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It was the sanctuary inside this dive on University Avenue that brought me home, gave me comfort, wrapped me in safety. UF’s Pride Student Union was, indeed, a wonderful place to generate ideas, but it could never match University Club. In a way my experience was similar to Ms. Never before had I been presented with so many similarly aged people who identified as I did, and who might be romantically inclined to talk to me.
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I relished the refuge hidden within Gainesville’s lone gay bar, University Club, surrounded by people who, like me, had to suffer through teaching themselves how to sit like a man, how to eat like a man, how to talk like a man.
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The lights are dim there, and no one’s sitting around a table in the student union, asking for your name and major.Īs a gay college student several years ago at the University of Florida - only about an hour and a half away from Orlando - I was overwhelmed with the immediate sense that I was not the only gay person in sight when I arrived on the campus, which had been very much the case during high school. Miller means is that at a gay bar like Pulse, students can still maintain a bit of anonymity if they don’t yet feel completely comfortable with who they are. “And in gay bars, you can watch other people be themselves.” “You can wander into a gay bar, but you wouldn’t necessarily wander into your campus LGBTQ club,” Ms. At a gay bar, sometimes the lone one in town, students who may not be out to classmates or professors can feel totally unencumbered, free. Gay bars, specifically in college towns, play a role that even campus clubs like a gay-straight alliance or a pride student union never could. I wouldn’t have found these people in class, but I found them at Pulse.” I only knew them because we’d go to Pulse together. Miller, who is now a technical director in the theater department at the University of Miami. It was a place that finally accepted her, a place to call home. To Sam Miller, a UCF alumna, Pulse was special.
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I can’t talk to a guy there without feeling judged. “If I would go to straight bars, I can’t fully be myself there. “It’s the most iconic, quintessential place that I have ever identified with,” he said. Pulse was the first gay club he ever went to, and he went most Wednesday and Saturday evenings for the mix of top-40 music and hip-hop Pulse played those evenings. Their sanctuary had come under attack.Ĭampus life at UCF was fine, Mr. That’s why the massacre early Sunday that left 49 people dead and 27 still under a hospital’s care - many of them students, out being themselves - was especially traumatic for fellow students. And students go there to feel safe and free. A gay bar is a refuge to people whom lawmakers have actively legislated against, at whom relatives and peers have spewed vitriol and hatred.Ĭollege towns across the country have a Pulse.
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Those naysayers, perhaps, have never rehearsed their gait or needed to adjust their intonation to fit in. A gay bar, drenched with alcohol and sweat, some may think, can’t be holy.īut those disbelievers have perhaps never found themselves meticulously studying the minutiae of how to eat, dress, walk, or talk to conform to some overly perfected gender stereotype just so no one beats them nearly to death. If Orlando’s popular gay bar, now the blood-bathed site of the nation’s worst mass shooting, was a sanctuary, its walls sheltered its congregation from the outside world. If Pulse were a chapel, its dancers would be its faithful flock. Above, people gathered at the Gainesville club on Monday night to pay their respects to the victims of the shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. University Club, in Gainesville, Fla., near the U. Patricia Ochoa, WUFT News Gay bars in college towns offer LGBTQ students a sense of freedom that differs from what they may find on campus.