Tag: Ybor City

I Wanna Dance with Somebody

Only when I’m dancing do I feel this free…

I love to dance.

Really, how was there ever any doubt about my sexuality?

Well, there probably wasn’t, but I still live with the illusion that people didn’t know. It makes me happy, okay? Allow me my delusions, thank you.

I think the first time I ever danced was at a school dance when I was a sophomore. I don’t remember what the dance was for, but that was it. A friend of mine asked me to dance, and I replied, “I don’t know how” (which was true), and she laughed at me, saying, “all you have to do is move” and showed me a basic back and forth step with swinging arms that was pretty simple. “Just stay on the beat,” she advised, and I found myself losing myself on the dance floor, getting into the music, and improvising…and for the first time in my life got compliments for something. This happened again when we moved to Kansas and at my first dance there–girls couldn’t believe what a good dancer I was, and they all wanted to dance with me.

Granted, most guys were not fun to dance with, usually doing some kind of weird shuffling kind of movement that was always off-beat and looked almost painful to do. But I basically figured out the trick–moving your hips and shoulders on different beats of the music instead of together. And the more I did it, the more I loved it. Guys were also not supposed to enjoy dancing, as it wasn’t ‘manly’ or something; I don’t know, there was a lot of idiotic bullshit like that for boys when I was one. My love of dancing continued on through my twenties–there weren’t any really good clubs for dancing, gay or straight, back then–and it really wasn’t until I moved to Tampa and started going to a gay bar in Ybor City called Tracks that I really found my place in the community.

Oh, not right away. I would dance when I’d go out, but not much; I was very self-conscious, and dancing made me sweat–a lot. My hair (what was left anyway) would plaster to my scalp with sweat, my socks and shirt would be soaked through, and I really really believed I was unattractive. But when I was out on the dance floor, I didn’t really care about how I looked or if anyone was looking at me or anything other than the driving beat and cutting loose on the dance floor. I never felt tired or sore the next morning either–I always felt good after dancing all night…

….and then I lost weight and discovered the gay bars in New Orleans.

I also discovered Ecstasy, but that’s probably best handled at a different time.

Oh, how I loved coming to New Orleans to dance the night away! That was the one thing I always hated, everywhere else that I lived or visited; the night always ended with last call, sometime after midnight and always no later than three. In New Orleans, the evening ended when you were too tired and sweaty and exhausted to dance any more. I used to go dancing at least three nights per week when I lived in Tampa (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), which also continued in New Orleans. I also spent a lot of evenings in gay neighborhood bars while in Tampa–didn’t really do much of that after moving here.

There’s something about being in an altered state (of whatever kind) out on the dance floor in a sea of shirtless gay men, all dancing and having a great time, while killer music plays through the speakers, the constant thumping of the bass getting into your nervous system. There would also be a light show during the dancing, and mist sprayed down into the crowd (in the older days before I lived here, I used to think they put poppers in the mist because you could smell it…although now I’m not sure that wasn’t just from how many people were using them on the dance floor), whistles and bells and there was always some older gay hippie, shirtless with long gray hair, shaking a tambourine out there. Everyone was friendly on the dance floor, smiling and grinning and flirting and grind-dancing, and the loud music just got into your soul, making it an almost out of body experience.

I always hated that the mixes you heard in clubs were so hard to find in record shops.

And the divas we sang along to–Deborah Cox and Madonna and Celine Dion and Martha Wash and Whitney Houston and Mariah Cary, among many nameless others–I was always lip syncing when I danced, really doing drag without the make-up and costumes and wigs–music I could just get lost in for hours. On the dance floor, everything was okay and everything was going to be better and this insular all-gay world was a place where I was at peace, where I was happy, and where nothing could ever bother me.

I miss dancing, but I also am older and can’t stay up late enough to go out dancing, let alone dance for even a few hours. But dancing has always been an integral part of my gay identity, even if I don’t do it anymore. I still listen to the music I can find on Spotify or Youtube, and believe me, there’s nothing like blasting gay dance music for cleaning the house. I used to have deejays make me tapes for my aerobics classes–and the attendees always loved the music.

Are gay bars still community hubs? I honestly don’t know–but all the young gay men I work with go out to clubs, so I guess so. Maybe not as integral as when going to one actually put you at risk of being arrested, but still important.

It’s Raining Men

The first song I ever danced to in a gay bar was, quite naturally, “It’s Raining Men.”

I never said I wasn’t a stereotype, did I?

I was twenty-one the first time I ever set foot in a gay bar. (If there were gay bars anywhere near me in Kansas, I had no idea) It was in Fresno, California, of all places; where I spent the 80’s and which I often lovingly refer to as “Topeka in the Valley.” It wasn’t much of anything, really; a small building on Blackstone Avenue, I think just past Olive, and near the off-ramp for the new cross-town highway in an attempt to alleviate traffic on the main streets of the city (it may have been further north). The bar was called the Express, and someone I worked with–the first obviously gay man I ever knew, and certainly the first one who was out and proud and not ashamed of it–took me one night after work. I was nervous as hell. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I remember it was dark and crowded. There was a bigger front room with the bar, and there was a smaller dance floor further in the back. We arrived–I didn’t recognize the song that was playing–got a beer (he got a vodka and cranberry), and then the next song started up. I didn’t know it, had never heard it before, but he dragged me out onto the dance floor and yes, the song was quite a jam. I loved it, and rather self0-consciously danced my ass off (I always loved to dance). My friend later told me the song was by the Weather Girls, who used to sing back-up for Sylvester, and it was called “It’s Raining Men.” The song was utterly ridiculous–it still is–but those powerhouse vocals, the driving beat, and the absolute joy in the idea that all you had to do was “rip off the roof and stay in bed” so a hot man will drop in from the sky for you? How could gay men not embrace the song? I bought the single at Tower Records a few days later, and every time that song played, I’d be out on the dance floor. Even now, when I hear it, I always think back to that first night I went to a gay bar.

