The last big event I went to before coronavirus/quarantine/lockdown was a rock show at the Danforth Music Hall. It’s a big old creaky venue in the neighborhood where I grew up. My brother’s band was opening for a group called the Beaches there, and my whole family had tickets.
I had slept over at my parents’ house the night before, to spend time with them and to make transport easier. As was often the case, I had brought a couple of sex toys with me for the visit, because I have phone sex with my partner Matt most nights and usually they tell me which toys they’d like me to have at the ready. For that particular stay, one of the toys I had brought was the Carter dildo by New York Toy Collective. Mine is bright pink and blue swirled together; it had been given to me by Matt a couple weeks earlier as a Valentine’s Day present.
The dildo was in my large leather tote as we lined up to get into the show, but I didn’t think anything of it – that tote also contained the other trappings of my typical overnight trips, like a toothbrush and a weed vape and a bottle of my antidepressants. Even when we got close to the front of the line and I saw that the venue’s bouncers were searching everyone’s bags, it didn’t occur to me that any kerfuffle would occur. There was nothing illegal in there, after all. (Marijuana is legalized in Canada.)
I got to the front. A big, burly guy wearing an official-looking security lanyard asked to see inside my bag, so I unzipped it for him, while continuing to chitchat idly with my mom, whose bag was being examined by the next guy over.