I’m drunk off of two gin and tonics, standing in the corner of this overcrowded bar, and my girlfriend is about to kiss me, so I will just say this–
I love gay bars and drag nights. I do. I love that when I walk up the faded and tattered stairs of this college bar on a Thursday night and hand the bouncer my I.D. and cash for the cover, I can grab my girlfriend’s hand, and we can dance like we love each other. Because we do.
I love ordering a drink at the bar and having it be a little too strong. I love watching my friends wince upon their first liquor-filled sip. I love how all my friends look—wearing shorts from the Walmart men’s section, vibrant eyeshadow they’ve been too scared to try before, and quirkily patterned button-up shirts from the Thrifty Shopper. I love watching the fluorescent purple lights from the drag show reflecting in their eyes. I love to see what everyone else is wearing. Girls with mullets, half the room in boots on this hot September night, facial piercings shimmering from people sitting at the dark tables.
As much joy as I get from this weekly drag night, I am often brought back to my experiences at fully-fledged gay bars. I always try to get my friends to go to the gay bar when we’re in a city with a big enough population to have one. I went to a lesbian bar (the only dedicated lesbian bar in the country) in London one time where the floors were so sticky that I thought my Doc Martens might be planted there forever, and the clientele was either barely 18-year-olds or married 40-year-olds. My vodka soda was almost all soda, and it was £8. The dance room was sweltering and the ceiling design was reminiscent of a tin can. I still dwelled on that place for weeks on end, and for a while, I couldn’t tell why.
The door had a “no unaccompanied men” sign on it, and my friends and I joked that every single lesbian stereotype was present in that claustrophobic bar. I was shoulder to shoulder with British lesbians as ‘Renaissance played’, and I was sweating through my thoughtfully chosen button-up shirt. Still, I didn’t care because I was hanging out with one hundred lesbians, and Renaissance was playing! Renaissance! And the older lesbians were all grinding on each other–which maybe, in theory, was gross–but the week before, I had been at a different bar, and tens of straight couples were doing the same thing to one another (perhaps more graphically). I remember almost crying at the idea that I would maybe never get to be that embarrassing in public with the person I love.
When a straight male friend of mine showed resistance a week later to going out to another gay bar and instead opted for our group to drink at another sports bar, I found myself angry and suddenly realized why I couldn’t stop thinking about that shoebox lesbian joint. I selfishly wished he could experience feeling othered in the way I had my whole life. I wished he could experience the paranoia created by just kissing your girlfriend at a club while straight couples mindlessly did the same all around you. I wished he could understand the absolute euphoria that rushed through me when people like me finally surrounded me. Even if his shoes stuck to the floor, and he paid a ridiculous amount for a vodka soda to achieve that long-sought feeling of peace.
At the tiny lesbian bar, every person who accidentally spilled their overpriced drink on me or stepped on my foot looked at me earnestly and said, “I am so, so sorry, are you alright,” before grabbing their partner’s hand and heading to the dancefloor. Everyone moved their bodies freely and loosely, not taking a split second to look at what others were doing. I only knew a small amount of people in that room, but I felt a strange, deep, and striking connection with every single person I walked by. I wanted to leave the bar with every single one of them, and maybe we could get McDonald’s together and talk about the weird things we had done as little gay kids and our first crushes and everything and anything else. I had never felt that way in my life before, and I had never felt so safe at a bar.
And maybe it was not that good, and maybe this college bar drag night is not great either, and I am sure I will go to better bars and drag shows in my life. But it seems good to me now. And I am drunk (maybe too drunk) off of two heavily poured gin and tonics, a drag queen is performing a song from The Little Mermaid in front of me, my girlfriend and I are dancing in front of everyone we know, and we are about to kiss again. So this is all I will say.