Your Queer Friends Will Not Be Okay If You Sit This One Out
How vulnerability was more persuasive than facts
In the beginning, I wondered if he was flirting with me. Standing in line outside a row of single-occupancy bathrooms, this fella’s charming good-humor could reasonably have been read as a bit more than friendly if we had been in the libidinous gay bar I used to frequent across the street.
But in fact, we were standing in a bar I had never been to in all my years in the city — a bar with about a half-dozen taxidermy deer-heads on the walls, and a single shady pool table where the fella’s friends — with their flannels and mullets — were regularly sticking their cues in everybody’s faces.
My liberal cinephile friends were out of sight at the other end of the bar, and I was just trying to relieve myself. Coincidently, I said I was gay right when the two single-stall bathrooms opened up, and the sweet fella I was chatting with laughed — “Well then you oughta use the women’s room!”
You’d think after that comment, I’d get offended and just write him off. But it was so juvenile, I genuinely didn’t get the “joke” until after he explained it to me an hour later, when we were deep in conversation again.
