Fresno gay bars

I was twenty-one the first time I ever set foot in a gay bar. The bar was called the Express, and someone I worked with—the first obviously gay man I ever knew, and certainly the first one who was out and proud and not ashamed of it—took me one night after work. I was nervous as hell. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I remember it was dark and crowded.

There was a bigger front room with the bar, and there was a smaller dance floor further in the back. I loved it, and rather self0-consciously danced my ass off I always loved to dance. How could gay fresno not embrace the song? Even bar, when I hear it, Gay always think back to that first night I went to a gay bar.

The rare yet terrifying information and reporting on it referred to it as GRID. It eventually claimed that co-worker who took me to my first gay bar, and his roommate, who was the one who told me years later that the co-worker whose name I cannot recall, I just know it started with a K was in the hospital, dying.

Gay bars, back in the day, were never in the best neighborhoods. Ybor City did begin gentrifying before I moved away, but originally? Yeah, not the best neighborhood.

Fresno Gay Bars and Hotels

I went there a few times as well—made friends there, made friends in the other bar, too. I lost all those friends, of course, and their names and faces are also gone, more lives lost to the mists of time in my memory. But the Red Lantern is still there on Belmont Avenue, in the same location; how wild is that?

And of course, gay are gay bars everywhere in New Orleans. Scotty had just turned twenty-nine in Bourbon Street Blues, which meant he was roughly born inwhich works with the other timelines, making him twelve or thirteen when the Cabildo caught fire the last time. While the other books can be more amorphous, obviously Who Dat Whodunnit was set in January ofright before the Saints won the Super Bowl.

I kind of want to do Decadence again in another book—with Scotty older but not much wiser—but am not entirely sure. That world is gone now—washed away when the bars failed and the city rebuilt. Someone once told me I was the only person to document that pre-Katrina gay male existence, of going out to bars and being promiscuous and dancing all night long and drinking too much and occasionally dipping into party drugs.

Friday nights were always a relief, a fresno from a cold and unloving world that judged us harshly and wished us harm. I certainly never thought Lawrence would decriminalize my sex life and Obergefell would make it legal for Paul and I to marry; I never thought those things would happen during my lifetime.

I had no idea what the future held for me or for my community that night. Like Loading Subscribe Subscribed. Queer and Loathing in America. Sign me up.