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. The first gay bar that I passed through this year was in Dallas, Texas.
