This post was submitted by Zack Rosen

Close your eyes and put a picture to the phrase “gay bar.” You are probably imagining the platonic form of a homo club, where shirtless muscle daddies gyrate in time to the sonic vomitings of Kristine W, their hairless chests illuminated on the dance floors and surrounding balconies by the laser lights. The smell of poppers and ravaged ass hangs heavy in the air, barely covered by the fog machine. A blonde 16 year old gets plowed in the backroom by a man with Fu Manchu facial hair and eraser-sized nipples. I doubt this place actually exists, but it still shines brightly in our collective cultural memory.

Now close your eyes again and picture a straight bar. Do you have as vivid an image? I didn’t until December 23rd, when I met up with an old friend of mine in an Irish pub that is incongruously attached to the best Greek restaurant in Chicago. We had chosen the location because I had only been off my airplane for an hour and he gave me the courtesy of meeting somewhere close to my parents house. But as we chatted I could focus not on the conversation we were having, or all the pleasant memories we were bringing up from our years together. The gin and tonics we belted back tasted like water to me, and I barely even noticed ” A Fairy Tale of New York” coming off the jukebox.

Instead, all I could think about was titty fucking. The scene before me was so alien, so in-my-face different, that it left me with an image of what I consider to be the most heterosexual act burned into my brain until sometime the next afternoon.

This is because a cultural anthropologist who lives deep in my annals (stop giggling) took notice about half an hour in that I was frequenting A Straight Bar. Not just a bar that straight people go to (I would call that a bar, or a mixed bar) but a bar that seems to cultivate all the worst stereotypes of straight behavior in the same way as the non-existent gay bar from my first paragraph. Every guy wore carpenter pants, shapeless cable knit sweaters and the paunch of too much Killians. The girls wore makeup as if it were spackle, showed off their overly-tanned turkey skin cleavage and writhed in unison all 15 times that “Bad Romance” came on. Mind you, I was in this place for an hour.

I had actually forgotten that bars like this existed. I believe that my straight friends and I, at least in DC, have an unspoken agreement to drink in neutral spaces. I don’t take them to Apex, they don’t drag me to Georgetown or, god forbid, M Street. Instead we have sniffed out a thousand laid back watering holes that are neither gay nor straight, but pleasant. DC has The Raven, The Black Cat, Soussi, Pharmacy Bar, and dozens upon dozens of other bars that won’t make me feel like I’m in physical danger, or make my hetero buddies get credit card swiped every time they bend over to tie their shoes.

So at the bar attached to theGreek restaurant both myself and the less-conspicuous breeder keeping me company felt so out of our element that we were practically huddled together like koala bears at a dog fight. It was refreshing for me to remember that gay people don’t have the societal run on embarrassing behavior, and that anything looks fairly ridiculous if taken to an extreme.

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