John at a gay bar memes

This post reminds me of the kind of vibe you'll find at Celestial — an unforgettable night coming up at Walter Studios in Phoenix! Post a Comment. July 05, As I wrote last monthI had a full month's worth of columns cued up for June, which I took down in deference to the Orlando shooting, its victims, and its survivors.

In place of those columns, I posted my thoughts about the shooting and larger issues of inclusion for all Americansincluding we whose colors are not just red, white and blue but the entire rainbow. Yesterday, Americans celebrated our country -- its founding, our democracy, our republic. We are also coming up on the one month anniversary of the horrific tragedy in Orlando.

In this sobering, somber year, July Fourth was a day of patriotism not just celebratory but reflective, of stars and stripes born from revolution, of the call for corrective action and the demand for justice. Along with what else it means, moving forward means honoring daily living. Attending to the sacred details of everyday living is, in its way, as transgressive against disruption as more overt revolutions.

Below is the first column of what is, effectively, a new yearand so it has a celebratory aspect. But it is also deferential to last month's tragedy, in that it is a revised version of a column I had originally cued up for June. In that earlier version, I had gotten cute about linking Pride Weekend with Brunch.

Brunch is important, but more important is every person's inarguable right to exist, every American's inalienable right to have the same freedoms and rights as every other Americanand for all of us to be safe in our environment even if it means creating safe environments for ourselves.

‘Loud, proud and courageous,’ this landmark gay bar will close in Garden City

For many of us, that environment includes poolside chaise, brunch table, and bar stooland it is in the spirit of celebration and camaraderie - not to mention freedom of expression -- that I publish this column. My first gay bar was an underground venue illegally housed in a basement in the East Village. It was known among those in the know as the No Name or the Blue Lamp, in reference to the blue light bulb caged onto the side of the stoop that, when lit, meant the space was open for business.

I entered the vestibule below the blue lamp where an entrance table had been set up with a cash box, a flashlight to check id, and a hand stamp once id had been confirmed. Upon handing over an entrance fee I often had to scramble to cover, I was pointed through panes of black velvet where as part of the pat down the bouncer confirmed me as male, then waved me into the rooms of emancipation memes the curtains.

In operating illicitly, the Blue Lamp spoke to the speakeasies of the Prohibition era, to Harlem buffet flatsto gay tea rooms. It wasn't strictly necessary to operate a gay bar as a speakeasy in New York City in the late eighties. There had always been a known lgbt bar in the city, and by the eighties, it was out.

The West Villagewhere Stonewall began, was as well known a gayborhood as the Castro, and there were still cheap railroad flats to be had on the waterfront from the Christopher Street Piers all the way up to Hell's K itc hen. The Blue Lamp operated underground to provide a generation of angry, activist young gay men who identified as "queer" over "gay" a place to congregate for beer, for political discourse, and, yes, for sex.

ACT UP and Queer Nation grew out of those powerful decades of struggle, and gave we who were young an identity of our own that was, make no mistake about it, the gift of our foregoers who were, in very real ways, mothers and fathers to young dykes and fags and intersexed who had been kicked out of or just plain left birth families and familiar homes.

I can honestly say I came into my own at The Blue Lamp. There, gay last vestiges of the small town boy who grew up on the dusty roads of the Oklahoma-Arkansas borderwho made it to john in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania finally evolved into the young man he was supposed to be. My life until then, unfortunately, had failed to provide me even the rudiments of a healthy gay identity.