Her place is around Piedmont, a nexus of the city’s very crowded queer scene. In the spring, I flew to Atlanta to visit my mom. Now I wanted to see how they were faring themselves.
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They’d taught me how to make a way in the world. I worried about how the pandemic’s upheaval would affect these bars, and other queer spaces writ large. I’ve learned more about myself, and found more comfort, spending time in them than just about anywhere else. I never went inside, but the proximity felt important. Its streets house most of the city’s gay bars-some of them were closed, others open intermittently. The neighborhood is the nucleus of Texas’s queer scene. In Houston, while ambulance sirens blared at all hours, I occasionally spent my afternoons walking up and down the roads of our own local gayborhood, Montrose.
As ever, queer establishments were particularly vulnerable, whether the handful of surviving lesbian bars throughout the nation or the sole queer outposts in deeply conservative regions (to say nothing of the absolute paucity of trans-friendly spaces). Last year, the pandemic shuttered more than a hundred thousand bars across the United States. Then he added, Maybe I’m just not that comfortable yet-being here’s more than enough. When Boots clunked away, I asked my New Friend why he hadn’t seemed interested. He told my New Friend that he was very handsome, and my New Friend thanked him, grinning, before turning back to his phone. A moment later, a hulking whiteboy in boots wedged himself between us. We agreed that the weather felt entirely unseasonable (Global warming, my New Friend smiled), and he told me that he’d been coming out to the bars ever since the COVID shutdowns had lifted. I sat next to another Black guy, one of the room’s few masked patrons, and soon enough we struck up a conversation. The sidewalks were dimly lit, and I glided from light to light through the deeply balmy evening, and beyond the patio I found a pandemic-era simulacrum of a Texas gay bar’s usual weekday crowd: a few (white) guys watching sports on their phones, a (white) man talking to the bartender, alongside a handful of skinny (white) dudes looking to get laid. On my first evening in town, after pretending to write but mostly crying over K-dramas, I headed out to Oak Lawn, the city’s gayborhood. I’d driven to the city for a research trip, from my home in Houston.
The first gay bar that I passed through this year was in Dallas, Texas.