So I went.

It was a knock-three-times-and-whisper-low kind of place only a few blocks from campus. When the smoke cleared, I saw 30 or so men, all much older and definitely not collegiate. Eventually a middle-ager spoke to me. Would I like to go for a ride? He drove me back to Yale and then he drove home. This was my coming out at Yale.

Except nobody knew it but me. And I was still lonely, very. It would still be a bunch of years before gay bars would start being less scary, and a lot of fun. It would have been around , which made me ish and I was fresh out of graduate school. I looked very straight and very Midwestern cornfed. I walked around the block before I got the nerve to go in because the lady bouncers looked so fearsome and eyed me suspiciously. This is a lesbian bar. I was 17 years old, and equally scared of being caught for being underage, and of being recognized by anyone I knew.

I just remember frantically playing pinball and not speaking to anyone the whole time I was there. That fake ID was my lifeline for years because it got me into the only places where I could find the gay community that I so wanted to be part of.

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Gay bars and clubs were the alpha and the omega for me then. I still have her same haircut. My first gay bar in New York was the Duplex, because it was kind of a soft launch into the gay world. I went to school at Northwestern and lived with a bunch of gay guys, and we would go out to Boystown, the big strip of gay bars in Chicago.

Between my junior and senior year of high school, I drove an ice cream truck in my hometown Belleville, Ill. I had heard rumblings about this tavern. Like, monster butch dykes. I had never seen one before. It was noon or so, and it was completely empty except for these six huge dykes playing poker. Rialto Tap in Chicago was the first black gay bar I went to, and what I really remember was the cracked tile dance floor.

This was when everyone was playing raw house music and bands like Heaven 17 and Yazoo. After that, I went to C. As in Cash on Delivery. I was there underage with a fake ID. I was a trans person so I was an outsider, but it was where people went to dance and get away from the everyday.

It was acceptance. It was no fear. When I was 20, 21, and I liked to go out in a knee-length red skirt with a duck patch on it, which I paired with a hoodie and Chuck Taylors. I remember dancing particularly hard that night. I remember needing to feel beautiful, and catching glimpses in the mirrored wall of my hairy legs coming out under that skirt, catching glimpses of my desperate twirling. I remember my boyfriend was there, smiling at me, lovingly bemused.

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It was , maybe My neighbor was housing a relative from England for the summer. We were both gay newbies. There was only one gay club that we knew of. I think it was called Thunders.

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How I remembered that from ninth grade French? No idea. I asked my dad if I could use the car to go out. We danced the night away — drinking Bud Light. I felt happy and free. On the way home we made sure to stop at the Candlelight diner — around 2 a. Dad was clueless. On a Sunday night in July , at a sprawling complex called Tracks in the District of Columbia, I found thousands of young black gay men and lesbians.

At times, as I walked around the three dance floors, it seemed as though everyone in Washington was gay.

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The men at the gym, the parishioners at my church, the salespeople at the department stores, even the guards at the White House were there. But here, unlike the white gay clubs, the patrons appreciated, and in fact reveled in, black beauty. For the first time in my life, I felt not only desirous of others but desirable to them as well.

I was in college, and a bunch of us drove an hour and a half to get there. I was used to feeling like a total alien when I was in any kind of social group. A year later, in , I moved to New York. There was a lot of routine anti-gay hostility on the street. The bar had its own perils — no one ever paid the slightest attention to me there — but it afforded me the space to just be, with my guard down, and that was salvational.

President, the Ford Foundation. In , my freshman year at the University of Texas, my sophisticated friend Kenneth would drive us in his new Cutlass to a bar called Austin Country. It was a giant converted warehouse, with bars encircling the dance floor and the biggest disco ball in Austin.

By my senior year, the mood was changing. We were focused on getting into law school, or business school, or landing a job. Tragically, AIDS was beginning its deadly, devastating advance. The frivolity of those fast, fulsome, fleeting days has long since given way. When I was a teenage apprentice in summer stock, I went to my first gay bar in suburban Connecticut. The atmosphere was friendly and the outfits were from Sears and Brooks Brothers. There were two gay bars in the neighborhood where I grew up. 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.

By the time I was old enough to enter such an establishment, I had my own tight jeans and inchoate prospects. 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.

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It was Boy Bar on St. Marks Place, and I clung to someone I knew named Debbie who was temporarily lesbian. Sex was already easy to find, though it unnerved me.