was 8.21 A Blue Bunny Compilation,
an experimental 2000s compilation album featuring a few early tracks by Sufjan Stevens. So I always made it a habit
to at least skim the clearance whenever we went.
Clearance tends to carry a bad name: close to expiration, missing pieces, damaged, or otherwise unwanted and
undesirable. And don't get me wrong, there's definitely a lot of poo here. Lots of the stuff you'd find in the
shelves at Goodwill... Christmas music, nature sounds, pop country slop, That's What I Call Music, always
a few copies of Savage Garden and Enya. But clearance here also means stuff that's so rare and out there that nobody
wants it, and that's where I come in. I love my nonsense.
And about a year or so later, in August of 2024, we found these.
Gay Happening, compilation albums decorated with pictures of shirtless, muscular men, 2000s European and Latin American
music awards show entries, and lots and lots of club hits. If you think this is all the CDs we found, it's not.
Every time we thought we had found the last one, there were more. All donated on August 6, all very gay, and distinctly,
all absolutely REEKING of cigarettes. Some of the discs, although I never took pictures unfortunately, were
literally stained gold with how much cigarette smoke they had encountered. But beyond that, and maybe a bit of sun
damage on a few of the spines, they were all in amazing condition. We started any pulling CDs from the rack that
sounded even remotely like something 806 would've had, and surely enough, they were his, all identified by
that date and that odor.. I only ended up purchasing two of them, Gay Happening volumes 3 and 4.
And frankly, I regret not buying more.
Because I mean, come on? Vintage German underwear ads in the middle of the booklet? That's amazing!
But there's a sadness to it as well. The more I thought about it, the more I began to pick up on the story
behind all of this. A trove of gay CDs. Music awards shows from the 2000s. Nothing recent. Nothing modern.
Gay Happening 3 and 4 released in 95 and 96 respectively. The newest release I was able to pin was... 2005.
The cigarettes, the stale cigarette smell that permeated their soft paper booklets and stained their discs.
And all of them, every single one, donated on the same day.
He died, didn't he?
I mean, there's not really a concrete way to know, unfortunately. Unless somebody somehow finds
this article and contacts me directly with more information. Based on when these CDs released and how stained
they are, it's pretty likely that he owned them for a long time, maybe even since release day. But beyond that, it's
impossible to truly say how old he was when he first started collecting them. He could've been 20 in 1995,
making him only 50 in 2024 when the CDs were donated. But who's to say he didn't spend his 20s living through the AIDS crisis?
That would've put him in his 80s by the time the donation came around. And regardless, cancer doesn't discriminate
and neither do things like car accidents.
In college, I knew this older gay man who lived just down the street from the grocery store I worked at. He was
a musician when he was younger. He walked with a cane and lived in a basement apartment like me. He did a
lot of drugs in his youth, and drank a lot of coffee. I drew him a picture of a cockroach holding a martini, and he
hung it up on his fridge. I had been to his apartment a few times with some of my coworkers. It was filled with
art, and he always had house music playing on the TV. I never got to know him that well. Frankly, I was
intimidated by how much older than me he was, and how friendly he could be. But he had a good spirit.
Getting to know older gay people, ones who grew up when the world was much unkinder, ones who aren't chronically
online and obsessed with being percieved in a certain way, it's such a blessing. I wish I could've
met 806. The area I live in, there's not a lot of gay anything. And if he really is gone, there's even
less of it now. I can only hope that he's up there in gay heaven, listening to Italo Fresh hits and
dancing with sexy muscular men on Reagan's grave.
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