The Gay Millennial

Time is indifferent. It doesn’t take or give deliberately, it has one function: to move forward. It’s like meeting someone that you instantly connect with. Your chemistry is undeniable. Only to find out they are moving across the country next week. You think of what life would look like if only you met sooner. It’s that weird form of disappointment that leaves you with a feeling of “…but I just got here”. This is the closest I can get to describing what it felt like when I was finally able to access gay bars and spaces as a gay millennial. Particularly for those of us born between the late 80’s and early 90’s. This one’s a love letter to my littermates left in limbo.

A generation at the intersection of grief and the major shift from analog to digital. We were too young to lose a friend or a lover to AIDS, but still close enough to feel the impact of it in our everyday lives. The misinformation, the fear instilled in us by our friends and relatives about HIV/AIDS. Long before PrEP was available, but in the thick of drug cocktails resulting in undetectable statuses in patients. Too young to see GRID printed in papers, but old enough to know that the virus felt targeted at us. It was still taboo to come out of the closet, you waited until you left high school. Corporations weren’t capitalizing on Pride Month, and gay characters on TV and film were either comedic relief or a tragic plot point ending in death. Same-sex marriage was a hot political topic in the first election some of us could vote during. A part of our being was constantly up for debate before we could even get a taste of it. Little did we know how much would change.

I began to explore gay bars as often as I could straight out of high school. I never told even the closest of my friends back in my hometown, in fear that my family would find out the secret I had accepted about myself. I got to live a separate life for a brief moment, I had circles of friends who never met or knew each other existed. I needed to protect this, and I regret none of it, because I got to experience something that would soon be scarce to come by. I entered my first gay bar when I was 18. A small dark room with neon pink lighting, packed with other men like me, who shared the same accent that often outs us before we get a chance to out ourselves. I would learn a new language that night that involved less words and more body. Unspoken rules I picked up that felt like a sixth sense. We were all visible to each other. Even as strangers, we were family. There was not anywhere else reliable or safe to meet, I wanted to show up, I wanted to see what it was like to flirt out in the open, not caring who was watching. I wanted to be free. We all did.

That freedom also became a sobering reality. A lifestyle at our fingertips, but something was still missing. Something felt off. The more I went out to these spaces, the more I began to notice that there was an entire generation missing. It’s like a color was suddenly missing. We were left to mind the gap, a lifestyle with no rule books or bylaws, only information passed down from one generation of gay guy to the next. You could look around the room and see a lack of mentors, elders, gurus. Maybe we were too excited to be out in the world finally, but it took us a while to stop and ask where the rest of the party was?

What felt like a new way of life quickly changed with the growing popularity of Grindr. The bars were not as packed, the culture began to shift, our spaces were closing because the logic of the app was undeniable: why go out when you can just order in? The generation that learned how to walk through the door was handed a reason not to. We accepted it, and a lot of us never went back, if they ever walked through the door at all to begin with. We abandoned the spaces that held us near and dear when no one else would. I didn’t see those friends I made as much, that feeling of “but I just got here…” began to take shape. I went where everyone else went, because that’s where the party went: on the black and orange app.

But what Grindr has never been able to replicate, is something those spaces are still all about: community and connection. Yes, the app cut through the motions of trying to get laid, and allowed us just to skip to the fuck. But the bar wasn’t always just where sex started (sometimes it started on the actual bar, pool table, floor…I digress), it was where you learned to be among your chosen family. It was where you found electric connections beyond sex, you found friends and community.

Dan Savage has spoken about how during the darkest days of the AIDS Crisis, they buried their friends in the morning, protested in the afternoon and danced all fucking night. The dance kept them in the fight because it was what they were fighting to protect. The pandemic shaped how the men who raised our culture held each other, loved each other, and showed up for each other. Them and those before them built rooms that mattered because we had lost so many of those rooms during the 80’s and 90’s. The gay millennial inherited those rooms, without the weight of the full story. Those stories were not easy to find, we had to dig for them, because LGBTQ history was not something we were taught in our many iterations of US history through school. So we continue to share those stories with who comes next, making sure they know why these spaces are here in the first place, and the magic that can occur inside of them.

About a year ago, I saw a version of my younger self at a bar. A gleam in his eye that he had finally come home upon entering through the door. There was fear of how to act, who he was, and what it meant to be surrounded by his fellows. This bar turned into a nude dance party after midnight, and in a beautiful moment scanning the crowd, I was elated to see this gaybie giving full monty and dancing with the biggest smile on his face. He found that freedom, you can’t create that on an app or anywhere else, it’s a cathartic feeling I hope we all have, or get to experience one day.

There’s a change in the atmosphere lately, we are digitally detoxing when we can, taking breaks from the apps or leaving them all together. There is a renaissance that we can’t quite name yet taking shape. We are re-entering our spaces, we are learning to walk through the door again. We are ready to make our sacred spaces feel sacred again. I imagine if you are like me, you still feel like you just got here when you enter one of our spaces, often still in limbo. Not knowing if we have the wisdom and ability to be what we missed out on in a generation lost. But time moves forward regardless. It’s no longer a question of “Are we ready?” It is our responsibility to be who we needed in those spaces for the next generation.