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Being less able to support each other to cope with the shit that keeps happening. I wonder if the online anger is also caused by the queers not being able to be together in person. I’ll take your fantasised version of that night over what really happened – though isn’t that the truth of any night out? For of course a sad evening out is better than sitting at home, observing, as you say, queers getting mad at each other online. Sun today!ĭimensions: what a gorgeous way to phrase it, and what a beautiful thing to have done – to have taken that anecdote about maracas and unfolded it to reveal all the facets of what that evening could have been. I have come to kind of embrace my suburban view of the world, which, for me growing up, was very much about observing popular culture at a remove.īut my larger concern is that as we sequester online, our lack of imagination threatens to foreclose our respect for other people’s realities. It includes establishing shots, taken from Google Street View or whatever, of banal suburban curbs and hedges and driveways, the suggestion being that a frisson runs through the street. Now around-the-corner has been closed.Īround the time of the first lockdown, I came across this popperbate video comprising different porn clips edited together to create a narrative of horny men in an American suburb who commune via cam from behind closed doors. There’s this Henry James passage on the lines of, a city’s excitement is the danger lurking around the corner, even if you never turn that corner. The lockdown put a moratorium on serendipity. And you watch him laugh with one customer then grimace at the next, and there are dimensions.īut, yes, same as you, initially I didn’t want to go out, either. So instead of the compare-and-despair that happens alone on a device, this person becomes dimensional, their earlier and later more readily imaginable. But at least there’s someone else there to share another sidelong glance with.) And maybe the bartender is a hottie but you don’t envy his job in a pandemic. And maybe the drag queen onstage says something a bit yikes, a bit iffy, but hey she’s an elder, it’s a performance, let’s give her a chance. (Or was it not even funny?) The saturnine humour of the paltry rattle, something spontaneously experienced in real time and space. Perhaps because we aren’t engaging in spaces where something like the maracas malfunction occurs, sad but also funny. Lately I find myself assuming all queer people are mad at one another. At worst, it’s accusations flying, people piling on. I guess one way of thinking about it is, yes, that was a pathetic event, but what would the online version have been? The equivalent to failed maracas on social media is, at best, the humiliation of very few likes. Kevin! The failed maracas are so zeitgeisty. You spend a lot of time imagining what would happen if gay bars no longer existed – what is it like for the book to come out in a world where, at least temporarily here in London, they really don’t? I know it must have been written and finished a while ago, but now that subtitle has taken on a whole other meaning. And then I read your book, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. I spent January reading about the history of nightclubs. I spent December going for runs in the countryside and listening to lives mixes recorded at clubs and festivals on my headphones. I think like everyone I thought bars and clubs would be opening up again this year, and now, who knows. It was just sad.īut over Christmas it really hit me.
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It was the saddest drag show I ever did see, and not in a sweet way. (A little stingy, don’t you think?) We couldn’t cheer, so we had to shake maracas. Maybe eight tables, one song each from three queens. I went to one socially distanced drag show in Bethnal Green in October. Even in the summer, when there were raves happening up in Hackney Marshes, and a friend told me stories of everyone sitting around a bonfire, passing around a key, I was like: nah, I’m good. Getting through was just about all I could manage. When lockdown first hit – good lord, it’s almost been a year – I couldn’t bear the thought of going out. Kevin Brazil’s What Ever Happened to Queer Happiness? will be published by Influx Press in 2022. Atherton Lin is the author of Gay Bar, a cultural and personal history of gay bars across London, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the early months of 2021, with the pubs and clubs, not to mention the shops, closed until further notice, Jeremy Atherton Lin and Kevin Brazil came together to talk to reminisce about drag nights and gay clubs, and the community these places nurture.