A large group of my friends and I spent Friday night hanging out at Emerald City, one of Pensacola’s gay night clubs.
Fridays are guy’s night at EC, so for me it was a great way to have a night out on the town while still being broke as a joke. It was my first time there, and I was surprised at how much fun it was.
Once we got more drunk and loosened up, our whole group would cram into one of the big, goofy cages off to the side of the dance floor and danced like a horde of mentally handicapped rhesus monkeys.
Later in the night they had a gay striptease contest that our friend Andy managed to win by just a hair (and I will not tell you where that hair came from). It was a really great time.
The next day when I told people that we hung out at a gay bar, people acted kind of surprised at first, but it really didn’t seem like a big deal to anyone.
Before that night I had never attempted to hang out at a gay club before, mostly because I thought it would be crossing some sort of line, like if a group of Christians showed up at a mosque and started doing their own form of prayer off to the side while the Muslims worshipping in that mosque were trying to tend to their own lifestyle.
It would just be kind of inconsiderate, since there are hundreds more Christian churches out there for them to pray in then there are mosques. Fortunately, what I found out was that gay people don’t seem to really care at all if straight people come hang out at their club.
And honestly, it isn’t that uncommon for a lot of straight people that I’ve met to go up to EC and hang out with their friends to take advantage of the drink special.
I suppose society has just given up on homophobia. I mean, anyone that saw Adam Lambert closing out the American Music Awards Sunday night can attest to that.
Once something becomes pop culture like that it has been officially accepted into mainstream society, and there’s no more avoiding it. It happened with the black community when rock ‘n’ roll became huge, and it’s happening now with the gay community.
Young people ultimately make the rules in our culture, and young people are saying that homophobia is lame.
The only people who are still holding on to it are older people, who are uncool anyway by default, and religious jerks who want everyone to be just as repressed and unhappy as they are because they hate being left out of all the cool stuff.
Eventually the old people are going to do what they always do and just complain about how scary the younger generation is (our music, our slang, our technology, our president).
Meanwhile, the religious people are going to do what they always do and conveniently rewrite their rules to make more room for gays so that their organization doesn’t become outdated and abandoned (read: divorce, heliocentrism, evolution... give it a sec).
The bottom line is that homophobia is dead, the gays have won, and dudes drink for two bucks on Friday nights. Cheers.
17 comments
I'm not gay, so I can't really say if that whole marveling-that-they-like-us tone was insulting or not. It just seemed in poor taste...Well... to me, the Adam Lambert performance set back gay acceptance, not demonstrated it. Does prancing around, hip-thrusting, flipping off the camera,singing awfully, grabbing dancers and shoving them into your crotch REALLY represent "the gay community"? And the response afterward showed even more clearly that people are way more upset with gays acting like sluts onstage than when straights do it.Also, as a sometime- Conservative/ Libertarian/ Progressive I realize I don't speak for the young people of America. I also understand societal change, but don't you think it's a little dangerous even to classify "young people" under a blanket statement? Especially since "our" President has done nothing except send 30,000 more young people off to die. I don't think your points were "lost" on me, I just don't think an overall lighthearted story about how it's cool that gays and straights can drink and strip together really justifies all the implied points you don't seem to realize you made.Anyway... not meaning to flame, but I'm really tired of opening to my school paper and seeing clumsily-written, purposely-insulting stuff that has every RIGHT to be printed, but really ought not be printed.
ONLY "old people" are homophobic?
Barack Obama is "our" President (and, by implication, pro-gay rights, even though he has stalled on Don't Ask, Don't Tell...)?There's just a whole lotta irony going on here. It's sad that you found it necessary to condemn hatred of one specific group in an article that stereotyped and showed hatred to other groups.Also...
"Fortunately, what I found out was that gay people don’t seem to really care at all if straight people come hang out at their club."Sentences like this and others seem to reduce "the gays" to another species, one to be studied and examined, and visited at "their bars," much like a zoo, but not exactly accepted as equal. ...Remember Bill O'Reilly and his "M-F'in Iced Tea!" comments about going to Sylvie's? "I hung out in Brownsville, and the black people didn't seem to care. Therefore, racism is dead!"
That wouldn't fly, would it? If the tone of this article was supposed to be snarky sarcasm, then be snarky sarcasm... with a point. But your point seems to come off like a "liberal" version of a Stephen Colbert sketch.