That’s not about being a size queen, I’m talking about the tease. Today, with everyone looking at Grindr on their phones, is the sexual urgency at bars completely gone? And then up through writing the book, up to the pandemic, I continued to go out for the frisson, for the feeling there could be trouble in store. So you put it exactly right - the possibility of sex, if not actually having any. This was the ’90s and a lot of us were terrified of disease.
For me, though, the sexy stuff took some time, because when I first went out - and I was taken out, you know, identified and taken along - it was more to see and be seen. But the sex was an important motivation, not just for going to bars, but writing the book. I know some people are mad at me for writing from that angle–like they’d rather I’d written about searching for an alternative family, not a hot daddy.
