So, we’re at the Cherry Blossom Festival in DC, feet worn down to tiny nubs by now from all the walking. Today was the Japanese Street Festival part of the celebration of the peak blooming period for the cherry trees that populate vast swaths of downtown DC. I went ahead of The Boyf, who caught up with me later, and while walking around on my own I noticed some people dressed pretty elaborately as various characters. Aha, I thought, Of course there are cosplayers here.

There were some really amazing ones, some of whom I managed to photograph, but the most interesting was this one guy whose character I in no way recognized but he had big, white hair and a fedora. Physically, he strongly resembled my friend and fraternity brother Donald B.: tall, thin, strikingly handsome. He was of that general physical type, anyway. White Haired Guy and several other cosplayers had kind of set up shop with a “Have Your Picture Taken with a Cosplayer” sign, and a band of late-teens young women had set up camp around them. The young women would stand and watch people get their pictures taken and then, whenever any of the cosplayers in any way changed their pose or struck a particularly character-specific pose, these young women would squeal as with one voice and clap with excitement. It was very charming, actually, and my heart went out to them.

Then some other guy, with big red hair and of the same general morphology as, for instance, my friend and fraternity brother Damien (average height, athletic build, boyish good looks), happened to walk by at that time. Their characters seemed to have something to do with one another, as the two guys looked at one another with surprise and shouted something at one another and the chorus of young women took up sustained squeals of surprise, fingertips pressed to their lips as though to hold back some measure of their glee.

The White-Haired Guy ran over to The Red-Haired Guy, and they hugged, and the chorus of young women all squealed. Then Red Hair and White Hair pulled apart just a bit as though to go their separate ways but after a moment Red Hair threw his arms around White Hair’s shoulders, hoisted himself aloft and wrapped his legs around White Hair’s waist. White Hair made what I can best describe as a cry of pleasure and proceeded to hump the living hell out of Red Hair, right there, right in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The chorus went wild. They shifted directly from squeals to screams. They were turning to one another in pleasant shock and screaming at one another, then turning back to the extremely… vigorous display of dry-humping – both Red Hair and White Hair were really getting into it, I have to say – and then they’d scream some more.

I was so surprised I didn’t manage to get a single picture of them in action.

That isn’t my point, though. My point is that for thirty seconds I was in the middle of a crowd of thousands on Pennsylvania Avenue and at the same time I was trapped in a small space with what appeared to be the gay softcore anime equivalent to The Beatles and half a dozen of their biggest fans and it was fascinating.