There’s something that feels unfairly uneasy about making new friends in the gay community. Let’s not do the thing where one type of experience becomes the basis of a universal representation of a community. That’s not what this is about. This is about my repeated experience within a specific scene and how, potentially, it may not be suited for others like me.
On my way to Paris for a weekend escapade to get out of the day to day routine and take a step back to do some much needed introspection, I decided it could be fun to go out to some gay bars, make friends for a night, and indulge in over sharing with strangers in a bizarre act of free therapy. I find that when searching for answers within myself, I often get there by just interacting with people I do not know.

I asked some friends familiar with the bear scene in Paris for suggestions of fun bars to check out. What is the bear scene, you ask? It’s a subset of the gay community focused on less commonly celebrated body types, mainly: hairy, chubby, muscly, « manly » looking men. But this definition is a bit of an oversimplification and I encourage you to at least check out the Wikipedia article on the subject. It’s quite insightful.
I wore a trendy Uniqlo Pokémon t-shirt (the middle one in the top banner) under a jacket thinking it could act as a conversation starter with fellow geeks at the very least, without necessarily being an obstacle for people not familiar with that creative property or not recognizing it. I tend to be shy when alone at bars, so I admit part of my plan was to hope for the bar regulars and extroverts to strike up a conversation. I’m perfectly apt at following up and engaging, but much less at starting it out of the blue.
And so the night went by, as I basically only sympathized with the barmen (which is a sure sign of failure, for it is their jobs to entertain guests). Towards the end of the night, around 3am, I finally began to chat with two men who also weren’t regulars. One of them was adamant that I had to download a bunch of dating apps. They could act as platonic relationship finders too. I hadn’t used those in years, ever since I had met the love of my life and now fiancé and frankly I hadn’t missed them a bit.


Here’s my experience with gay dating apps, whether bear focused or general gay ones, from years ago and also today:
* Set up a profile with a picture, fill out your interests, clearly mention why you’re here (looking for friends to hang out with at a bar tonight!)
* Start messaging people who clearly also label their profiles as ones looking for friendships and into bars, not just dates or casual sex
* Never get replies, ever
* Sometimes get messages from people wanting sex or asking for dick pics before saying hello, and sometimes those people aren’t even in your city
Years ago I was looking for a relationship, so just reproduce the same format but with « looking for dates » instead of « looking for friends » and it was the same. I get it, I’m not good looking and I’m geeky, and so far the only ones that have disagreed have been my fiancé and my mom? But it’s still such an extremely tiring and saddening process. I thought that in a big city like Paris, there would be enough people to find at least a couple of to hang out with, because God knows that experience is even worse in smaller cities. I was wrong.
It seems, at times, to me, to be impossible to form friendships in the gay community without being introduced to somebody else’s friends. Sex seems to be the usual starting point. That is incredibly maddening to me, as a man with a monogamous vision of love.



I spent the next day walking through Paris (mainly in the 1st and 2nd districts), eating Japanese food (rice-free bento because I’m diabetic), buying a book (Flights by Olga Tokarczuk), writing (about identity and perception, a future post to come), obsessively checking 4 different gay apps, and doing much pondering about whether going back to the bar was really what I needed in my attempt at introspection. I thought about the night before: basically standing around, waiting for people to interact, a drink in hand. That person wasn’t me. I had to find a way to be myself even if that meant clashing with typical bar attitudes. I love writing. I collect a number of notebooks and letter stationery from around the globe. Why not write at the bar?
I grabbed letter paper and a pen, and decided to sit at the bar and write letters for the people around me: the barmen, strangers, even the bear community itself. Writing made me feel at ease, made me feel like myself.
I wasn’t even halfway through the second letter, a bare 5 to 10 minutes into my arrival, when a man walked in and stood next to me, waiting to order a drink. Our eyes met, a bit longer than what would be safely assumed to be a glance. He looked at the letter paper, then back at me.
We chatted. We danced. We hung out, platonically! It was fun. We had a fun time. We exchanged Facebooks and said bye to each other, looking forward to meeting again in the future.
What a stupid, obvious, cliché moral of a story, huh? Be yourself and it all works out, also avoid digital apps to have physical connections? I almost feel bad typing this. Almost.



Again, this story isn’t necessarily meant to be universal. Maybe the way I presented myself on those apps simply wasn’t good. Maybe my profile picture sucked. Maybe every gay person in Paris has a busy social agenda and a day’s notice is not realistic. And maybe, just maybe, it was simple bad luck.
But still, riding the train back home, when I think about my current sleigh of gay friends, there isn’t one that I haven’t met either through somebody else or through sex, apart for two people: one guy in college (we both came out to each other after a year, it was kind of funny), and the man I met yesterday at that bar. Same for my fiancé: one of his gay friends is from college, all the others he met through other people.
And yet, part of me wonders why I’m necessarily against sex as a way to connect socially. The quick and obvious answer is that I’m in a committed and monogamous relationship and that has always been my vision of love and relationships. It’s the same for my fiancé. But it’s not for a lot of my friends and, well, they have way more friends than we do.
Maybe that’s something to think about. A topic for another day…


