This is by no means a new question, but it’s still one of my favorites.*
I was 19 or thereabouts, living in the San Gabriel Valley (not even THE Valley, the OTHER valley), half-heartedly attending Christian college, when I discovered a small contingent of students who would carpool into West Hollywood most weekends. The first weekend I decided to go along — strictly for observational purposes, of course, wink wink — they went to a tiny gay dive bar on the outskirts of Pasadena that was the most terrifying place in the world. Two important things happened almost the moment I walked in the door: a butch woman all in leather began roaring AC/DC’s “Big Balls” (it was a tiny gay bar, but not too tiny for a travel-sized karaoke stage), and a bartender poured us a round of rainbow shots. I was mesmerized by the magic of rainbow shots, and bitterly disappointed when, years later, someone pointed out that there was probably just differently-colored dye at the bottom of each shot glass.
I was deeply and quietly glad when, years after that, someone showed me that it is in fact possible to make authentic rainbow shots without the use of dye. There is still magic in this world, if you know where to look.
There were more and bigger and better gay bars to come, there were girlfriends to be wooed more or less tentatively in the very near future; but the Boulevard was the first, and the Boulevard got me through the early terror. I had set foot in a gay bar and no one had called my RA to report me. No one had thrown me out.
One year later, almost to the date, I would SWEAR I had seen Kate Moennig at the Abbey. I believed it so sincerely that even now I cannot trust the memory. Would I feel so strongly about something that had really happened?
Two years later, almost to the date, I went out dancing with the girl I was soon to come out for, along with two of her very nice but decidedly not-pro-gay friends. As the night wore on and the drinks made me bolder, I eventually suggested we visit a place I’d danced at before in Silverlake. It was a gay bar. “Mallory,” one of the other girls asked after she’d unsuccessfully tried to flirt with the male bartender. “Is this a gay bar? I…kind of think this might be a gay bar.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “This definitely isn’t a gay bar.”
The next time we went to that gay bar — for Reader, a gay bar it very certainly was — it was on a double date with my roommate and her girlfriend. Reader, we had a marvelous time.
*Perhaps this question is not terribly important to you; perhaps you are very young and attractive and allergic to labels and have never been to a gay bar and find all the queer society you need on Tumblr, in which case: I honor your experience. Tell me about the first gay GIF you ever printed out and placed under your pillow.
[Image via 365daysinLA]
Amazing, as always, Mallory! Curiously, I *ALSO* have a (quite possibly false?!) memory of seeing Kate Moennig at Here, which is (was?) next door to The Abbey! Like, I can picture it happening, but I have wondered lots of times if someone just told me of a sighting and I migrated it into my own memory banks?! I can believe that in the early to mid 2000s, we were ALL “seeing Kate Moennig” somewhere.
The first true gay bar I went to was what was known to me then as “Second on Second” in Manhattan. There was – and still is – a glowing rooster-shaped flourescent sign outside the door. I walked in to the packed room with two gay man friends, and quickly realized I was one of maybe three women in the place. The other two women were sitting at the bar, waving dollar bills at a cadre of white-speedoed dancers, who were not so delicately making their way around the wrap-around bar. They must have been taking Viagra or something, because they were visibly tenting the speedos the entire time I was there. I was awed by this physical trick, and spent my time at the bar drinking shitty gin and tonics and sneaking glances at the dancing men, enjoying the feeling of being no more noticeable than a lamp in the corner of a living room.
The first lesbian bar I went to was the now-closed Cattyshack in Brooklyn. It smelled weird and was full of women who gave me sullen, heavy-lidded glances, and I was thrilled.
I have no story to tell, but I want you to know I am paying attention. The usual tricks – smiling, nodding, making eye contact – don’t work on the internet. Thus this comment.
Oh my God, I love you.
Doctor Jay is a true gem. I am unsurprised but pleased to see you on The Toast, Internet acquaintance of mine! (usually I have a K in my name. ahem)
My first gay bar was when I was 19 and proved somewhat anticlimactic. Curiously, the bouncers really did care if I had my ID. I didn’t get thrown out, per se, but I did get shooed away rather unceremoniously.
i got kicked out of my first gay bar, too.
