You again. I’m tempted to go easy on you because we have history. You ask this question every time you pull up to the bar, and I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a broader issue at play. You want to know if a Negroni is a girl drink.
It’s not. But you’re not going to believe me. You’re stuck in the whirling gyre of unstable masculinity. Of hetero-normative behavior matrices. Like a drone with no signal, you’re circling until someone rescues you, or the batteries run out, and here’s the thing.
Your question is like a bright neon sign hanging over a pool table in a gay bar. With great looping fuchsia cursive it reduces your question to its irreducible fear. AM I GAY?
That’s what you want to know. You there in your flannel-forward over-pocketed cargo shortness. With your Boho ethnic tribal linen hemp cords. Mala bead bracelets halfway to your elbow, and your hair in a Samurai knob. You with your toe socks and your Che shirt. Your front pocket wallet and your turtle shell Harry Potters. You with your easily hidden geometric goat tattoo. You, with your high-fiving fist-bumping half-hugging bruh-I-love-you-manning infinite shield of manliness. Hear me now: you’re so gay.
Sexuality is a delicious hot steamy swamp of red-hot horn-dog monkey-humping. It’s sweaty salty grabass and butt-stuff hanker hunger, and there’s not a got damn thing you can do about it. Go ahead. Don the deep blue uniform of cis declarative denim. Wear checkered shirts and cowboy boots. But that big belt buckle you’re hiding behind isn’t a shield. It’s another pink neon sign of drowsy, looping cursives declaring: UNDECIDED.
How do I know this? he asks, polishing a glass. Because I’m a grown-ass man. And because you asked the dumbest question a male creature such as yourself may ask: is a Negroni a girl drink?
Not because of the specifics of the drink. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the boozy head-swirling dipsomaniacal hand-on-your-glutes sexual innuendo that goes into (and comes out of) this very Italian cocktail, the Negroni. It’s one of the classic three-part drinks, a 1:1:1 potion that makes a Long Island Iced tea look like it comes in a box with a straw. One part gin (think about swapping in some good bourbon), one part Campari, one part sweet vermouth. Like your porn streams, the variations are endless.
I feel like you’re windmilling here, sexual identity-wise. I can see this whole thing is spiraling out of control. And the truth is you did just ask a simple question (is a negroni a girl drink?). So perhaps I should be considerate and just answer you, which, of course, I will, after one last thing.
Ask yourself why you’re asking. Did the nice man with the impeccably groomed beard order one for you? Or was it the lady with biceps that look like two pythons wrestling under a sheet? Are you, a male type person, wondering if this cocktail will pin your Locus Operandi to the g spot on the slinky supine spectrum of getting it on? Allow me to soothe your affliction: it will not. It cannot. It’s a fucking beverage, man. Is a Negroni a girl drink? No, Eugene. It’s this:
Ingredients:
Method:
Pour it all into a mixing jar filled with ice. Stir until chilled. Try not to think about your sad, pointless display of manful armaments. Strain into a coupe, which is femme as hell, son.
