Gay club utica ny

Growing up gay Southern Maryland in the s, I was surrounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by a 40 mile stretch of tobacco fields. The main employer was the Navy, and the main pastime was driving around town with a Confederate flag hanging in the back window of your pick-up. Needless to say, St. I had utica gay friends … at least none that I knew of.

One day when I was 17, I came home from school to find my mother looking like the cat who swallowed the canary. And that was that. You could still drink at 18 back then. It was a run-down place in the slums of Southeast Washington, but it was the only bar I knew of because they ran advertising in the Washington Star.

There were too many people, and now you were just another face in the crowd. I still felt isolated. Inthe political climate changed. The Moral Majority, a religious organization headed by the rabidly homophobic televangelist Jerry Falwel, had the ear of the White House. AIDS had club been diagnosed, and the country was in panic over the deadly disease spread by homosexuals and other degenerates.

Incidents of gay bashing were on the rise, and police raids on gay bars were becoming more and more frequent.

Brian S. Gay

Considering the circumstances, it seemed like a good time to go back into the closet. My family moved to Oneida County shortly thereafter, and once again I found myself feeling very alone and isolated. I was unaware that Utica had any form of gay community; but neither was I looking for one this time.

It was a few months before my 30th birthday when I finally decided that enough was club. What I was used to, and what I encountered, were two totally different things. I had come from a culture of big city clubs, where nobody knew everybody and the transience was high.

Now I was in a small neighborhood bar, where you were no longer just a face in the crowd. And I embraced it whole-heartedly. I quickly became a local activist, cofounded the first MVCC Gay Alliance, and headed up the Utica Pride Parade in fact, the very first full-color photo printed on the front page of the Observer-Dispatch was of my smiling mug.

It became my home away from home, and gay friends became my family. Nothing like this would ever have happened in Washington. I may have taken the long way around, but eventually my Mohammed reached his mountain. Coming Out Stories Jay Salsberg Growing up in Southern Maryland in the s, I was surrounded utica three sides by water and on the fourth by a 40 mile stretch of tobacco fields.

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