🙁
I mean, “shooed out unceremoniously” as you put it is probably more accurate but “kicked out” sounds far more impressive.
2005. I had moved to Boston maybe a year before, had come out-ish to my roommates (a gay dude and a lady), and the three of us headed across the river to exotic and mysterious Somerville, where we had been informed, by knowledgable parties, that there was a gay bar called, interestingly enough, Toast Lounge and that Fridays were for the laaadies. We were absolute babies (a year or so out of college — I was 23 or 24), and this bar was off the T, so we took a cab and, like, 30 to 40 minutes later, arrived at this mysterious location. (It was in Union Square, a place I have been to many times since, but this bar closed some time in the mid-Aughts and I never went again, so to me it is basically this magical and scary land that emerged from the mists for that one night only, much like Brigadoon.)
I don’t really remember much, other than everyone seemed to know each other and that I found all of them terrifying. I drank too much and mostly talked to the male bartender, who was wearing a pink t-shirt that said “ASS MASTER.” Somehow, toward the end of the night, I managed to strike up some conversation with a middle-aged lady, only to be dragged away and out the door by my friends, who informed me I was talking REALLY LOUDLY.
Shortly thereafter, I moved to Chicago for grad school, and didn’t venture into another gay bar until sometime in 2007, during a brief sojourn in Columbus, OH, during a time when that fair city was blessed with not one, not two, but three lesbian bars. East Village had pool, Liquid had dancing and funny lights, and Wall Street was just the worst. Only Wall Street is still standing. I once went to East Village with my sort of girlfriend and with my dude friend who was trying out cross-dressing. He now lives in LA and wears skirts like it’s no thing.
Oh, and my straight roommate from Toast Lounge is now very much in love with a lady I met years later at speed dating. Because life.
It was pretty recently! a year or two ago? I met up with some of my new buddies from my feminist women’s group (of course) at the one dyke bar in my city. I ran into some rugby players (of course) I knew from my crossfit gym (of course). A straight friend of one of my buddies who happened to also be there that night came up to us and asked us if we were “power lesbians.” I laughed out loud.
in fairness, I went to the gayest college ever (smith), in the gayest town ever (northampton, ma), and every bar in town was kind of de facto a gay bar, just by virtue of the large queer population in the area. so the fact that I didn’t make it to a real honest to goodness dyke bar until age 27 was kind of a function of my not having needed to.
OH MY GOD your entire life.
shoutout to a fellow smith-goer! I still live in Northampton.
Haha, I went to Smith too, and was trying to remember if any of the Noho bars were officially gay bars – you summed up perfectly why that was so hard. Love you, Northampton, you beautiful queer mecca you.
Yeah, I grew up in the area and I was going to write about going to an all-ages goth night at Diva (Diva’s? Divas? I can’t remember) but wasn’t sure if that was technically a gay bar, because… Northampton.
Yessss yay for fellow smithies! My first gay bar with a majority of guys was weird, when I moved away from Northmapton, because such a big DEAL was made out of it being a “gay bar,” when in Noho that’s just…every bar.
I studied abroad in the Czech Republic the year after having my first GIRLFRIEND and felt so weird and isolated in my queerness that I started going to gay bars in Prague with a few of my [gay] male friends. The gay bars were fantastic, great for dancing and being suuuuuper drunk, but they were not SO welcoming to the gay females. I don’t think I ever met another queer female at one of these bars and I definitely got a lot of ATTITUDE from the gay dudes (probably rightly so?). The lesbian bars must have been like a whole nother level of subculture that I was never able to figure out.
How funny, I was just about to write about how my first gay bar experience was a lesbian bar in Prague. I, a young hetero lady, was very very intimidated.
omg what! What was the bar? wish I had known about it then..
I remember very little about my first gay bar experience except that it was in Providence, RI and I was with my best friend who had come out for the first time to me about a month prior and we were both 18, and I got kicked out for being underage (and, I argued, for clearly not being a gay man.)
