Montrose, the Neighborhood That Gave Us Everything

Montrose was unofficially codified as the nexus of queer life in Houston. If you held a map to the wall, I could tell you how we came to be on those streets.

This is Bayou Diaries, a column by Bryan Washington on his life and history in diverse, expansive Houston.

We met at Juan Mon’s, this old sandwich shop on Taft, something so predictable to the folks who knew us that we made up another story altogether. In one version, it’s this used bookstore by Rice. In another, you fished me out of the college pool by Calhoun where you lifeguarded. For a minute, we chalked it all up to winning the lottery on the apps—the type of shit that elicited polite smiles from our straight friends, beside ahhs and clapping from the gays.

But the truth is that we sat at separate tables for months. Juan Mon’s sold self-described “international” tortas, hiding milanesa and carne asada under fat tomato slices, between halves of the flakiest baguettes. Whenever Juan wasn’t around, the dudes behind the counter were always cheesing, always fucking around on their phones, and whenever you gave them your order they’d take like two years to bring it out. One time I asked the cashier if the Acapulco was any spicier than the Cuernavaca, and without even looking up, he told me to ask you, because you got it all the time.

The deli sat on the edge of Montrose, right before I-45 bisects the Business District from the Theatre District. It’s hard to imagine now, but Houston’s preeminent gayborhood wasn’t always so glossy, slicked-down and buffeted on both ends by high-rises and “elevated” cocktail bars. Developed back in 1911, the neighborhood was conceived as a streetcar suburb, and about five decades later it became a magnet for Houston’s counter-culture. In the early ’70s, the neighborhood was unofficially codified as the nexus of queer life in Houston. That’s the part you and I cared about. Because, for all its diversity, Houston hasn’t always been the most welcoming city for everyone.

From 2004 to 2010, we lived in the largest city with a lesbian mayor. But in 2003, Houston was the epicenter of Lawrence V. Texas, which repealed anti-sodomy laws in fourteen states after Lawrence and a partner were jailed for violating Texas’s Homosexual Conduct Law, which is still on the books. In 2015, Houston held court on HERO (Houston Equal Rights Ordinance), which was almost immediately dubbed “the bathroom bill,” which led to anti-trans fervor throughout the city to redirect from the legislation’s actual intent. And in 2017, the state’s lieutenant governor attempted to enact yet another “bathroom bill” through the Texas Legislature, which was only defeated after Big Money and the NBA and the NCAA threatened to pull their cash from the region contingent upon the bill’s enactment.

You came from west Houston, just outside of the city. I’d come from even further west than that. We’d both been called fags by our families. Both of our families had, at some point, referred to Montrose as solely for fags. We laughed about how they’d arrived at the same conclusion, despite the differences of language and continents between them, over lukániko and falafel on Studemont. Later, we cried about the same shit, over fried chicken and biscuits down the road, licking our fingers while the lady sitting behind you crossed her arms and said she’d told us the seasoning was hot.

We weren’t sure what the rules were. But we knew that if there was anything to learn, it’d reside between the bridges flanking Richmond and Westheimer: so we taught each other. Didn’t know what we actually needed to know, so we didn’t leave anything out. One time, over enchiladas on Yoakum, our waitress brought us a single check, and you started laughing, out of nowhere, because, shit, who would’ve fucking thought? One night, I got so mad about some bullshit thing that I punched a brick wall on West Gray, and you got so mad that you did, too, and a group of dudes in a black pick-up yelled “GUAAAAPOOOOS” behind us. One night, you found a still-lit cigarette in the concrete on Fairview, and you picked it up and took a drag and let the smoke drift from your mouth to mine, entirely too unbothered by the bass from the bars surrounding us—until a man came up behind us, and we both tensed up.

But then he put a hand on our shoulders, squeezed and walked on. We watched him whistle as he turned the corner by the trees up the road. And it was wild, thinking about how many like us had done the very same on these same streets, on these same blocks. A street is a street is a street is a street, and it can hold nothing or absolutely everything.

*

One time we hit this diner east of the loop for some pancakes we’d heard about, and it took all of forty-two seconds to realize we’d made a mistake. Our shorts were too short. Our shirts were too bright. The sound in the restaurant dropped a full decibel once we sat down, and the other patrons sipped at their coffees, chewing on their forks. In the midst of their not paying us any mind, they made us the center of attention.

We sat in this booth and we both shut the hell up and we almost ran out of there before our waiter leant over the table. He was a fleshy guy in glasses. Around our age, and brown. He had the heaviest lisp, and an accent we couldn’t place, and he called us both “sir,” grinning and laughing at our shitty jokes. When we got to asking about his life, he told us, in a whisper, about how he wanted to be a nurse at this clinic by California and Waugh, and how he just needed to finish saving up for an apartment, and when we told him we spent a lot of time in the area, had just come from it, actually, he got the biggest smile on his face. All of a sudden, we had context. We shared a history. We were brethren. He brought our dinner out like birthday cakes, smiling the whole time.

I don’t paint pictures and I don’t write poems and I told myself I wouldn’t do that about Montrose. You’d have called that bullshit. But you would’ve also understood. And if you held a map to the wall, I could tell you how we came to be on those streets. And I could also, probably, tell you exactly where we came to an end. Because the thing about a map is that it’s only what we remember, and we are so full of memories it will never only be one thing.

Language is malleable, and meaning changes with time, and I am not confident that either of us could distill the experience of finding ourselves in that neighborhood into words. But the last time we spoke, a few months back, you only texted a street name, with a question mark, and I answered, and that was it. Because it was an entire conversation. And that is, I guess, what a neighborhood can do.

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Montrose, today, is the epicenter of the city’s looming gentrification crisis. Rents have skyrocketed. Livability has thinned. In a lot of ways, the direction of the neighborhood is greater Houston’s direction, too.

But I’ll still watch the Chinese tourists, dressed to the nines, as they make their way through boutique coffee shops, staging disposable cups by the register for Instagram. And I’ll watch Mexican aunts walk their toddlers past Agora, stopping at the puddles in the cracks by the sidewalk. And, in the evenings, I’ll watch fucked-up couples stumble out of each other’s arms alongside Numbers, arguing but unable to separate, and the punk kids skateboarding by Tacos Tierra Caliente on West Alabama, and I’ll think of that night where you ordered for the two of us in the sloping, awkward Spanish that I didn’t know you spoke, and we ate tortas soaked in salsa verde on the curb, and you asked me, honestly, soberly, Who wouldn’t fall in love with this fucking neighborhood?

Juan Mon’s called it quits before we did. They tried franchising for a minute, going the way of our city’s food trucks. But then that didn’t take, and business thinned, and the deli died—but not before we posted up on their patio one year during Pride. This was before the city shifted the parade further downtown. We sipped plastic cups of rum and watermelon juice we’d accepted from strangers. That was your first parade, and my second. You didn’t like crowds, or the way they mingled on that street. And we were both vaguely aware, even then, that some spaces maybe weren’t as inclusive as they deemed themselves to be.

But we also knew that, sometimes, you are pleasantly surprised. So we went anyway. We held hands as we walked down Willard and Bomar afterward. We could hear the night parade from the deli’s wooden porch. We spat seeds into the grass. We fumbled our fingers and waved at new friends. Eventually, we knew it was time to head home, but another thing we’d learned is that we were already there.

Bryan taught a six-week fiction workshop with Catapult this summer. If you’d like to be notified when Bryan teaches for Catapult again, please follow this link.