Gay bars in billings montana

Imagine if you had some ongoing reason to meet up with other people, but those meetings had to be secret to keep you safe. Perhaps you have some business with like-minded folks that other people dislike for whatever reason. That others might even think should be illegal and have passed laws to make it so.

If this business were very important to you — perhaps even the difference between living or miserably dying — what would you do? Would you go ahead with your secret meetings? Would you still try to fall in love? The first time I ever danced with another man was in a hotel conference room at a Ramada Inn in Billings.

Back in there were no gay bars in Montana, or Wyoming, or Idaho, or the Dakotas, though there were old and unverified rumors about the basement bar of the Crystal Lounge downtown along with an apocryphal place in Great Falls known as Toad Hall. Among other social services, YLA ran monthly events where gay and lesbian people could meet, have a drink, dance, and otherwise do the exact same things straight people took for granted anytime they went out to any of several dozen bars and bars across town.

At these YLA dances, lesbian and gay people could do anything except make love. That was illegal, even if you got a hotel room. Not a misdemeanor, but a felony. Which is a fact many tend to forget: that making love meant jail time for many Americans, within gay own lifetimes.

In May ofI came out among a circle of friends I had known much longer than I had been willing to publicly admit the truth of myself. The following month, one of my oldest friends invited me to the dance, and to dance with him, in a drab beige hotel ballroom. Playing the following for a certain set of friends — the Group knows who they are — remains evocative.

Thank you, Wolfgang. Yet the montana log dance hall still featured on their newsletter logo would be hung once a month with Christmas lights. Disco and country tunes would be played in careful alternation on a crappy stereo brought in for the occasion. And, amply stiff drinks would be poured for handsome women and beautiful men who dared to dance among themselves as their hearts and loins might be drawn.

Just like any other billing in town, for a night.

Going out tonight?

That next August I went back to college again, a few stories the wiser. Thanks for reading Old Truck Good Coffee! This post is public so please help us grow by sharing it. By the next summer ofthe monthly dances had become a weekly event being run for some combination of love and profit by the scion of a local longtime family pizza joint.

On Friday nights only at 9pm, long sheets of butcher paper would be taped over the big streetside windows of Casa de Pizza downtown on First Avenue. From that hour until 2am, in exchange for a stiff five dollar cover charge, you could flirt and chatter with a glass of a beer among folks who felt the same way you did about how bodies may bump in the night.

The dance floor was off in a tiny back room. The stereo was crappy and yes, there were Christmas lights.