Gay bars and shootings at gay bars

You've changed, man. We all have.

I didn’t think I was going to write anything about the shooting earlier this week at Club Q in Colorado Springs. But then today in between laundry and running errands and an afternoon walk around the block to get coffee I only sort of wanted, I just kept thinking about it. I thought about how everyone was re-posting links and quotes and various tweets about the shooting. And I thought.. I don’t know. Maybe I was being too dismissive in thinking I had nothing to say.

But what is there to say about it, really? Shootings are a fact of life in this country. They are random and senseless and they happen literally everywhere. The only conclusion one can draw is that we live in a society that just fucking tolerates five or ten or twenty people being shot to death in a public place every three or four months. The reasons this happens aren’t really hard to understand. Or at least.. even if, as a society we can’t agree on why they happen, we sure as hell seem able to agree that we’re not going to do anything meaningful to stop them. It all has the feeling of a low-grade sectarian conflict playing out in the background. Like a lesser version of Ireland in the 1970s, or Palestine. The violence is just there, but we can’t do anything to stop it, so what choice do we have but to go grocery shopping. Or go to the movies. Or a concert. Or a gay bar. Shootings are an annoyance. Like a train that suddenly goes out of service and offloads, causing you to be an an hour and a half late for work. They aren’t a crisis that demands any kind of solution or commitment to action.

But I guess.. this shooting is of particular significance to a lot of people because it happened at a gay bar. Yes, I know.. I say “gay bar” because I can’t bring myself to say “L.G.B.T.Q. bar.” It sounds so clinical and academic to string all the letters together like some sort of corporate HRC-approved brand name. Gay bar. It’s a gay bar. Queer bar I guess is preferable to some people, and maybe in time I’ll become more comfortable with that word. It still doesn’t quite roll off the tongue for me, though. But whatever we call these spaces, they mean a great deal to people. They are places of belonging and identity, and of course that’s a powerful thing. It's destabilizing to see violence enter into a space you regard as yours, and to think that it might not be as safe as you had hoped.

I think about what gay bars used to mean for me when I was younger. Before I was out, or before I even really knew I was gay. I think they were more special then. There was a tense, anxious vibe that came with walking into one — like I either didn’t quite belong there, or I was being transgressive just by virtue of entering into that space. A gay bar was cool because it was Not A Regular Straight Bar. It was full of freaks and weirdos and people whose families had thrown them out or who were artists and performers and therefore they were more interesting than I was. They aggressively wanted you to know you were welcome here, and if your face showed how uncomfortable you were, well.. that was fine, too. None of us are going to be telling our parents that we gathered here, in this grimy, gritty tavern. The bartenders and patrons all had tattoos and jewelry and painted nails and good stories and they dressed in a way that mixed equal parts fashion-forward edginess and slutty, unselfconscious sex. It was fun to think of myself like I might fit in there. “What did you do last weekend?” “Oh I went to this bar with some friends. You wouldn’t have heard of it. Or if you have heard about it, you’d need friends who are at least as cool as my friends to get you into a place like that. … It was fine.”

And then somewhere along the way, gay bars just sorta .. stopped feeling like that for me. They aren’t edgy anymore, but rather.. I don’t know. They’re all the same. Whether I’m here in Chicago, or visiting Seattle or DC or New York.. it’s all the same. Same music. Same RuPaul episodes playing on a million televisions. Same vodka sodas. Saaaame patrons. Every bearded, skinny-jeaned, white or not white (but usually white) 30-something Matthew and Andrew and Colin and Kyle and Justin looks the same same same same. It’s still nice. It’s still a nice place to be, and now that I live in a very large city with a very large gay population, I have a lot of friends who I might see when I go out. But it’s not an adventure. I’m not doing anything I haven’t done a hundred times before, and I hardly feel like the gay space that I’m in is itself taking any risks. Sidetrack is just .. Sidetrack. It’s like Jewel-Osco or the gym, just with darker lighting and the music is louder.

Gay bars, gay bars, gay bars. All great. Except Nellie's. Nellies is terrible.

And I guess the natural question to ask is.. what changed? Did I grow up and get bored with these places? Or is it just objectively true that gay bars aren’t as fun anymore? Did the equality / visibility revolution of the last 10 or 15 years leave us all too exposed and too normalized, so that gay bars now are just.. eh. Another damn thing like any other? Even though I myself am like.. the least shocking, edgy person ever, I liked the idea that I could belong to something that was shocking and edgy. But too many people like me showed up to the party, and I fear maybe we ruined it. It’s all kinda just whatever now, isn’t it? “What did you do last weekend?” “Went to a gay bar. You know.. the one that’s over across the street from that new SweetGreen. Next to Warby Parker.”

And that’s the thing, of course. Gay spaces aren’t edgy at all because they’re all located in monied, gentrified swanky neighborhoods. There’s no getting in a taxi to go waaay out to the weird, sorta unsafe part of town to go to your secret, shithole gay bar. It’s all just right there, in the richest, happening-est neighborhood your city has to offer. Your real estate agent knows exactly where all the gay bars are, because that’s where all the hottest sales are happening. So it goes. I’m hardly the first one to notice or complain about this.

I’ll have a vodka soda.

