I looked at my outfit in the mirror, a navy shirt with a popped collar and khakis, the fashion at the time, and wondered if I would stand out or fit in. In my imagination, we would stay in the dorm and sit on his bean-bag chairs, watch reruns of Will and Grace, and maybe order a pizza. I considered not going, turning up the volume of the television so my assigned roommate wouldn't hear the knocks at the door of his room or the calls of my name from the hallway. They didn't say the word gay, but I knew, in the way they didn't say the name of the bar and the secrecy of it, like so much of my life up until that point, the unspoken promise of something sexy or thrilling, and how it seemed like they could only find what other kids on campus already had by visiting an unnamed bar.
I'll never forget the fear when one of the art students, a third-year sculptor with dangly earrings and frosted hair, singled me out in the cafe by inviting me to join a small group that was going to a bar that night. Pittsburgh seemed like a shimmering gray Oz-in-a-bottle from my seat on the bus, with skyscrapers of varying sizes and shapes packed onto a tiny triangle surrounded by rivers that could only be accessed by a bridge, dozens of them sprouting out in all directions but leading to one central place like the yellow brick road. I was a senior in high school and had never left Windber––except for summers in the Outer Banks before my parents had died and a school trip to the Baltimore aquarium––let alone been to a big city.
The first time I went to a gay bar I was seventeen years old and visiting Pittsburgh on my own to check out the college art program.