The eclectic music, the light show, the cute guys milling about, the club kids dancing on speakers: It was gay heaven! I didn’t have to pretend anymore. After I finally built up the liquid courage to do it, I never turned back. But the flat-out gay bar was a bit harder to navigate because it was across the street and one could easily be spotted entering and leaving. The dance floor there was filled with punk rockers, bow heads (sorority girls), gay boys, lesbians and every kind of person under the sun, and I loved it. (By the way, Hair and I are still friends to this day.) One was named Xanthus, an “alternative” bar where the bouncer was a girl named Big Hair. But inevitably I would sneak off, very carefully, to the bars down the road, just past the straight bar. called the Bengal on Highland Road in Baton Rouge, La. With my friends, mostly straight frat guys, I would frequent a popular college bar at L.S.U. It was the 1980s, it was the South, and people didn’t come out then as quickly as they do now.
The feeling that you have that there are no other gay people in sports evaporated quickly. It was fascinating to feel my world expanded.
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Not just pro athletes but college athletes as well. In Scottsdale, in that bar, we met other players and other officials from other sports. Later, I did talk to him, and it was amazingly reassuring.
What are the chances that you walk into a bar and there’s a ref? Immediately, I get a drink, I turn around and I see someone at the bar and say, “Damn it, I know that guy.” It was Bill Kennedy, the N.B.A. I remember walking in that first time quite tentatively with a group of my friends. I went to a little bar there called BS West. I lived in Arizona, in Scottsdale, while I played in the league. I used to go there with my sister with my friends routinely. I’m from Manchester, England, so we have a very vibrant gay community that is very well integrated. Psychologist and former National Basketball Association player Ease and dignity, however, had seemed incompatible with my gayness until my sweaty June bar visit set me on a new path, one that much later led me to marrying my husband, having our children, and becoming an activist for L.G.B.T.Q. Love was not unimaginable, though I didn’t yet have the hang of it. Sex was already easy to find, though it unnerved me. Marks Place, and I clung to someone I knew named Debbie who was temporarily lesbian. But contrary to so many narratives of relief at finding a gay context, my initial experience was primarily of anxiety, because to be where the least acceptable aspect of myself was the explicit topic made me feel more naked than the go-go boys. By the time I was old enough to enter such an establishment, I had my own tight jeans and inchoate prospects.
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I haunted them, promenading back and forth with our family dog, whom I had to walk after dinner, and trying to see past the darkened windows and curtained doors, simultaneously hoping and fearing that one of those men in tight jeans would want to strike up an intimacy as he exited. One was Uncle Charlie’s Uptown, the other had a punning name I didn’t understand at the time: Camp David. There were two gay bars in the neighborhood where I grew up. Matthew Eisman/Getty Images Andrew SolomonĪuthor, “The Noonday Demon,” “Far & Away”