On my last trip to a gay bar for the foreseeable future, my boyfriend and I played Jenga on a sofa outside. I pulled a piece from a nook. He slid one from a cranny. A bachelor party was next to us, and eventually someone ran into our tower of blocks. Immediately, fifteen pairs of hands, all of them various shades, stooped to gather the pieces. Our fingers touched from time to time, grazing wrists, and we laughed about the touching, didn’t think twice.
Another time, in Austin, we found a gay bar on a nothing Saturday night. There was no reason for the place to be packed from wall to wall, with people breathing all over one another, sweating and pulsing and winding and shoving—but it was. We were. We were a blob of gas and air. At one point, I elbowed the guy shaking beside me, and after I apologized he touched my ear and said it was fine.
One night a few years back, at a gay bar in New Orleans, I was watching a drag show prep when a group of construction workers wandered in, holding helmets and kicking boots and already more than a little drunk. Some of the bar’s regulars traded glances. The performers took the stage. Eventually, recognition rippled across the workers’ faces. But one of them took a dollar bill from his pants, and his buddies followed, showering the stage. The performers pulled them onstage, where they continued to dance. We tipped, cheered.
One night, at a gay bar in Houston, I watched a group of guys huddled around a man who was flailing his hands, tickling the Christmas lights hanging above him. He looked maybe forty. He’d just come out. His friends stood beside him, reining their guy in, asking passersby to give him a kiss on the cheek to celebrate. A loose line formed beside them, ebbing and flowing with the music, congratulating and patting and chanting as though we’d all just won some championship.
Another night, at a bar in Doyama, nearly halfway across the world in Osaka’s Umeda district, I spent a perfectly rainy hour drinking next to the only other patron. When we stepped outside, he kissed me, and then I watched him walk away. A little later, I told the friend I was staying with about it, and he narrowed his eyes and then rolled them into the back of his head.
One evening, at a dancy gay bar in Houston, sometime after eleven but almost certainly before one, the crowd reached that point in the evening where people start disrobing, loosening ties and opening buttons and wrapping hoodies around their waists. I don’t remember much about the music or the conversations or any of that. But it was early February. So I remember the steam.
One night, a few days after the Pulse shooting, I sat in an Atlanta gay bar where nobody said anything at all. Instead, we touched the small of one another’s back in passing and gently squeezed every neighboring shoulder.
One night, in New Orleans, I sat with a straight friend who had never been to a gay bar before. We vaped on the balcony, and he noted the physical proximity of the space. Everyone stands so fucking close, he said. Just then, a man slipped between us, cupping our elbows, not even looking at us.
One night, at a gay bar in Tokyo, I sat with a group of strangers, laughing at something I can’t recall, but it was enough to keep us from breathing. We’d come from Texas, Singapore, Toronto, San Francisco, London, and Seoul—I’d never met them before, and will almost certainly never meet them again. But still: we laughed until we were hoarse, leaning on one another’s shoulders, basically crying.
One night, at a gay bar in Sydney, after a long night of pretending to drink with writers, I shared exactly one beer with a stranger. We talked about our jobs, and then bánh mì, and then video games, and then religion, and also the fact that he was a break-dancer. When I asked how that worked, he stood up. He motioned for me to follow. He’d pull a move, guiding my limbs until I did the same. We did that for nearly two hours, stumbling through the motions.
It’s worth wondering how a space largely free of threats evolves when every space becomes a threat. It’s worth wondering what the function of these spaces is, and whether they’ll survive, and what their survival will mean as the nature of physical space continues to change. Some of us waited a long time for those spaces. Some might not mind waiting a bit longer. Some of us don’t have time to wait. You miss it when it’s gone.
But, before everything changed, there was one night—walking back to our car from a gay bar in Houston—when we skipped along the broken sidewalk, buzzed on proximity and beer and chilaquiles. Turning the corner, we ran into a guy staggering back to his own car, with his own people. We hugged in the street. Apologized. Kissed one another’s cheeks. We said, Sorry, thank you, love you, be safe, goodbye. ♦
