Well, the Old Pink burned this morning. It didn’t burn DOWN exactly, but it looks gutted. A friend says the roof is totaled. Hard to see how it makes sense to do anything with the structure now but raze it. We’ll see.

It’s a big loss for a lot of people. It’s a moderate loss for me. I haven’t been there in years, but I have so many memories of that place, involving so many friends and fights and so much music. And there are so many memories I SHOULD have but shamefully don’t…because I am a blackout drunk.

I identify as a blackout drunk. I didn’t at the time, and I didn’t identify as punk or queer or…anything, really. But I loved it there.

I could plausibly identify as a lot of things, based on the contents of my head and my history, but I have taken exactly zero percent of the risks that my out queer, punk, etc friends have taken, so I’m not going to steal any valor. Plus I change my mind a lot, and I am defiant. The minute I “identify” as anything I usually find out I’m wrong.

I will identify as an alcoholic, even though doing so involves some risk (and actually being an alcoholic involved almost nothing BUT risk) because that risk is way smaller than it once was. Also, I’m sure about it. I’m sure about so little. 

I’m sure that at the Pink Flamingo, I did not have to keep my shit together. I am terrible at keeping my shit together, and when I was a teenager it was very important to my parents and my community that I keep my shit together. Alcohol and loud music gave me a break, and the Pink gave me both. I’m not sure I belonged there per se, but I was really comfortable there anyway. My shit was not together, but neither was anyone else’s, and I could be myself. I was pretty sure I was a pervert, and the perverts on my side of town seemed to be congregating at the Pink Flamingo, where the only rule I could identify was “whatever specific kind of freak you are, don’t bully the other freaks.”

So the Old Pink wasn’t a gay bar exactly, but there were a lot of gay folks there, it was in the gay neighborhood, and it was NOT the college bro bar…which was down the block, also in the gay neighborhood. That’s Buffalo in the 80s for you. 

Maybe the Pink Flamingo was my first gay bar. I have been thinking a lot this month about gay bars.

I am not gay. I am currently, publicly, a chubby middle-aged middle-class Midwestern white woman with a husband and a kid, benefiting from all the privileges that bestows. The Midwestern Mom drag fits just fine for now – at least as well as all the others that don’t really fit.

But as I have learned from moving here, I’m not passing as normal. People always think I am SOME kind of freak, they just can’t put their finger on exactly what kind. This causes them to either pursue me or avoid me.

I’ll stop there, because I am not talking about my sex life on the internet while my Dad is alive. Not because I CAN’T, or he’d be judgy or upset, but because…yeah, no. If you know my Dad, you know that he is wonderful and open-minded and loving and we are very close.  But…we are very close, and boundaries don’t come easily, so the ones we have I am going to maintain and enforce.

So let’s say I’m straight. And let’s extend the cliché and say I had a gay male best friend growing up, and then went to drama school. And I really really love loud dance music. 

So, gay bars.

The gay bar love-of-my-life was Neighbors, in Seattle, on Capitol Hill, from 1993-1998.

To pursue the cliché further: at Neighbors I was a straight-presenting white girl, and gay bars are not places for tourism. You probably shouldn’t take your bachelorette party to one (though if you do, please tip 30%). But when I frequented gay bars in my 20s, I wasn’t there in that spirit. I was there because that’s where my friends were, and because they were safe.

I hasten to add, they were safe for ME. They were not always safe for the young gay men I was with. My friend James was a sex worker, and occasionally he would have to leave quickly in response to some sort of menace. Sometimes he’d need me to leave with him, and I would. I didn’t exactly understand what I was protecting him from but I knew I wanted to keep him safe.

He kept me safe. As did the hundreds of sweaty, oily men on the dance floor.

This was priceless to me, and if you have ever been a young woman I do not have to tell you why.

In my 20s I danced in clubs a lot, and most of them were not safe. I mostly didn’t care. I enjoyed the danger, which was an unfortunate product of my youth and my alcoholism, but occasionally I would have to change my tune quite quickly. Even at Re-Bar – a mostly gay, smaller, neighborhood club I also went to – I had to watch myself. If I did what I went there to do (get drunk, and dance the way I wanted to dance) I was apparently inviting every man in the place to shoot his shot in whatever way he chose, and some of those men were not good at taking “no thank you” for an answer. I had a lot of hands on me, a lot of male fronts pressed up against my behind, scarier stuff I won’t describe. Surprise!

