Saturday underground invasion gay bar

On Monday afternoon I was walking along the Mall in Washington, DC, looking at all the flags at half mast in remembrance of the massacre in Orlando. The fact that the victims had to come out after their murder was like an emotional sledgehammer. Such a common story. I could talk all day about the shooter and the reactions from the bitterly gun-obsessed, Islam-hating right-wing narrative inventors.

But I want to talk about the crime scene. More specifically, the importance of the gay bar in America. Friday will be the one year anniversary of the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina where another hate-filled man killed nine black worshipers. The black church is historically a sanctuary from the racism outside the church doors, a place to be in the majority and bond over common struggles.

Dylan Roof invaded a safe space that had been invaded many times before. In the early s, that was mainly Backstreet in Midtown, set back far enough from Peachtree Street that it felt like a secret mission just to find the door to get in. I first went with a bunch of friends in I was 17 and still schooled in the homophobia of the South but also aware that I never fit in that Southern culture.

That was the beginning of the end of my homophobia. All I knew was that the cool kids were at the gay bar, dancing to Two Tons of Fun or Grace Jones, smoking cigarettes and bitching about rednecks. Did I not rate?

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I felt insulted but welcomed at the same time. It felt dirty and dangerous and liberating. It was clear people were risking life and limb to be there, to find a community in the shadows. Georgia license plates have the county of registration on them so when you saw Mr. Coweta County on Juniper, you knew what was up. They just kept it on the down low.

There was an air of constant danger. Maybe most important was the simple fact that people there could be who they actually were. So many LGBT people are forced into double lives. Their true sexual selves and the persons their religion or community demands they must be.

You felt like you were in an oasis of sanity and disco lights. But it was in those clubs that a movement from the fringe to the mainstream was born. Like at Stonewall in and Pulse in