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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.
Chaps gay bar boston windows#
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” But we had that time together – all the men and women in that darkened room, with a throbbing strobe light, the pounding beats, and that feeling of shared elation.Credit.
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That moment, and its place in my life, had passed. While I would never be a regular club kid, I would always enjoy the occasional night out, and when Chaps moved over to the theatre district, it was never quite the same (nor was it as easy a drunken walk home). I remember that night to this day, so important was it to my initiation into the gay world. As we moved in unison, dancing and jumping and clapping to the music, I thought surely there was salvation here, surely this was heaven, surely this was the closest I’d come to a religious experience. It’s the time when even the shy guys will take their shirts off and swing them in the air with gleeful abandon (most, not me). I don’t remember all the songs we danced to – just this one – as this was the climax of the night, the song playing when everyone was collectively moving en masse, when for a few brief moments the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Maybe that’s why gay clubs are so much more exciting than straight ones – everyone is just relieved and happy to be there, and we’re going to have the time of our lives no matter what. Even if they spend a few nights in a gay bar, they can never know what it’s like to have spent a lifetime in a straight world, only to have that oppressive tension (even if nothing ever happened) lifted.
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There was a certain freedom from worry in a gay club that straight people will never understand.
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And even the tiers of men watching from the elevated section above didn’t phase me. Thanks to countless choreographed danced numbers practiced in the carpeted world of my childhood bedroom, I could cut a rug as well as the next gay guy, so the dancing never intimidated me. I had been to one or two gay dance clubs before, but had watched the dancing from a distance. (We won’t mention Boones here.) After my third, I was relaxed enough to join my friends on the dance-floor. Yeah, I was once that kid, but at least it was better than the amaretto sours I started on. (Aside from a one-time-only chalked-license night at the Branch one previous summer, I was never one for under-age drinking.) Once I turned legal, I didn’t go crazy, so I had been of age for a couple of months before really utilizing it. A few retail co-workers (shout-out to the Fanueil Hall Structure crew) were going, and having recently turned 21 I decided to join them. It was at Chaps, which was still on Huntington, right across from the Copley Marriott. This is one of the very first songs I danced to at a gay club in Boston.