But in any event. I’ve never been to Club Q or Colorado Springs. I can’t say anything about what that bar was like or what it meant to the people who went there. I only know what the bars that I’m around seem to mean to people. And I dunno. Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe it really is just me who’s gotten older, and these tired old gay bars — Roscoe’s and Scarlett and Sidetrack (for Chicago) / Nellie’s and No. 9 and J.R.’s (for DC) — maybe to kids in their 20s, those places really do still seem cool and a bit rebellious. Maybe there are buttoned-down 20-something gays for whom the idea of going to a gay bar — even a random ass generic one with 2-for-1 vodka drinks on RuPaul night — is a real chance to step out a little. I shouldn’t just dismiss that. It’s important.

But I can still be mad that we as a gay community have lost our edge, though, right? Truly queer spaces — in the queer sense of the word — are damn hard to come by. There are no sex clubs or naked strip clubs or porno theaters or seedy basement dives in such numbers as to constitute a scene anymore. There’s nowhere I can feel simultaneously uncomfortable/out of my element and also accepted and kinda like this is where I belong. My friends and I don’t go to places like that (at least not in this country), and even if we did — they certainly don’t exist in numbers that could support the sprawling gay community of Chicago. Truly edge places are just that. They’re on the edge (if they exist at all) and well.. all those Andrew/Matt/Justin gays are just too damn normal, aren’t they?¹ Alcohol dependence in the gay community brought on by near nightly pilgrimages to shitty back alley gay bars is a dying phenomenon, and we’re all worse off for it!

Nigel @nigelcantweet

@LacefrontQuest “What’s wrong with the kids?! Doesn’t anyone DRINK anymore?!” will be my new go-to Old Man Rant.

But of course, even if the majority of gays are trending in the direction that’s solidly normcore, there are still a lot of people who need those queer alternative spaces. It’s still the case that some kids get thrown out of the house or disowned by their parents for being gay. Or for being trans. Life can be painful and cruel, and it’s all the more so if you feel like the world has rejected you for who you are. Some kids and adults still really do struggle with their own sexuality and fight it for years and need to know there’s a place that will accept them, even as their own path toward self-acceptance might be a rocky one. There are still communities that are absolutely suffocating in their heteronormativity, and some kids desperately, frantically need out. For some, just being ~*different*~ is really the point in itself. They’re more at home in the knowledge that they’re charting their own path. I mean this in the way that’s like.. more than just that high school phase of being punk/goth/emo/whatever. It really is an identity carried through to adulthood that says “i can’t do this the way everyone else does. I’m different.” I can see how our unstoppable #LoveIsLove steamroller of Big Gay Acceptance is kind of a threat to people like that.

Maybe in part that’s a tension with some of the more modern-day conflicts about gender identity. It’s like.. here’s this controversy over how we should regard sexuality and gender, and it sits right between what it means to be accepted and thus “normal,” versus what it means to be distinct and unique (and thus, by definition, not normal). Is this community of ours really “queer” or isn’t it? And if we can’t agree on an answer.. well.. maybe this “community” is more fractured than we care to admit.

I know I’m way out over my skis in talking about this stuff, because the truth is I’m just .. not queer like that. I’m a lawyer married to another lawyer. We have a mortgage. We’re both cisgendered. We had a wedding registry at Crate & Barrel for god’s sake. We’re just… insufferably normal and that’s fine, but I don’t want to pretend I’m something I’m not. It’s just that.. I miss the feeling that came from feeling like I was different. But I think I was just “different” from the heteronormative expectations I had already internalized and set for myself. Once I grew into my own skin and got a sense of who I was, the idea of being “different” didn’t really fit anymore. I’m just me. And gay bars are just bars. There’s nothing edgy or shocking about any of it. Sometimes that makes me sad.

Another gay bar in another gayborhood

Anyway. Shootings are bad. Shootings in gay bars are really bad, and maybe in some perverse way it’s the broader acceptance of gays in society that makes gay bars more visible and thus more likely to be targets. It’s important that I acknowledge my own privilege as one who lives in a city where gay bars are completely normalized, accepted, and even celebrated. Not everywhere is so lucky. I didn’t really talk about it here, but the politics of demonization and hatred is always horrible, and ugly moral panics will always be promoted by terrible, cynical people who are trolling for cheap votes. I try not to think about the shitty side of politics that demonizes gay and queer people. I just try to maintain a faith that these conflicts will always continue but will trend (however haltingly) in the direction toward progress and acceptance. Moral arc of the universe and all that. We have it better than our parents did. So, too, for the next generation, hopefully. I’m not sure if that’s much comfort, though. Speaking of Club Q itself, we don’t even know the shooter’s actual motivation yet, not that it really matters. Maybe it’ll turn out to be another Pulse situation — horrific and senseless, but not motivated by hatred of gays. It doesn’t really matter. The effect on gay and queer spaces is the same. People need these spaces. People deserve a community where they feel at home and feel safe. There’s not much more to it than that.

1. Normal in the sense of, "young unmarried college grads living in the city” normal. I suppose in very suburban or very rural spaces, even your mainstream Sidetrack gay still seems kinda out there. But I think that says more about just how siloed and isolated our society has become, rather than a comment on whether gays are on the fringe or not.