As a smiling health practitioner readied my forearm for my second dose of the Dolly Parton vaccine, I excitedly told them that “My mom is going to cry happy tears now”.
A rainbow pin they were wearing caught my eye as they replied, “It’s taken a whole year to bring us to this moment” and poked me. The rest of the day I felt light and hopeful. The constant worry and fear surrounding getting sick or getting someone else sick faded more and more every day for two weeks as the vaccine reached its full efficacy.
Everyone began to discuss how things were starting to “get back to normal”. In terms of spending quality time with friends and family, getting back to normal was wonderful news. But there are certain aspects of normalcy that I have mixed feelings about - such as bars opening. It’s overwhelming to think that “normal” used to mean spending a vast majority of my time working with and socializing around alcohol.
I’m thankful for this pandemic because without it, I don’t think I would have been able to escape habitual drinking. I would still be bartending and serving. Being in close proximity to alcohol and people who drink creates a world in which drinking every day is normal. Being encouraged to drink with guests, to taste new wine and beer, and to pour yourself a glass once your shift was over was my daily experience. Then my coworkers and I would cross the street to buy a few more drinks at our neighborhood bar, I would fall asleep drunk, and the next day the process would begin again.
I have to admit that I have been missing the social aspect of a good dive bar. I miss touching elbows with strangers, kissing in photobooths with friends, and taking 100 selfies in the poorly-decorated-but-somehow-still-cute bathrooms. Now that restaurants and bars are beginning to reopen indoors and at higher capacities - and with California planning to fully reopen in June - I have been considering what it will be like to reintegrate myself into the bar scene as a bar fly who doesn’t drink.
I want to watch my friends drink, is that weird? I want to enthusiastically cry for them to take shots. I want to down free or cheap soda waters with lemon and be enveloped in a sea of red-faced and sweaty people who smell like stale beer and cigarettes. I want to believe that I will be content to sit in a bar without having to get drunk. But not just any bar.
I need the gay bars to open. I am a Sober Gemini Lesbian who can not wait for the local gay bars to swing open their doors. Not because I can finally pick up some cute girl and buy her a drink (although, I don’t totally oppose that idea), but because it will simply feel intoxicating just to sit indoors with other queers. I have missed smiling at gay strangers in gay spaces. Going to the run-down local queer bar was such a normal part of my routine pre-pandemic that I have felt a huge gaping hole in my life this last year. If I wasn’t so wrapped up in figuring out how to lead a sober life, I would be concerned with how I was living my queer life. What does it mean to be a lesbian when you are not socializing with other queers, meeting new queers, or involving yourself in queer matters? If this pandemic had hit in my early twenties, I would be a bundle of nerves; my identity was so wrapped up in being gay then and living and breathing everything that was and is gay.
While I might feel like my identity has evolved since then and believe that I have become a little less dependent on queer vibes to survive, the era of covid has definitely reminded me of how bad I need it. I need to be surrounded by queers, loving on queers, kissing them, dancing to gay bops with them, and just sitting in a space with them. I need to breathe in a gay bar just to feel like me again.
Truthfully, a gay bar will always be more than just a bar.
And that will be the first place I take my sober bar business to.
It is a place where anyone can feel safe and welcome. Whether or not they’re queer. And whether or not they’re sober, hopefully.