Q
The Club Q shooting got me to thinking about the Pulse shooting. And those got me to thinking about all the time I’ve spent in gay bars and all the friends I made there.
I’ve always had four-person barfly friend groups.
Thirty years ago, I’d go out dancing with Pinhead, Psychofag and Frumper.
Then I went with Kristin, Steve and Psychofag.
Then I went with Joe, Alan and the Queen of the Night.
Then back to Psychofag, now with Bryan and Paul.
There were other combinations. Other cities. And plenty of other states.
But there was always that group that looked out for you.
Even if they (or I) happened to be hitting on/hooking up with someone, we always made sure everyone had a friend to dance with … a way home … and, at the very least, a safety net should something happen.
But nothing happened, you know? We’d drink and dance and laugh and buy mixtapes (later CDs) from the DJs.
And now all that music is available on Utopia on SiriusXM.
In any event, everyone I mentioned is married off. I was an attendant at Bryan and Paul’s nuptials — long before it was legal. Another just had a baby with his husband.
None of the straight girls from that era ever had kids, go figure. Not even in my non-barfly friend foursomes.
Anyway, I type all of this to say that I am so glad my friends and I are alive.
That the only fucked up thing to happen was Psychofag tossing himself from the second floor of our parking garage onto Steve’s convertible as we sped away from the club.
Not even the unhoused guys in Southeast ever bothered us or our cars. We would hand them a couple bucks, and the only cars that weren’t rummaged through were ours.
That we could drink and dance and talk openly and grind up on random people we thought were attractive and make out with people we might never acknowledge in the light of day.
The things that happened between dusk and closing time are precious. You wear what you want. You be who you are. You pop some Molly and let your inhibitions that didn’t already melt away in the dark dissolve completely.
And you live to never tell if you don’t want to.
In any event, I love that a drag queen with a giant high heel kicked the shit out of the Club Q shooter while a straight male dad held his bitch ass down.
I’m just sad that the (non-binary) shooter, who was from the LDS sect, had so much self-loathing and a firearm he never should have possessed, that he turned another sacred space into a battleground.