First gay bar: a place I’d been a couple of times before, in my “not quite anything and never talking about it” phase, that an old old friend took me when we’d reconnected after many years – in the interim, both of us having coming out – to quiz and congratulate each other. I ran into my then-crush in the bathroom and was so flustered that when she asked me what I was doing there, I threw up my hands and said loudly “having a gay old time!!!” like a maniac.
First gay bar in the USA, some years later: a bar in Washington DC that I took myself to, alone, where the biggest source of social anxiety for my European brain was realising, almost too late, that in America you’re supposed to tip the drag queens.
Tip everything, ever.
My first gay bar experience was pretty unexceptional, I guess? Like I barely even remember what the place looked like. I just remember loud music, the location of the bar, and a lot of multicoloured lights.
It was only memorable for: a) my annoyance at being hit on by girls who immediately identified themselves as “bicurious”, b) the sighting of a high school friend I had always suspected was gay but who vehemently denied it, c) being spotted by one of my cousins while sitting outside talking to a girl I would go on to date for about a month, who asked “is that a gay bar? I think that’s a gay bar.”
My second gay bar experience was much better. My now-fiancee and I only went to get away from the party we were at (a plan that backfired because half the party followed us), and we spent about an hour just making out passionately in a dark corner.
For clarity’s sake: I have no problem with being someone’s first same-sex sexual experience. It’s just that when I hear “bicurious” I hear “I’m not even sure I’m attracted to you.” It may be unfair, but I find it off-putting.
It’s a perfectly fine thing to BE, but it’s generally not the best thing to lead with when introducing yourself, in my experience. Save it for like, the third or fourth thing I get to learn about you!
Seems perfectly fair to me. No one wants to hear “I’m not sure that I am interested in you as a person but I would like to experiment sexually, will you please indulge me?” At least, it has been my experience that I am much more willing to help someone experiment sexually or otherwise indulge them if I am approached as a person first.
“Hi, I’m here to try the sex?”
I spent my later teenaged years in the small seaside town with a sizable and engaged gay community, so my early bar-going (often with older gay men, like my lovely boss of three years) was almost all gay-bar-going, and a particular type of bar at that: where the clientele were mostly well-to-do 30-to-50-year-olds who wanted good food, festive music, and comfortable seats. That was a very civilized introduction to bar-going.
My late partner’s memorial service was in a dreary cookie-cutter suburban funeral home, but the real memorial took place later that afternoon and into the evening, when we brought out a trunk of his drag costumes, dolled ourselves up in them, and walked down the street to the piano bar of his — and my — youth and belted out show tunes in his memory.
Those were the days, my friend
We thought they’d never end
We’d sing and dance forever and a day
We’d live the life we choose
We’d fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way
Just when I thought I couldn’t love you any more…you tell this marvelous story. Thanks for sharing.
Oh man so this is stretching the definition of gay bar a bit, but soon after I realized I liked girls (so, like a year ago…) I went to this amazing place in Boston called The Donkey Show, which is a combination 80s club/ queer singing and dancing performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, complete with roller skating dancers in drag. It. Was. Glorious. That night was by far the most fun I’ve ever had dancing, only slightly marred by the two guys who tried to get me to join them for a threesome by pretending they were twins.
Oh and there was also the time I was wandering around Paris and I saw several guys in kilts and then I saw a whole bunch of mildly chubby men with beards all standing outside one bar and I thought to myself, “Why do they all look alike? Is this some kind of family reunion? That’s a lot of cousins.” and then promptly smacked myself in the head when I saw the name of the bar was The Bear Den and realized I was very much in the center of the gayborhood.
This happened to me in Paris, too! The bar was..sort of full of men, yes, but they seemed friendly enough, in that nobody actively asked us to leave, and they were all…kind of giving us the side eye, yes…and the name of the bar was, yes, Bar Open, and the logo of the bar was…yes…a stylised arsehole.
I wish I were kidding about any of this, but mostly I wish I were kidding about how long it took us to realise that we were not only in a Gay Bar, but a BOY Gay Bar.
