“It Was Like Church”

That was how I described my first response to my first gay bar. It turns out I am not alone. A reader writes:

YES! This is wonderful! I felt the same way when I used to go to the now (sadly) defunct Club Shelter in NYC. It was a club with NO BOOZE just amazing house music and the best dancers in NYC. We would stay until sunday around noon and yes, it was like church – House music can be spiritual too … all that movement – "Dancing the ghosts away…"

That has always been my biggest complaint about church and the reason I don't go. People say church serves to 'charge up' your soul for the week ahead, and I firmly believe it does that for people. But the act of going, and SITTING and LISTENING charges nothing for me. I spend all week in front of a computer, the only thing that charges my soul is some rump shakin. So now? My brother and I meet up to go jogging early on Sundays and I bring my son along in the jogging stroller – with family, early in the morning, surrounded by god's creation … yep, that's church to me.

I also had the chance to go to DC's legendary equivalent of this, The Clubhouse, where non-alcoholic punch, helium balloons and legions of men, almost all African-American, made for an unforgettable musical and yes, spiritual experience. It was one of the earliest venues for House music, which I instantly loved. Another writes:

There is currently a senior lecturer in gender and women's studies at Cal State Northridge and screenwriting at UC Irvine named Marie Cartier. Her work, "Baby You are My Religion: Butch Femme-Gay Women's Bar Culture from the 1940s to 1980s," includes stories, testimonies and photos of gay women and men from the early years of the of the gay rights movement who considered the bar an alternative church.

Cartier, 55, based the program on her May 2010 Claremont Graduate University dissertation, which included more than 100 lesbian interview subjects – more than 1/3 from my town of Long Beach, CA – and a few local gay men, she says. In these illicit bars, women claimed roles or identities that felt natural. For many of them, these havens were the first – and sometimes the only – time they could feel this way, Cartier said. "They were able to find some one to love, have community, find themselves, have a sense of belonging and, in general, provide a structure in which they could create meaning for their lives," she said. "Isn't that what much of us credit religion with helping us do?"

My first experience at a gay bar was my freshman year in college. I must say, still being in my early twenties, the only thing I remember clearly (after the unease and nervousness escaped) was the feeling of belonging. I was raised Catholic, and although I don't practice religion, much of my experience felt like a baptism – I was submerged in the sounds, bathed in the flashing lights and arose with a renewed sense of myself. I danced the entire night in bliss. I felt like I finally found my place, my church.

All I can say is: Amen.