I want to stress here: a lot of men DID take “no thank you” for an answer. Most men are decent, or I would be dead today.

I had many experiences that taught me to fear men as a class, but that is not a lesson I ever learned. I think it’s reasonable to fear men as a class, but what I personally learned to fear was my own desire to let down my guard, because I knew that the minute I did THAT, something really bad could happen.

At Neighbors, it didn’t happen…to me. There were giant men all around me who did not want to have sex with me, or harm me, or both. Some of them did want to dance with me, and were strong enough to threaten any man who menaced me, most of whom just…weren’t there. Because it was a gay bar.

So I danced, and I drank, and I was free. I needed to feel safe and free in an unsafe world, and so did they, so we did it together. I fell in love with the lights and the music (and the drugs), the shared bliss and the shared heartbreak. All those lyrics about loneliness and yearning, about feeling real, wanting someone to show you love, real love, 100% pure love, love you were already burning up for.

Is anything better than feeling different together, and moving your body to that feeling?  Maybe, but if so I don’t know what it is.

I was welcomed in gay bars. Not by everyone, but in general, as long as I was not calling attention to myself, I was treated like an asset not a liability. I knew that I was in someone else’s house, being offered a gift, and my job was to accept it gracefully.

“Gracefully” meant that I couldn’t throw up and make a mess, even after eating pasta from the hot bar (yes Seattle, I ate from the Neighbors’ hot bar and lived to tell the tale. If you don’t know why they had a hot bar in a nightclub, congratulations on not being forced to know the liquor laws in Washington state in the mid 90s). Being a guest meant I waited to get in and didn’t cut the line even if I knew the bouncer, unless I was with a particular group of men, in which case it was OK…which wasn’t logical, but the point is I learned the rules and followed them.

Being a good guest meant that when I would pee in the ladies’ room and a drag queen would come in and scream “ugh, who brought the fish?!” my job was to slink out apologetically, not to defend my presence in…the ladies’ room. My job was to know that it was her room, not mine.

My job was to proudly side with the perverts, not the normals.

That was easy, because they were the kindest, most wholesome people I knew. They were gorgeous, desirable, superior. I let them see that I thought so. That was my job too.

By now I hope we all know that the normals – the nurses and the parents and the social workers and the bus drivers – ARE perverts, a lot of the time. By which I only mean that they are human beings with complex desires who deserve to be free.

In this cultural moment, in this gorgeous chaotic revolutionary social restructuring around sex and gender, I see us learning that separating the “wholesome” people from the perverts creates a really dangerous false dichotomy. I see how much this threatens the people who still need to hide, who still want the wholesome façade to protect them.

It’s the people who enforce purity and oppress perversion who are ruining the planet for all of us, and eventually their personal perversions are always, predictably, exposed.

So to show my gratitude to the Old Pink, to Neighbors, to punks and drunks and perverts, to the DJs and drag queens and bears and rent boys who protected me and celebrated sexuality with me on the dance floor without harming me…I don’t expose myself, but I don’t hide either.

I side with them, with us. I put my money and my efforts where my mouth is. I learned how to give a DIY first trimester abortion, I pestered Kamala Harris’ office speaking up for sex workers, I let trans kids be exactly who they are and change their minds about that if they want to, because identity is a slippery thing and I know that firsthand.

I try not to punch anyone. I listen to really loud dance music. My freak flag prefers not to fly, but I clap for yours and embrace yours, and offer my hugs and my house and my snacks. I think you’re beautiful, and precious, and as normal as you want to be, and I tell you so. I am a cliché, and that’s OK. That fits just fine.

I celebrate Pride month not by identifying myself, but by being loudly pro-pervert.
I certainly learned that at the Pink Flamingo. 

Buildings come and go, but the freaks and punks and queers and drunks will always find safe places with disgusting bathrooms in which to fight, fuck, drink, and dance. The Pink is dead, long live the Pink. It burned up, probably not for love.

But there is a fire I can feed that will destroy nothing, just keep me safe and warm and dancing, with all the wholesome little perverts of the world. I found it there, I follow it forever.