When I was 17 going on 18 and, pace Rodgers and Hammerstein, just beginning to find my way between “innocent as a rose” and “fellas will fall in line,” I used the occasion of volunteering at a Lesbian Community Cancer Project gayla (get it do you get it Mallory) to flirt my way into a fake ID. My name was Chris, and I was twenty-eight years old, my hairline beginning to pull back around the temples and an ex-con’s glint in my eye, and I hightailed it the very next night, ditching the LCCP for manlier climes, to Chicago’s Sidetrack video bar. It was a shitty ID. It was a shitty IDEA. They let me in. As I stood in the vestibule, trying to keep my hands steady enough to use the ATM, I heard something that I’d never heard before, and would never hear, exactly like that, again, that was utterly alien and intensely familiar:
“♪ I used to have a girlfriend known as Elsie… ♪”
And then, in a sibilant tsunami, hundreds and hundreds of gay voices: “EL-sie?!”
“♪ With whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea… ♪”
“CHEL-sea?!”
“♪ She wasn’t what you’d call a blushing flower… ♪”
“SHE’S A WHORE!”
“♪ As a matter of fact, she rented by the hour! ♪”
“BY THE MINUTE!”
People had told me about Sidetrack, and I was mostly there for the promise of a grape-flavored frozen liquor slushie that was (is) great in the way of all childhood things half-remembered and mixed liberally with vodka, but no one had told me this: interweaved around about half the songs, there was a complex and often hilarious system of call-and-response jokes—but “jokes” undersells it. Was in fact a whole sub-sub-culture, receiving and preserving and elaborating on an understanding of itself and its situation in the world with all the sweetbitter charm of the “poisoned cookie.” Andrew Lloyd Webber comes on, go out to smoke. Unless it’s Evita—climb up on the barstool, do the arms, and shout “I’LL NEVER WORK AGAIN” when Juan appears on-screen. Titanic? Replace the bridge with “glug glug glug glug glug glug glu-glug.” I managed to eke out a couple of years and go through about four IDs learning the whole corpus before they threw me out and 86’d me one grim spring evening after I’d started working at the all-male hair salon down the street and was becoming known among the locals for my age and liver function, and a perfect couple of years they were.
GAY PEOPLE ARE THE GREATEST PEOPLE
Agreed. According to the Harvard Implicit Association Test I have “a strong preference for gay people”.
My bff and I spent a good portion of our college years in Rumors, Grand Rapids MI’s gay bar. We’re straight cis-females but we had a ton of friends who partied there and the vibe was better than the other places in town. Our first time there was Halloween where we both got spectacularly drunk and I fell down the stairs on to a very nice burly drag queen.
I had just turned twenty-one, just transferred schools, just got out of a long relationship. The bar was in Clemson, SC, a tiny hole in the wall in a strip mall called YNK, which stood for “You Never Know.” Their claim to fame was foam parties, which seemed super magical and amazing to me at the time. I went with a boy I had just started seeing, at a time when I was shedding most everything I’d previously believed. In this bar we danced with everybody, women, men, most people were mostly naked and we were neck deep in soapy foam and who knows what else and it was my first glorious experience with feeling wildly close to a whole group of complete strangers.
I remember the thumping music, and the intimidatingly hot butches playing pool, and the drag show, and feeling like I belonged somewhere for the very first time.
Fall of 2002. Some Thursday. Badlands in Dupont (now Phase One Dupont, previously Apex) did free-for-college-kids Thursday nights (maybe $5 cover? something cheap), and some of my gay male friends were going and I got invited along. We go in, and one of the guys gives me some of the best advice ever, as my teenaged self was a bit intimidated: “Okay, so we’re going to the video room, in the back, so we’ll have to go through the main dance floor. Hold your head up and walk across it like you own the place and you’re better than everyone.”
This advice has come back to me and served me well more times than I care to admit.
I also heard Khia’s “My Neck, My Back” for the first time that night.
