Gay Bars

The Orlando massacre has put the gay bar into the spotlight.  This morning's Times, for instance, has reminiscences of celebrity gays of their first visits to a gay bar.  For the most part, although they were somewhat timid, they were sufficiently conversant with an existant gay culture to know what they might expect.  In 1948 fresh from Iowa, 18 years old, I went into a gay bar on MacDougal Street, and never really found a home there.  The males I met were older, but also had a style, an implicit agreement of expectations and behaviors, a seriously developed irony that so intimidated me that I did not form any relationships in all the time I went there other than to go home with one or another guy for sex. I dropped gay bars from my list of to-do activities.  Fast forward to many many years later when I hosted a speaker at Boston University whom I knew to be gay, and so I took him to what I had heard was a gay bar in the back side of Beacon Hill, as I remember.  I was considerably older than the self assured uniformly good looking males in this place, but one horrible thing I witnessed was a really old male, perhaps sixty--that's old for gay--sitting at the bar and the bar crowd shunning him by a space of maybe two feet all around him.  That was so true then.  Old was a disease, everyone was afraid of catching it.  I remember volunteering at a gay organization which disseminated information about AIDS to the community.  At the end of the evening encouragements to join others at a bar were shouted out but also always studiously directed so as avoid including me--I was fifty by this time.  Flash forward.  A much younger colleague in New York who wanted to treat me to a drink to make up for being late for something other took me after a concert to a gay bar in Chelsea.  It was a sports bar, for god's sake.  I could not imagine such a thing, and there were the requisite television screens lining the walls over the bar and lo and behold demonstrably straight males for bartenders, one more hunky than the next.  And there was a dance floor below the room we were in, very crowded with males of all ages and sizes and some with female friends, quite a wild selection of people.  I could have brought my mother to this place, it occurred to me