Gay Travel Forum

Please join me this year to celebrate “The Diversity of Love”. The party will take place on May 19, 2007 starting at 7:30 PM. It will be held at Hollywood Bistro, 2409 Grant Street (behind Southbeach), Houston, Texas 77006. RSVP by May 12, 2007.

This year party will feature live entertaintment. The show starts at 8:30 PM. I am extremeley grateful that the following artists will perform.

Tribal Lillies: Houston premiere belly dance troupe.

China Doll: My guest of honor. China Doll is the only Vietnamese Drag performer in Houston. She will also be celebrating her birthday.

Yna Nova: Houston’s Filipino Empress. Watch out Imelda!

Christina Lee: Christina will be moving back to Houston after a self imposed exile to Las Vegas. We all hope that Christina will make it back in time for my show. As they say, “what happened in Vegas stays in Vegas”!

I also want to thank Danny and Jeff at Hollywood Bistro for letting me throw the party at their place. There will be a Hors D’oeuvres reception. Beverage(soda, wine, beer, coffee) and a complete dinner menu including pizza can be purchased at the bistro. Please support Hollywood Bistro.

I will show my latest video, “In My Eyes”, a short video regarding children around the world who have been displaced by poverty, natural disasters, wars & cultural intolerance. I created this video by using footages I saw on CNN, National Geographic, Oprah’s, and other news broadcast around the world. I will also present my updated version of “Secrets of Love 2007″ also known as “the Rosie’s version”. This funny video will balance out the serious tone of the first. Finally, “You Put Your Arms Around Me” is a video celebrating the community showing pictures of friends and family.

SEE YOU ON MAY 19, 2007.

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On May 13, 2006 I had a party for my two latest videos, Secrets of Love and  Amazing Life.  The party was attended by 60 guests and we all had a great time.  Meteor was the perfect place for the party.  The manager, Armando, and his staff were nice and kind.  The party guests who have not been to Meteor before expressed to me how much they like the place.

My co hosts were my friends, Ian, Gary, Annie, Diana, Sandy, Ngoc and Jessie.  The five ladies  passed out Mardi Gras beads and gift bags to the guests while Gary, Ian and my childhood friend, Katrina helped me set up our buffet reception.

There were plenty of food courtesy of my brother, James.  We had Vietnamese spring rolls, Vietnamese meat pastry (pate chaud), chicken salad and crab salad finger sandwiches, turkey wraps, veggies and dips, ham and cheese plate, duck pate (I made this myself) with crispy mini toast.  The deserts were plentiful with assorted petit fours, fruit shaped marzipan and cream puffs.  The glucose level on the desert table was enough to send a diabetic like me into sugar shock.

I took the mike right before show time at 8:40 PM to thank Meteor and my brother and  introduced my guest of honor, Ray Hill.  Thank you Ray for being my guest of honor.  As a human  right activist, Ray Hill is an inspiration to me.  Ray’s kind words about me left me speechless and I forgot to thank my hosts and hostesses.

Up to show time, I was actually very nervous about showing my videos.  The cheap and old equipment I have at home did not play the videos well and I was preparing for a major embarrassment.  To put it this way, “it looked like crap” when I played it on my 5 year old DVD player and my three year old computer.  What a pleasant surprise it was to see my videos exactly as I had envisioned it to be.  There was one small exception. The small exception was that the word Clip ended up looking exactly as Cllp.  I thought it was a typo, but it was not.  The process of transferring the videos from my hard drive to a CD disc via VCD format distorted the letter i.  Regardless, the videos looked and sound great coming from the fine and expensive equipment of Meteor.

I want to also thank everyone who attended this party.  My guests made this party so nice and great.  I met old friends and made new friends. This was the first of an annual event.  There will be a “Love Party”2007.

While I was in LA from January 2, 2005 to January 6, 2005, I met up with a friend I have not seen since 1988. The guy looks the same, cute as ever comparing to me who has gained a whopping 40 pounds. I was lucky that I actually missed the heavy rain that came the week before, and on the 6th the rain came down again as we headed back to Vegas for the Consumer Electronic Show and the Porn Convention which I ended up going to neither. My friend, Andrew, hitched a ride with me and Gary to spend more time with us. We stayed at the Harrah’s Las Vegas Hotel and Casino. This hotel is boring as hell, but Gary and I gamble exclusively at Harrah’s, so our room was comp by the casino.

