Last night, I went to another gay bar here in Salt Lake City with the (cis-hetero-normative) friends who are hosting me.
It was quite a different experience from last weekend.
Firstly, while I was still feeling extremely nervous, I did feel less uncomfortable and almost a little more confident or even comfortable in my own skin. At the other bar, I basically never raised my eyes from the floor. At this other bar last night, while I still made no eye contact nor interacted directly with anyone, I did act & move a little more “naturally”.
But I think the big differences where in the type of venue & events and ensuing atmosphere.
Last weekend, we went to a smaller gay bar, mostly known as a “dive bar”, with a small patio (where people smoke cigarettes!!!) and two small rooms indoors, one with a pool table and one for dancing. The patrons at this gay bar had been distinctly queer, and most of them slightly more mature gay men.
Last night, we went to a larger gay bar that is usually known to have a “sports bar” atmosphere. In reality, the screens showing sports are not at all obnoxious and there’s plenty of space in a big room, including a pool table, karaoke, and well-separated tables & booths. The outdoor patio is also larger (& no one smoking!). And then there’s an adjacent parking-lot that last night had been turned into a big outdoor dance-floor with DJs and, later, drag shows. Maybe this latter part in the parking-lot-turned-dance-floor was specific to this particular weekend with lots of celebrations for the last weekend of Pride month. The patrons last night seemed to be more varied, or diverse, and there seemed to be also a large portion of non-queer people.
Anyway, I ended up spending almost the entire night dancing outside in the parking-lot-turned-dance-floor.
At the first gay bar last weekend, I was also able to dance a bit, but only in the small dancing-floor-room (indoors). I know I got lots of stares/looks last weekend, despite me always stubbornly looking at the floor. And last weekend, one of the gay men even came up to me and caught my attention by gently touching one of my arms on the dance floor and said to me, “You should teach me some dance moves — my husband says I dance like Donald Trump!”
Whereas last night I felt comfortably invisible, or almost. I got hardly any looks/stares from anyone, no one seemed really interested in me, it felt like we were all there just to dance in the parking-lot-turned-dance-floor (at least, those of us who were out there), and I even looked around a little more instead of staring at the ground the whole time. (But I also know how distracted & unaware of things I can be when I dance.)
Was this an improvement? Or was it simply different from the other time?
The Little Prince and the Fox 