My First Gay Bar’: Rachel Maddow, Andy Cohen and Others Share Their Coming- Out Stories. Below, some other prominent gays and lesbians recall what gay bars meant to them as they began to embrace their sexuality, some eagerly and some nervously. Photo. Credit. Charles Sykes/Invision, via Associated Press Andy Cohen Television host and producer. I used to sneak away from my straight friends at Boston University and go to Chaps (gay bars often have hypermasculine names) in Boston’s Back Bay. ![]() Ever notice how Christopher Nolan’s movies (Interstellar, Inception, The Prestige) feel like an anxiety attack? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a bit. But. A Brooklyn native and Brown University art history major, writer, director and actor Joseph Bologna (Dec. 30, 1934- August 13, 2017) shared an Oscar nomination for. · Jane Lynch, Alexander Wang, Rosie O’Donnell and others reflect on what gay bars mean to them, in the aftermath of the shooting in Orlando, Fla. It was quite literally like stepping into another world. When I moved to New York in 1. Works on Columbus Avenue and Uncle Charlie’s on Greenwich Avenue were where I built a community of friends. ![]() Pre- internet, gay bars were integral in our social development. They were an escape from the (often unfriendly) outside world, packed every night of the week, and everyone inside was a friend. Photo. Credit. Todd Heisler/The New York Times Larry Kramer Playwright, author and activist. In 1. 95. 3, gay bars were scary. I was a freshman at Yale. I thought I was the only gay man there. I overheard some guys making snide and sneering references to a place called Pirelli’s where “the fairies” went. I was lonely, very. So I went. It was a knock- three- times- and- whisper- low kind of place only a few blocks from campus. ![]() Surely I’d meet a guy from Yale here. When the smoke cleared, I saw 3. Eventually a middle- ager spoke to me. Would I like to go for a ride? We drove for miles looking for a place to “do it.” We did it parked in some wilderness, a distance from New Haven. He drove me back to Yale and then he drove home. He’d come all the way from Hartford to find his gay bar. 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. Photo. Credit. Robyn Beck/Agence France- Presse — Getty Images Jane Lynch Actress. The first gay bar I ever went to was the Cubbyhole when it was on Hudson Street in the West Village. It would have been around 1. 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. When I finally tried to walk in, the door lady stopped me and asked: “Do you know where you are? This is a lesbian bar.”“Yeah, I know,” I said nonchalantly, as if I’d been walking into dyke bars since the beginning of time. Photo. Credit. Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images Host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” The first time I went to a gay bar was in 1. ID that I bought for $2. I was 1. 7 years old, and equally scared of being caught for being underage, and of being recognized by anyone I knew. I don’t even think I ordered a beer. 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. Gay bars and clubs were the alpha and the omega for me then. I wish I still had that terrible fake Arizona drivers’ license — I think my alter ego from that ID (her name was Ann) would be 4. I still have her same haircut. Photo. Credit. Charles Sykes/Associated Press Billy Eichner Actor and comedian. My first gay bar in New York was the Duplex, because it was kind of a soft launch into the gay world. My good friend Diane Davis and I used to get up onstage after a few drinks and sing “Sun and Moon” from “Miss Saigon.” That may have been my first gay bar over all. 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. There was one called Charlie’s Chicago, which was a gay country- and- western bar. I was, like, I’m gay, but I’m not into this. That’s where I started to draw some lines. Photo. Credit. Jason Merritt/Getty Images Lea De. Laria. Actress. Between my junior and senior year of high school, I drove an ice cream truck in my hometown Belleville, Ill. My truck broke down near this little bar called Lil’s Tavern. I had heard rumblings about this tavern. I had an aunt and uncle who lived near there, so we would barbecue with them, and I heard words bandied about like “bulldyke” and “he- she.” I knew they would have a phone where I could call the boss, so I went in and in the corner was a table with six big ol’ butch dykes. 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. And one of them looked up at me and yelled, “Hey, baby butch!” I’ll never forget it. I did one of those look- around takes, like, “Oh, she’s talking to me.”Photo. Credit. Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times Honey Dijon. Performer. 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 1. Yazoo. After that, I went to C. O. D. As in Cash on Delivery. That’s where I first heard Frankie Knuckles. 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. I told my parents I was staying at a friend’s house. Photo. Credit. Ulf Andersen/Getty Images Justin Torres. Novelist (“We the Animals”)When I was 2. 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 one night on the walk to the Stud in San Francisco, a man took me in with disgust — my hairy legs, my painted lips — and called me a “faggot,” in that quiet, direct way that always seems particularly menacing, looking straight into my eyes. 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. And then another man, who sidled up to me at the bar when I paused for beer, said to me, “Girl, you are figuring it out tonight on that dance floor,” and I was, and I still am. Photo. Credit. Cindy Ord/Getty Images Rosie O’Donnell. Actress and comedian. It was 1. 98. 0, maybe 1. I was — 1. 9, living at my dad’s home in Commack, Long Island. 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. In French the word for lightning is éclair. How I remembered that from ninth grade French? No idea. I asked my dad if I could use the car to go out. Where to?” he asked (at 1. Friday night). “The bakery,” I said, “to get éclairs.” Silence, and then, he said “O. K.” Peter and I drove the dented white Volare to the strip mall in Commack. 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. From that day on, “bakery” was our code word for gay bar. Photo. Credit. Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images Keith Boykin. Broadcaster and author. On a Sunday night in July 1. 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. 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. Photo. Credit. Jemal Countess/Getty Images Alison Bechdel. Cartoonist, author of the graphic memoir “Fun Home” My first gay bar was Satan’s, in Akron, Ohio. 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. But that night, in the large mixed crowd (there weren’t enough gay people to support a separate club for women), I experienced the profound existential relief, for once, of not being the only queer. A year later, in 1. I moved to New York. There was a lot of routine anti- gay hostility on the street.
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