I wished him luck, but I couldn’t hear his response over an unmasked group of white gays, yelling about poppers and spilling their beer all over the floor. He was here to meet a potential hookup, and he had a good feeling about it. My New Friend told me that he had to jet. Whenever I did spot one, our eyes would track each other for the rest of the night.Ībove us, Megan Thee Stallion rapped from the speakers. The city’s Black and Latinx residents have been leaving in droves for nearly a decade, and I’ve seldom found an excess of non-white folks at any queer bar there. When I asked what it’d been like meeting people, he made the face I get from many people of color living in Austin. He’d recently moved to the city, and he’d also recently come out, which made him, in his own words, double fucked. He was a scruffy Asian guy who’d just got off of work. A familiar dread percolated, and I was about to split in search of a taco truck when a dude sitting beside me asked if I wanted a beer. I could count the number of masked folks on one hand, and the patrons were nearly exclusively white. Occasionally, I drove downtown, to the queer bars on Fourth Street. When our bartender came by to refill my water, he said, It’s almost like we never left.Ī month later, I decamped to Austin, where I ripped up draft after draft of a novel in a tiny house on the city’s east side. He was deeply chiselled, with a fade and earrings. Some of us were masked, but most people weren’t, and, eventually, an unmasked Black dude grabbed the barstool beside me. At one bar, some guys modelled by the windows, and a handful of white “daddys” in polos and khakis shared drinks with immaculately dressed younger Black men. But it was a Wednesday, and the scene was muted. Atlanta is one of the South’s queer meccas, especially for Black folks. The next evening, I did my own lap around the area. Our waiter was a cub-ish Latinx guy, and when I stepped inside to ask for more syrup he asked if I’d always been a sugar queen. They sprayed everything down with sanitizer. She told me that the gays were great about masks. After we’d spent the day shuffling from the very happening (queer) gym to the very happening (queer) diner to the only slightly less bustling (queer) tailor, I asked my mom how her neighborhood had seemed the previous few months. 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.
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.