![gay bar shooting safe space gay bar shooting safe space](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/download-4.png)
One man dashes in, hugs each person, and departs minutes later with a simple directive: “Be safe!” As the afternoon turns to evening, Deb pours shots all around, and they raise their glasses together. They gather, as they always do, to the far right of the bar. It’s another to come to terms with the fact that doing so means someone somewhere might want you dead.īut as the crowd of regulars begins to trickle in, my pulse slows. It’s one thing to identify with a tribe - to find your people and feel at home with them. Many in my generation, born after the violent gay-rights struggles of the ’70s and ’80s, have never felt such fear so acutely. On Monday afternoon I found myself looking around the bar - the place where I feel powerful, joyful, free, and safe - and wondering where I’d hide if someone walked in and started shooting. In the aftermath of Sunday’s shooting, people who aren’t straight have explained over and over and over and over and over again to people who are exactly what it means that the gunman murdered 49 queer Latinos and allies in that space - the space where they felt powerful, joyful, free, and safe.
#Gay bar shooting safe space free#
Sometimes I wonder what it feels like to be a straight, white man - to feel as free and easy in the world at large as I do in a space like Cubbyhole, where I breathe the air more deeply because I believe it makes me strong.
![gay bar shooting safe space gay bar shooting safe space](http://s.marketwatch.com/public/resources/MWimages/MW-EP432_hate_c_ZG_20160615152758.jpg)
Family can bend and break apart, but a chosen family never will. But it’s not like family, because family can love you through your queerness, but family doesn’t always understand. Like the genetic information you share with your most distant cousins, everyone there has something in common. “And it’s your home, too, while you’re here.” She turns to the woman sitting next to me at the bar and says, “At some point tonight we should play ‘I’m Coming Out.’ It just feels right.”Īnd it does feel like family, because to be in a place like Pulse or like Cubbyhole is to be known. “This is my home,” Deb says to a group of newcomers. And when, the day after the shooting, I spend the afternoon on a barstool at Cubbyhole, family is the word I hear most often. “That’s what Pulse taught us.” Another former employee described the clubgoers as a “family.” “When somebody is hurting or in need, we always look out for each other,” he said. “ place where you could come out, just be you, love who you are,” Chris Callen, who performs there under the name Kristina McLaughlin, told the Canadian Press. Neither Deb nor I have ever been to Pulse, but those who have talk about it in a similar way. It’s impossible to look up without smiling. But the stools there are topped with upholstery featuring everything from Daffy Duck to Dorothy, and the ceiling is festooned with paper lanterns, rainbow flags, plastic fish, and dangling memorabilia from hundreds of customers who’ve traveled there from overseas, all snarled together in a glorious mass. Its walls are lined with wood paneling, and the bar is made of the same stuff. Like most bars in the West Village, Cubbyhole is cramped and dark. “It’s like going to an adult Disneyland - there’s always so much love. “The first time I walked in, I was in awe of the feeling there,” she says. It’s just as special to Debbie Greenberg, whom everyone calls “Deb,” and who’s been tending bar at Cubbyhole for almost six years now. Being there, I was overwhelmed by such a sense of rightness that at one point I had to stop talking mid-sentence to stem the flow of tears running down my cheeks. But until that first visit to Cubbyhole, I hadn’t realized mine existed. This might not seem remarkable everyone has their tribe. And the more I looked, the more I liked it, and the more I saw women like me - short hair, drop-crotch pants, aggressive boots - and realized that the aesthetic I’d been projecting for months to stand out everywhere else meant that here I fit in. I perched on one, sipping my beverage and looking everywhere at once. But my friend marched me inside, claimed a couple of stools, and ordered drinks. I’d been nervous about entering a space that was only half mine - you know, the half that dates women. I’m smiling down into my lap, embarrassed by the camera, but behind the shy smile is something like ecstasy.Ī few hours before, I’d dithered on the threshold of Cubbyhole, a historic lesbian bar in the West Village. In it, I’m sitting across from her on the train, wearing a coat and plaid pants appropriate for mid-December. My best friend took a picture of me the night we went to Cubbyhole for the first time.