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Meeting the Love of Our Life The Minor Details Images Courtesy: Badpuppy |
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Not Into Bar Scene, Part 2
For generations, bars have been one of the few places LGBT folk could hook up with others. So, lesbians and gay men often met their potential partners in bars.
Thanks to the activists among us, the welcoming options broadened. We could look for others in places such as religious organizations, clubs, community centers, and activist rallies. Since we'd been trained to identify what we do to hook up with someone as part of "the bar scene," there are LGBT people who criticize gay and gay-friendly churches and synagogues as places that are "too cruisy." But why would someone consider it a bad thing to meet someone in a gay friendly religious institution? Maybe they still haven't gotten over their guilt about their own bar behavior and think religion should be above such "sordid" things? Maybe they don't think anybody who hangs around a bar is the kind of character worthy of a long-term relationship - an interesting idea if they too were in a bar. Are we thereby be saying something negative about ourselves? Couples who've met in bars often feel some twinge of guilt or shame over it. The anti-gay attitudes of our culture are supposed to make LGBT people feel even more shameful about it. We're supposed to devalue our activities, dating methods, and relationships as worthy only of shame and guilt. So, aren't bars good places to meet the love of one's life? If not, what are bars for? Are there any good places to meet that someone?
The message is everywhere. And no wonder. It's a profit-oriented one. Consumption that has the attraction of Mr. or Ms. Right as its goal, dominates the interest of the ad execs on Madison Avenue. If people weren't looking for the right lover, then the straight man would never be interested in the Queer Eye that shows him how to more lavishly consume in order to attract his woman. Women learned almost from the moment they left the cradle how to buy the looks, clothes, and everything else to attract the man who will finally prove they're valuable. The dominance of this seldom-challenged message is why one of the most common questions singles ask is: How can I meet people? Or, more pointedly: How can I meet someone? It's so dominant an issue in LGBT communities that the reason many do most of the activities they do, including going to bars, is to meet that someone. It defines their life. And for some, the disappointment of failing to meet Ms. or Mr. Right in bars is what defines the bar scene, or any scene, for them. Since this is really about how we see ourselves, there's a more radical question here: Is it a healthy goal to do anything at all, or almost everything we do, to meet someone? If we go to bars, or any gay places, to meet people, and the only common characteristic of the people there is that they're all gay, then the only thing we'll have in common with them is that we're all looking for the same sex. If we go to a place where everyone drinks, then we add to that one thing we have in common with our potential partner the fact that we both drink. There are two questions we all must ask to make life full. The first is: Where am I going? The second is: Who will go with me? Our problems are caused by trying to answer the second question before we've answered the first. Then we either sacrifice our passions in life to maintain a relationship, or we recognize that the relationship won't support where we're going, and have to end it. And ending one, doesn't often mean we follow with an attempt to answer the first question before we seek another relationship.
That's why going places and doing things in order to find that special someone is hardly a reason to do anything. The real questions we need to answer are about whether or not we're living our passions in life. What do we like to do? What are our interests? What are our pastimes? What gives us satisfaction?
Then we can join or start groups and organizations that share our interests, joys, and passions. We'll start living them and focusing on them and what they do for us. There we'll make the friends who will join us in doing what we love to do. In those groups we also might meet a significant other who will share at least one of our central interests. But we might not. Refocusing our intentions from finding the partner who we believe will save us from our feelings of loneliness, worthlessness, hopelessness, and meaninglessness is radically countercultural, but crucial. And psychologically healthy. Learning to live as a whole human being who finds fulfillment as a single person is a mark of our emotional health. When we've gotten to the place where we don't need that one someone anymore. When we've learned to be a happy single who lives our passions in life. Then we're ready to find someone who meets us while we're on our life's journey, sees what that journey is, and will, and can, go with us. We, too, will be able to see their journey and know whether we're ready to join them. The pursuit of Ms. or Mr. Right, then, may sour us on "the bar scene. But it's another case where it's not the bar scene that's let us down, but our own definition of what a bar, or any activity for that matter, is for, and whether we know who we are and where we want to go in life. 
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. His Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society (HumanityWorks, 2003), was named one of the "Best Gay Books of 2003"and his Scared Straight (HumanityWorks!, 2001) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Independent Publisher Book Awards. He may be reached at www.fairnessproject.org
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Any single, gay or not, asks these questions. So strong is the culture's conditioning to need to couple with a significant other that we're supposed to feel like miserable failures if we're single. And the greatest fear of all is supposed to be that we'll never, ever, ever find anyone. We'll go to our graves alone and unloved.