My first gay bar experience was as a newly-out lesbian at the ripe old age of 26 – CC Blooms in Edinburgh. We ended up there after a friend’s flatwarming and it was rubbish, but it was the first time I had danced in a club with a girl (my then-girlfriend, now-partner/wife) (except if you count my first goth club, which had been six months earlier and where I had ended up hilariously making up with a skinny goth boy on the dance floor despite having come there with two lesbians, oops). Pictorial evidence exists; I think I was trying to check what exactly was sticking to the bottom of my shoe. Eugh.
Oh and lesbian nights at clubs have the best names – off the top of my head I remember: Furburger and Saturday Night Beaver, where the night always ended with a massive Journey singalong.
Woody’s, Toronto. I was just 18 and there with my boyfriend (I’m a woman) and his gay buddy “Juan” who it turned out was initiating said boyfriend, on the sly, into the gay stuff. The cruisey, gay bar/park bench/gay sex club gay stuff. I had a fun time, but I’ll never forget Juan said I’d be pretty if only I lost 15lbs.
I spent far too long fag-hagging with my gay dude friends at the Saloon and Gay 90s in Minneapolis. Not that those are not fabulous places to hang out for queer ladies as well, but I was denying my own queerness and trying to be some kind of Grace stereotype. The fact that I always seemed to be the one organizing these gay bar evenings was not lost on my dude friends. Was totally lost on me though!
I’ve been to the one (one!) lesbian bar in DC once. It is not on the red line and it has a dumb cover and is cash only so it seems like too much of a process.
It was around 1997 and I was working at the Gap part-time to help pay my way through college, which was a failed plan because all I did was spend my paycheck on clothes. But! My gay manager, Jay, took me to all the gay clubs in Cincinnati and I loved it. My favorite was a drag club that specialized in country western. One night, one of the queens sat me and another girl down and told us it was time to get our drag on. She did a complete drag makeover on both of us and it turns out that I am not an attractive drag queen. Sigh. Thinking about this makes me miss my undergrad years so much…and makes me wonder how I ever fell out of contact with Jay.
Boston area olds, hands up if you remember Manray.
Despite coming out at, like 13, I didn’t go to a gay bar for my entire adolescense. I went to Goth Clubs instead, which had a pretty hefty Quuer Contingent, so that was enough for me.
Eventually my aunt cate and her girlfriend took me and my husband to one when we went to visit them in Brighton on my 22nd birthday.
(This was also the birthday that had those two lovely women harrassing a barmaid with drink orders (we’ll have some mount GAY rum with FRUIT in) and them driving all round the city to find me a dairy free chocolate cake (you’d think you could find a vegan chocolate cake in BRIGHTON OF ALL PLACES) )
Mallory, did you go to Azusa Pacific?!?! Up to this point in my life it was known entirely to me as ‘where my jerk soccer coach went to school.’ You would give it a much more awesome connotation.
– grew up in Pasadena, totally have driven by the Boulevard a million times and never guessed. Which I suppose is the point.
I did go there!
I really want to charm you all with good gay bar stories (of which I have many) but I can’t because I’m too busy being all a-flutter about the fact that Mallory addressed us as “Reader”! It’s such a tiny stylistic choice but I’ve been laughing for the past half hour. It’s so delightful in a Jane Eyre way, who (let’s face it) was at least a little bi-curious. And speaking of Goth Clubs, Thornfield Hall kind of sounds like one, does it not?
First time at a gay bar: RAN INTO MY BROTHER
SHUT UP
NO DON’T SHUT UP TELL US EVERYTHING
It was really just so bad. We were both there with friends. He was out; I wasn’t really sure what my deal was at that time… There was this girl you know, but what did it all mean, blah-de-blah.
We kind of spotted each other at the bar. Anyway, he must have been 17, 18’ish; I was 23, 24’ish, so the one who I think should’ve taken control of the situation, but this did not happen. Awkward small talk and polite inquiries from me about the age of the men interested in him were conducted. (Old gay dudes are sometimes just as creepy as old straight dudes.)