That Thursday evening, Andrew convinced me and Gary to go with him to a “new bar”on the Strip, Krave. Here is the shocker, I rarely ever go to the bars anymore, and I really did not want to go since gambling and watching bad cable TV is much more appealing to me. Andrew insisted that we go with him to this HustlaBall that was being held at Krave and that he knows one of the organizer and his friends. We walked on the Strip to the Aladdin Hotel Casino and discovered that Krave is literally attached to the Aladdin on the far right side looking at the Casino from the Strip. As we approached Krave around 11:00 PM, there were about five hundred people standing in two lines outside of the club. Tall, short, slim, fat, hunk, male, female, you name it, we were all there. I wanted to turn around and head back to my hotel room but Andrew insisted that we hang out in the VIP line. This unorganized mess of people including me was just standing there; really did not know what to do, how we were going to get in, how much the ticket cost etc… Miraculously, after standing around for only 10 minutes, one of the doormen recognized Andrew and we were whisked in to the club and paid only $20 per person at the door, leaving a throng of people behind. THE celebrity life – light, camera, action! AND we did not even have to buy bottle service to get in fast.

I want my fellow readers to know ahead that this review piece will be biased because I am not a fan of crowded clubs and bad “gay club techno music”. Mr. Andrew immediately hooked up with some of the people he recognized from LA and Gary and I meandered through the crowd for a rest room stop. After our bathroom duty, we headed to the bars and ordered two cranberry soda waters and stood in the section looking straight ahead at the stage.

HustlaBall was started by Tom Weise and Jeffrey Davids and they promote various events throughout the US and the world. You can read more about them through the net. There was going to be a show with all kind of porn stars and personalities including the porn director, Chi Chi La Rue. Unfortunately for me and Gary, we just don’t have the strength, stamina and patience to wait until the wee hours for the show to start. We spent about 1 ½ hour listening to really bad techno music (the same thumping beat) on a bad sound system and watching some skinny dancers, including one that was so slim that I swear his legs can fit through my shirt sleeves, trying to prance around on stage. My Cinderella syndrome kicked in and Gary and I said our goodbyes and headed back to the comfort of our penny slots at Harrah’s. I have declared both of us as two old boring queens. I feel bad that there were many people who had to stand in line for an hour to get in; therefore, I felt obligated to stay longer and enjoy it more. The reality of it is that I did not enjoy it more despite my friend Andrew’s description of what was going on in the VIP area where you can have you favorite dancer perform a lap dance. He also reminded me that had I was willing to stand there for an extra hour, I would have witnessed a really wild show with Chi Chi La Rue as MC, and the talents included the Las Vegas show dancers, Men Magazine’s Men of the Year, Zeb Atlas. Act two had the incredible, Queen of the Strip, Frank Marino (his show, La Cage at the Rio is very good) and a list of porn stars longer then Paris Hilton’s Sidekick II phone list.

In the end, even though it is not my cup of tea, I am glad I experienced a sample of it. That what life is about and just because I don’t enjoy something, it does not mean that I will never experience it. I just hope that slim dancer had something good to eat after the ball.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR – The first Saturday of June each year is Gay Day at the Magic Kingdom in World Disney World in Orlando, Florida.  For some, the festivity starts the week before in Pensacola, Fl during Memorial Day weekend.  With over 100,000 GBLT coming from all over the world, Orlando is the gay capital of the world.  Gary and I always spent our time at the Disney World’s park and this year we decided to go to a party.   What a party it was.  Beach Ball 8 was held at Disney’s Typhoon Lagoon water park on the Friday from 8:00 PM to 2:00 AM.  Over 6,000 scantily clad men and women danced, swum, slid, knocked down by waves, floated and soaked in the chlorinated water under a clear and starry sky. 

The late night activity took away all our strength and we barely survived the Gay Day at Magic Kingdom the following Saturday.  Exhausted, we left the park before the nightly fireworks.   On Sunday, we met with Gary’s sister, mom and dad.  They live near Tampa and drove 45 minutes to Orlando and spent the day with us.  We went to Disney’s Epcot and experienced the new ride, Mission: Space.  This ride produces the effect of going out to outer space.  I felt weightlessness with incredible g forces that pushed my cheeks back against my ear, and the pressure on my lungs was so great that it was hard to breathe at times.  Needless to say we all experienced motion sickness (vomit bag available) that we were done for the day and left the park for an early dinner. 

There are many groups of people that attend this event through out the years, and some of them organize big parties. I want my fellow Houstonian to join me.  I am working on gathering a large group of people to go with me next year and hopefully start a new tradition.  SO SAVE your money and next year put on your Mickey hat; I mean Minnie hat.