At one bar, some guys modelled by the windows, and a handful of white “daddys” in polos and khakis shared drinks with immaculately dressed younger Black men. But it was a Wednesday, and the scene was muted. Atlanta is one of the South’s queer meccas, especially for Black folks. The next evening, I did my own lap around the area. Our waiter was a cub-ish Latinx guy, and when I stepped inside to ask for more syrup he asked if I’d always been a sugar queen. They sprayed everything down with sanitizer. She told me that the gays were great about masks. After we’d spent the day shuffling from the very happening (queer) gym to the very happening (queer) diner to the only slightly less bustling (queer) tailor, I asked my mom how her neighborhood had seemed the previous few months. Her place is around Piedmont, a nexus of the city’s very crowded queer scene. In the spring, I flew to Atlanta to visit my mom. Now I wanted to see how they were faring themselves.
#Inside a gay bar dallas how to
They’d taught me how to make a way in the world.
I worried about how the pandemic’s upheaval would affect these bars, and other queer spaces writ large. I’ve learned more about myself, and found more comfort, spending time in them than just about anywhere else. I never went inside, but the proximity felt important. Its streets house most of the city’s gay bars-some of them were closed, others open intermittently. The neighborhood is the nucleus of Texas’s queer scene. In Houston, while ambulance sirens blared at all hours, I occasionally spent my afternoons walking up and down the roads of our own local gayborhood, Montrose. As ever, queer establishments were particularly vulnerable, whether the handful of surviving lesbian bars throughout the nation or the sole queer outposts in deeply conservative regions (to say nothing of the absolute paucity of trans-friendly spaces). Last year, the pandemic shuttered more than a hundred thousand bars across the United States. Then he added, Maybe I’m just not that comfortable yet-being here’s more than enough. When Boots clunked away, I asked my New Friend why he hadn’t seemed interested. He told my New Friend that he was very handsome, and my New Friend thanked him, grinning, before turning back to his phone. A moment later, a hulking whiteboy in boots wedged himself between us. We agreed that the weather felt entirely unseasonable (Global warming, my New Friend smiled), and he told me that he’d been coming out to the bars ever since the COVID shutdowns had lifted. I sat next to another Black guy, one of the room’s few masked patrons, and soon enough we struck up a conversation. The sidewalks were dimly lit, and I glided from light to light through the deeply balmy evening, and beyond the patio I found a pandemic-era simulacrum of a Texas gay bar’s usual weekday crowd: a few (white) guys watching sports on their phones, a (white) man talking to the bartender, alongside a handful of skinny (white) dudes looking to get laid. On my first evening in town, after pretending to write but mostly crying over K-dramas, I headed out to Oak Lawn, the city’s gayborhood. I’d driven to the city for a research trip, from my home in Houston.
Among the dozen-or-more snacks are steak tartare toast, crudite with garlicky yogurt dip, mini smashburgers, and crispy potatoes with smoked trout roe.The first gay bar that I passed through this year was in Dallas, Texas. But it’s shareable snacks all the way - sassed up from what you serve in your own bar. Those who come hungry can certainly eat an entire dinner. In that way, Clifton Club is a bar first, restaurant second. “What we thought most about was: What do you want to eat when you’re having a cocktail?” he says. Katz’s aim was to serve food that is salty, crunchy and spicy.
Why the name? Green Point is Greg Katz's coming-soon seafood and oyster restaurant on Knox Street. Grilled jumbo shrimp comes with a side of Green Point tartar sauce. There’s a trio of olives, nuts and pickled veggies sitting next to a swirl of whipped ricotta topped with pistachio dukka. This little room is on the edge of the action, kind of like those good seats at the opera, over on the side, where you can sit on your perch and take it all in. Clifton Club is named for the town Katz grew up in near Cape Town, South Africa.