A few days later, I had dinner at parents; he was obvs there. He seem to have forgotten all about the awkward part and decided that this was the greatest thing ever; he was so excited and I was so horrified and not at all sure that was even gay and suddenly being the hero of my kid brother who though I was leading some spectacularly well orchestrated long-term gay double life was terrifying. I did not go home for weekly family dinner for about another 6 months during which I did figure out that I am in fact a giant lesbo which was just as well, cause he’d told my sister by then, who told my mom, who told my dad, who had a midlife crises.
My first gay bar was Südblock in Berlin. I was newly single and wanted to soothe the pain with dancing.
I was wearing a bright red evening gown and long gloves that a friend had convinced me to try on (post-breakup suggestibility ftw), dancing like a crazy person with my friend who was similarly attired. I remember the overwhelming feeling of _belonging_ and not being able to stop staring at the beautiful women. Also vaguely feeling like I was being appropriative because I was Totally Straight. Ha. Haha. *sigh*
I got hit on by a drunk dude who wouldn’t stop touching me until I yelled at him. I was also slightly worried about wearing a dress in public (a thing I never do) and what the cute girls must think of someone dressed so… differently than the vast majority of the butch women in the bar. Though being surrounded by people who looked like I usually do was so nice that the worry wasn’t such a big thing at all.
It was great. It took me nine more months to understand _why_ I found those women so captivating.
Please expect my reply to this in gChat tomorrow.
21st birthday. Charlie’s in Denver. It’s a gay country western bar- which is awesome and I highly recommend searching these out. I was the only girl in the place. The music alternated between Kenny Rogers and Cher (I Believe in Love was topping the charts at the time- god, I’m old). I did not pay for a single drink all night. Given that I had not really partaken in alcoholic beverages before that point (yes, I know, who in this day in age actually waits until their 21 to drink? I was such a good girl), this was probably not ideal.
In the first few months after graduating from Smith, I went to two gay bars back home in San Francisco. I was (and still am) figuring out being queer outside of Northampton’s gay bubble, so they were both Experiences for me.
The first one was Ladies’ Night at a gay bar in the Castro, with one of my good friends from Smith. It was packed with both gay guys and lesbians, and a pretty French girl told me she liked my hat, I bought her a drink, we danced and we kissed, and then she disappeared with her friends. I was a little disappointed but mostly elated, because it was the first time I’d been presumed gay.
The second time, I was out with two straight friends from high school for Halloween, only one of whom I had (awkwardly, with no labels) come out to the year Christmas break before when I was crushing so hard on my first girlfriend that I couldn’t not tell everyone about her. We wanted to dance, and followed the sweet siren song of some Ke$ha to the Lexington Club, where something about the bouncer’s haircut and smile got my spidey senses tingling. Less than two minutes later, my friend B came up to me at the bar, scandalized and excited that a GIRL was hitting on OUR FRIEND, F – and I looked over and F was awkwardly laughing but giving the girl her number.
And that’s the night I found out she wasn’t as straight as I thought, and we all had a gay ol’ time! But mostly that night was the night I realized, in the excitement of coming out to F as also into girls, that I missed having a queer community and that fun as gay bars are, I needed queer to be part of my day-time identity too.
I think my first gay bookstore had more impact on me than my first gay bar.
When I was seventeen, my family went to Europe to visit relatives. My parents let me go to London by myself for a week or so. It was one of the first times that my parents couldn’t track where I was or what I was doing or how much money I was spending. So I went to a queer bookstore. I had looked it up on the internet months in advance and secretly copied down the directions to get there. This was the most-anticipated and carefully-planned thing on my itinerary.
I was terrified that I would somehow get caught, even though I didn’t know a single person in the entire country. I think I was blushing for that whole afternoon.
I had lurked in the LGBT section of Borders and Barnes & Noble before, furtively reading entire books while trying to look like I was browsing the more innocent shelves nearby. But this was the first time I had gone somewhere that was specifically queer and the first time I actually owned a book about trans people (also purchased in London: a pair of boxers with a map of the Underground). I very carefully hid these in my suitcase and nearly had a heart attack when, as we returned to the US, the customs officers wanted to open up our luggage. Luckily, they changed their minds.