HIV/AIDS was already a thing, but we didn’t know much about it in Fresno; it seemed like something new and scary but maybe no worse than some other new diseases that had been discovered in the 1970’s/early 1980’s. The rare yet terrifying information and reporting on it referred to it as GRID. It eventually claimed that co-worker who took me to my first gay bar, and his roommate, who was the one who told me years later that the co-worker (whose name I cannot recall, I just know it started with a K) was in the hospital, dying. “It’s Raining Men” always reminds me of him; always takes me back to that first time when I so nervously paid my cover charge and flashed my ID and walked into my first ever gay bar. There was another gay bar in Fresno, the Red Lantern, that was in a much shoddier (“dangerous”) part of town. (Gay bars, back in the day, were never in the best neighborhoods. Tracks in Ybor City in the early 90’s–when I lived in Tampa–was also not in the best neighborhood. Ybor City did begin gentrifying before I moved away, but originally? Yeah, not the best neighborhood.) I went there a few times as well–made friends there, made friends in the other bar, too. I lost all those friends, of course, and their names and faces are also gone, more lives lost to the mists of time in my memory. It seems a bit shameful to not be able to remember the names and faces of the first people who knew a part of me I’d never let anyone see before, but they also didn’t know me in that I kept the other part of my life secret from them.

It’s very strange, because I decided to google the gays bars of Fresno while I was writing this and apparently the Express closed in 2013? I don’t think it stayed in the same location–according to the site I found it had also been called “708” before becoming the Express again; who knows what that was all about. But the Red Lantern is still there on Belmont Avenue, in the same location; how wild is that? That’s a pretty long-lived gay bar for a place like Fresno, really. I remember in Houston there was JR’s, and Heaven, and maybe another one there in the Montrose district. But I didn’t start spending a lot of my weekend evenings in gay bars until I moved to Tampa. Tracks in Ybor City and Howard Avenue Station were the two primary gay bars when I lived there; and there was Bedrox on Clearwater Beach–which was the gay section.

And of course, there are gay bars everywhere in New Orleans. I haven’t set foot in one in a number of years, and may never do so again. I’m old; spending the night dancing would end with me in the hospital, or needing days to recover.

I don’t know what gay bars are like now because I’ve not been a part of that culture for a very long time–we haven’t even done condom outreach during special weekends in the bars in years anymore–which is why it’s hard for me to write about Scotty being still a party-boy. His age in the book I just finished and turned in is roughly forty-three or forty-four; after Katrina when I had to actually pick a time for the books to have been set (Katrina couldn’t be ignored), I decided that the Southern Decadence where Scotty met both Frank and Colin was in 2004, Jackson Square Jazz was that Halloween, and Mardi Gras Mambo was Carnival 2005. Scotty had just turned twenty-nine in Bourbon Street Blues, which meant he was roughly born in 1976, which works with the other timelines, making him twelve or thirteen when the Cabildo caught fire the last time. While the other books can be more amorphous, obviously Who Dat Whodunnit was set in January of 2010, right before the Saints won the Super Bowl. With the pandemic starting in 2020–which I will deal with at some point–this one had to take place before the world shut down, so I am thinking it’s May of 2019. I don’t want to skip ahead a year to the pandemic, so Quarter Quarantine Quadrille will be further in the future. I kind of want to do Decadence again in another book–with Scotty older but not much wiser–but am not entirely sure. I also would like to really do a Scotty Halloween book, and maybe even a hurricane evacuation one, I don’t know.

I am, however, very glad that I did write those first three Scotty books, when I was enmeshed in gay bar culture, because I’m glad it’s preserved in fiction. That world is gone now–washed away when the levees failed and the city rebuilt. Someone once told me I was the only person to document that pre-Katrina gay male existence, of going out to bars and being promiscuous and dancing all night long and drinking too much and occasionally dipping into party drugs.

I’m also kind of glad modern gays don’t have to use the weekends and gay bars as a place to let loose and be as free and gay as possible, which they couldn’t do during the week. Friday nights were always a relief, a respite from a cold and unloving world that judged us harshly and wished us harm.

I don’t miss the bright lights, the cigarette smoke (that’s how long it’s been), the stench of male sweat and the smell of poppers in the air as the deejay spins another banger. I mean, I do, but not in a sad kind of way; those memories are lovely and they make me a little wistful for the days when gay bars weren’t clogged with bachelorette parties and obnoxious drunk straight girls. But those weren’t the good old days, really; we had no rights and our sex lives were against the law; the few legal protections we have now were goals back then, something we could strive to achieve sometime in the distant future. I certainly never thought Lawrence would decriminalize my sex life and Obergefell would make it legal for Paul and I to marry; I never thought those things would happen during my lifetime. I didn’t expect to see an openly gay member of the Presidential cabinet; out queer characters as leads in television shows and movies–none of these things seemed possible to that closeted twenty-one year old who walked wide-eyed into the Express and went out to dance to “It’s Raining Men.”

I had no idea what the future held for me or for my community that night. In some ways I wish I could let that kid know everything would be okay and his life would turn out so much better than he ever dared dream…but knowing might change things, and I wouldn’t want to change anything that would take away the life I live now, because I love it.