the martini bar

I went out on Saturday with a plan to see some drag and then finish the night dancing. Somewhere. It has been ages since I was going out in Chicago; there hasn't been many changes, but I forget the rhythm or the tempo of the night. Drag is a bit more dispersed since the closure of Berlin, but it seems to be in a positive way. More drag is happening in more places. I forget where people dance, though, except that every bar kind of has a place to dance. I love a small, intimate bar and I kind of crave that late night feeling of dancing a little buzzed, pressing on people and people pressing on me.

None of that is what happened on Saturday. The bar that I thought had drag did, but there was also an even: Meredith Marks, of all people, was DJing, so the night was ticketed. (It was also too early to dance and I don't care for the cult of personality around an DJs—the club has died when people go to a space and stand facing and dancing at the DJ!) There wasn't drag around otherwise, I don't think. Not the night for it.

A drag show is just a pretense to kill time early in the night till it's late enough to go dancing. The enduring complaint of gay culture is that nothing happens till midnight! Thankfully drag shows are happening earlier; I remember when they wouldn't start till very late. (This is especially fun if you are already out, but is very difficult if you are going out for drag.)

It was cold and the wind was strong, so I wasn't going to wander around Boystown, but it was too early to go the tried and true dance club (and too early for there to be much dancing elsewhere). What has become kind of the "main" bar of Boystown was hosting a girls night. Where to go? There is a cocktail bar near where I thought the drag show was, so I went there. It's small and intimate, very comfortable, and there were, luckily, two seats open at the bar.

I don't really care to, like, record the minutiae. I went and sat at a bar, had drinks (too many, I'm sorry to say), and then left. But the point is that I was chatting with people the whole time. Earlier in the night, I helped some younger guys who didn't know how to ride the bus (lol) get off the bus so they could go out. We went in different directions, but then I saw them at the martini bar and we chatted a bit about the night; where to go, where do I like to go, where they're headed. I encouraged them to go a bit farther north to the dance club there. That club is a bit of a particular vibe, but it is a proper dance club and not just a large bar with a big, empty space that people could dance in. We chatted about Meredith Marks DJing, then I went and sat back down because I was in the middle of a conversation with someone else. We said bye as they left.

The rest of time I was talking to a man who, like me, had come to the martini bar by himself. There was nothing beyond a friendly chat (I wasn't necessarily attracted to him and I don't think he particularly cared about me), but the conversation was easy and we talked about ridiculous things like which transit app to use and more interesting things like the change in the style of drag from early 2010s and now. I asked the boring question (what do you do for work?), but it turned out that he was in the process of securing funding for a new clinic outreach business, pointedly to address the lack of actual access to affordable, inclusive care. ("Why should we expect marginalized people to come to, or even know about, the queer clinic that's in Boystown, especially when most of that demo is nowhere near Boystown?")

He would have been perfectly content to have his cocktail and occasionally say hi to people he knew who came and went, to chat with the bartenders, but I wonder, in some way, how he felt about me essentially interrupting his night. I'm not worried about this, not really; we were at a bar, this is what happens at bars. I think about it because I'm anxious. I'm also proud of myself for, after so long giving in misanthropy and making up reasons to be generally annoyed with people, just starting a conversation. It was the easiest thing in the world to ask, after seeing him texting: "So, are you meeting up with anyone?"