The tiny gayborhood in Oklahoma City has several bars but only one for 18-21s, which was perfect for the little college freshmen like me and my friends who had to drive 30 minutes to get there and pay a cover we couldn’t afford to stand around and generally admire how many of us existed until the tiny drag show started. Never mind that the crowd was punctuated by old dudes trying to pick up the barely legal teen guys, one [old dude] of whom was arrested while climbing onto the courtyard roof to watch us in our carefully chosen outfits. I wore a vest and felt self-conscious about it but also hoped the cool OKC girls would notice me. My friends and I danced with each other and got dehydrated and couldn’t afford the $2 refill for a $3 cup of tap water so we went back to the dorms and watched some horrible gay movie on a laptop.
The first time I ever went to a gay bar, I actually went to five gay bars, as a part of a crawl to celebrate the first outing of the LGBT students’ unions of King’s College and Queen Mary (where I was studying abroad in London when I was 20 years old). My night was a cocktail of one part pretending that I knew anything about the “gay bar scene” and gay bar etiquette, one part reaaally wanting to kiss the jewish girl with amazing hair from my film class, one part filled with paralyzing anxiety that I’d reveal both of those things as I got drunker, and one part speaking in a piss poor British accent that I, rather offensively, slipped into whenever I got nervous-wasted, much to the chagrin of my actual Brit friends, and to the confusion of those that had heard me speaking in a Midwestern accent a half-hour earlier. I think I drank like 7 “Smurf” shots that my gay male friends forcibly ordered for me when we got to the first cramped, wooden hole because I was too shy to talk. I was too nervous to tell them that I was pretty sure its resemblance to blue semen was neither coincidental nor appetizing.
I also remember being legitimately surprised that gay bars played a wide variety of music, and not just Ani Difranco, Melissa Etheridge, and Scissor Sisters on an endless, throbbing loop, like for some reason I’d come to believe. I remember being a little disappointed at that realization.
“…that was the most terrifying place in the world.” This.
My first gay bar was a private party at Wilde Oscar’s in Toronto, where one of my coworkers from a place called “Indoors and Out” took me for a party. He shoved me at the only other lady under 30 there, and that worked out okay. Oscar’s closed, changed in for a faux-rish pub, as is Pope Joan’s, where I needed a driver’s licence and every last bit of courage to enter (I had neither), and Sister’s in Montreal, where I drank melon shots on closing night, trying so hard to be older and braver and hotter than I was.
My very first gay party, though, was in what is now a cafeteria at UofT, and I was one of maybe four women there, watching the ripped boys twerk shirtless on top of the speakers and wondering where I was supposed to be dancing.
It wasn’t until Vazaleen that I found that out, but when I did, it was wonderful.
Your comment reminds me of that Be Good Tanyas Song… "Promise me we won't go into nightclubs, I really think that it's obscene… what kind of people go to meet people where they can't be heard or seen"
Or something like that. (The song is Light Enough to Travel).
2001, just before I graduated. I had broken up with my last boyfriend about a year before, and finally got around being properly best friends with the person I’d met in my first week of university and then hardly spoken to at all in our second year. In the meantime, she’d become one of the leading lights of the Pride soc on campus. So I used to hang around with her all the time, and met lots of other people through her, and we joked about how all my friends were gay, which had also been true when I was at school, and how I was the Token Straight Girl, hahahah.
At some point that spring, the Pridesoc took the train down to Leeds to go to Poptastic at the Cockpit, which was the loveliest, cheesiest, warmest gay club ever. The whole place was just full of people who smiled at you, and they played Britney Spears and Robbie Williams and S Club 7 and Tiffany and A-Ha and it was all magic. We went there every month for the last few months of my degree, and the day I finished my degree my best friend gave me a tshirt she’d made that said Token Straight Girl and that night I kissed our other friend Alex and then I was not the Token Straight Girl and my best friend was kind of narked that I hadn’t mentioned that that might be possibility before she’d spent good money on the tshirt.