i'm no homophobe, i'm just married!

i used to live in a neighborhood heavily populated with gay people (mostly men) and worked at an optical boutique (in the same neighborhood) with a predominantly gay clientele. i actually met dave there and assumed he was gay. heh. but that's another story, for another time. it used to be fun to be a woman in a sea of fabulous, trendily dressed and perfectly coiffed, good-looking men. i had friends like none i'd ever had before -- i could never gossip with anyone like i could gossip with some catty queens! heh. and we had FUN -- i enjoyed going to gay bars and clubs and dancing to all the techno and house music i could stand. have you seen queer as folk ? stereotypical as they may be, the places i frequented were straight out of that show. it almost feels like another life at this point. five years and two kids will do that to you, i guess.

last night i met my friend lucia and her husband at the black cat to see my other friend elaine's band play. it was great fun, and a long time coming because we haven't hung out together in eons! we gabbed and drank and enjoyed the music and hung out with a bunch of other friends i knew that were there. much like me, lucia is the type of person who doesn't like to sit still too long, so she started to get bored with the music and suggested that we walk down to our friend ed's new (to me, anyway) bar. the night was still relatively young, and with 3 beers under my belt, i was game for anything. what i wasn't prepared for was how out of place i felt at a trendy gay bar! heh. seriously, it kind of threw me for a loop, even though i know i'm a completely different person now. okay, maybe not completely different, but pretty damn different.

the thing that bothered me more than how out of place i felt was how unchanged the experience was. i felt like i was walking into the same kind of bar with the same kind of atmosphere with the same freakin' people as i did 6 or 7 years ago! and basically, i was. i recognized quite a few of the same faces i used to see out and about. there was definitely a crop of younger guys, but it certainly felt like the same old, tired crowd. the same crowd with the same see and be seen attitude. it was actually kind of depressing. now the place was certainly cute and modern with great music and yummy drinks and yummier bartenders, but i wasn't really enjoying it. it felt too meat markety! and fake, somehow....desperate.

i'm inclined to believe that i would've felt the same way if i'd have gone to a "straight" bar. i just have to accept that any kind of bar i go to is going to make me feel weird now. unlike most of my friends, i'm married, have kids and don't live in the city. i can't sleep all day if i have a hangover. i don't have the time or energy to get all dolled up before going out. okay, maybe that's just laziness, but why bother?? it's SO nice to not be on the prowl. heh. but i am happy -- lame, but happy. i can live with that.