immediately widens out, and suddenly you see a vast network of ants who have just been there—making orderly lines, serving their queen, eating your food since God knows when—and until this moment you were utterly, blissfully blind to what was right in front of you? This was that kind of deal. Immediately I realized what any halfway-savvy fifth-grader with decent reading comprehension skills would have picked up on immediately: “young entrepreneurial types and an appreciative older audience” meant “prostitutes and johns.” This was a hustler bar. I shook the hand of my appreciative older audience, finished my beer in one large gulp, and excused myself.
I had a hard time finding my place in New York’s gay scene, and while today I recognize the problem as internalized homophobia and a lamentable eagerness to find fulfillment in a bar, at the time I blamed CeCe Peniston. Where now I recognize that the mid-’90s were a golden age of gay-bar music—a perfect, shining moment in time that has earned its place alongside the Motown era and the classic rock of the ’70s—at the time it worked my nerves. But that shit holds up; go into the most basic gay bar in your area—the one that smells like an old fog machine and is called Rumors or Illusions or The Malebox or whatever—and see how long it takes for you to hear “Finally.” If you have not heard it in thirty minutes or less, drinks are on me. (Limit 1, well and draft only.) In the ’90s, disco was becoming less of a dirty word and the gay community was becoming a marketing segment. Suddenly all you needed was a drum machine, some rudimentary recording equipment, and a shouting black woman, and you could be a gay bar superstar. Black Box, La Bouche, Corina, Real McCoy, too many to mention. They aimed for “Let the Music Play,” and when they missed, at least they landed among the “Gonna Make You Sweat”s.
There were a handful of bars in the still-intimidating East Village, and I thought if I didn’t find my home there, maybe I’d just get stabbed to death and the whole thing would be less of an issue. I immediately felt more at home in these places: The Boiler Room, The Phoenix, Wonder Bar. They had less hostile guys and more adventurous ninety-nine-compact-disc jukeboxes, stocked with ninety-eight fresh, interesting albums—Stereolab, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Soul Coughing—and, in position ninety-nine, Madonna’s Immaculate Collection. And come 11 p.m. on a Friday night, the Chelsea boys in their Caesar haircuts would start to arrive, and your Morphine would be cut with “La Isla Bonita.” It never failed.
And I never failed to show up. On the Upper East Side, my signature move became The Ghost. I’d be out with my friends, listening to the Dave Matthews Band at Dorrian’s or The Gaf, and then, at around 2:00 a.m., after the appropriate number of draft beers, I would act very tired. Ostentatious yawns and stretches. I might tell a friend I was going home to hit the sack, or I might just leave. Either way, I’d hit the street, shake off the fake fatigue, hop in a taxi, and go downtown. Two a.m. is the hour when people get less picky about whom they talk to and possibly take home. Two a.m. is when a guy like me can shine.
When you’re very young and you don’t know how to find (or be) a real boyfriend yet, you make one up out of what’s around. You have your friends, who take care of your emotional needs, and then you hook up with strangers, which checks off the intimacy box. You cobble satisfaction together. It’s not perfect, but it works. It did for me, anyway.
The great thing about New York, I quickly learned out of necessity, is that you don’t need to be in a gay bar to meet other gay people. It is a big, diverse city full of single twenty-three-year-olds who are desperate to pair themselves and their friends off so that they can have dinner parties and pretend to be older than they are. There are all kinds of people, everywhere, and they are free to mix wherever they choose.
One major pitfall about being a single gay man in New York in 1994, as the community was starting to gain visibility and power, was that people—primarily women, it must be said—were beginning to see gay friends as a hot accessory. They would get very familiar with you very