My Childhood Gay Bar

In Memory of The Bacchanal

My friend June Thomas asked her talkative friends — people like Alison Bechdel, Dan Savage, and Matt Crowley— to tell her the story of their first visit to a gay bar.

Alison really captured the zeitgeist of being shocked, awkward, and INITIATED:

The first gay bar I ever went to was Satan's in Akron, Ohio. It was the summer of 1980. I went with a carload of friends from college, and it took us an hour and a half to drive there. No one questioned a three-hour round trip for the chance to be in a place full of gay people.

It was a mixed space, half men, half women. I'm pretty sure that, at 19, I was underage, but they let me in. I stuck close to my friends, didn't dance, just looked around at all these other queer people with amazement. There was something kind of melancholy about it, too—excited as I was to be there, it was pretty chintzy and tacky.

Was I going to be spending the rest of my life in places like this?

The scariest part was figuring out how to get a drink. There was a th…