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It was the first time in my entire life I'd felt seen and heard.
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Entire galaxies of faces and acquaintances who didn't exist in broad daylight, except those few I'd run into at the free STD clinic. Night after night, four to five times a week at the height. My college shelf stereo now blared those awful "club mix" compilation CDs as often as Elvis Costello and The Fall. I stopped wearing my glasses and started wearing more form-fitting clothing (now that I had a form to fit). I bleached out my hair and developed a gel addiction.
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I changed the way I walked, adopting more of a swish to signal to other potential mates. Within the first year, I'd shed most of my huskier frame. The gay bars were an aspirational space for how I felt I should look. (Alongside the gay bookstore, of which Boston had two, and which deserve other FPPs of their own.) Looking back, they were the best and the worst of lessons. And all through those next few pivotal years, it shaped - literally - my identity as a young adult gay man. Within a few months, the boy was history, but the gay bar remained. at least, not to the standard that they all were.
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And, now that I was in a physical space where dancing was the currency, I found that I had no actual idea how to do it. Everybody was so skinny and pretty and seemed to know one another and carried an air of degraded ironic sophistication. Whatever utopian dreams I had about this mythical planet where "52 Girls" was on constant rotation, this wasn't it. But, like all actual transformative experiences, it was terrifying.
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The mainstream queer media of the time always showed young people bursting into these spaces, as if finally liberated from their cocoons of torment and silence. As a fat Jewish introverted boy growing up in a narrow Midwestern industrial town, it was a dream that felt too far out of reach.Ī few years later, in late 1996, I was taken to my first gay bar by the first person I dared to call my boyfriend. I recall, in high school, gazing longingly at a giant B-52's poster in my local record shop, and wishing aloud for a place where people actually wanted to dance together for fun. Doubly so to know that, epidemiologically, they will be one of the last things allowed to come back (for the few that manage to). I'm sure it speaks strongly to my age, class, and social status that I have missed gay bars during this pandemic more than any other public space. Posted by Zephyrial at 8:02 PM on Februīeautiful essay, and I'm buying that book immediately. Sure, every gay bar is outdated and problematic and exclusive and replaceable-except for mine. Even as we go there to feel the embrace of community, we often feel isolated and alone. Rather than going off on a rant :-) I will confine myself to doing two things.įirst, I'll share this bit from the end of TFA:Īs Obama said after the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, they are “a safe haven, a place to sing and dance, and most importantly, to be who you truly are.” “We go out,” Lin writes, “to be gay.”Īt the same time, they are also places that inform us that to be gay is to like a specific kind of music, that enforce certain norms of beauty, that all too often exclude those not masculine enough, wealthy enough, or white enough. There's a heck of a lot to digest in this-and I haven't even read the book he's reviewing-but I feel very passionately about this (especially as fired off by the, I feel intentionally-provocative framing).