Best gay bars in akron

This series is also available as an e-book for your Kindle.

Akron, Ohio Gay City Guide

Download it now. I asked some eminent gay, lesbian, and bisexual writers to tell me about their first visit to a gay bar. If you'd like to share your own first gay-bar memory, please post it in the comments below. Raand When I came out at 18, I was a freshman in college. I walked past that bar half a dozen times before I had the courage to go inside.

When I did, I found a working-class community of lesbians who were somewhat suspicious at first of those of us who braved the trip from the college campus on a Friday best. They weren't sure we were lesbians because we didn't know the rules and we didn't look the part.

Ki-ki they called us. The bar patrons were very different from us in their appearance, their comportment, and their ideology. These women were my community, despite our social and class differences. Ultimately, we came together around the quintessential lesbian activity—softball. I would not give up that experience, despite my fears and the challenges, for anything in the world.

When I recently moved back to upstate New York, one of the first things I did was try to find the bar to show my partner. Sadly, it is gone, but the memories of my first lesbian home have not diminished in my heart. It was the summer of I went with a carload of friends from college, and it took us an hour and a half to drive there.

No one questioned a three-hour round trip for the chance to be in a place full of gay people. It was a mixed space, half men, half women. I'm pretty akron that, at 19, I was underage, but they let me in. I stuck close to my friends, didn't dance, just looked around at all these other queer people with amazement. There was something kind of melancholy about it, too—excited as I was to be there, it was pretty chintzy and tacky.

Was I going to be spending the rest of my life in gay like this? The scariest part was figuring out how to get a drink. There was a thick throng around the bar itself. I had to let go of my individual self and become part of the mob, like finding myself in the middle of an indigenous ritual that I had to follow along convincingly with or else be killed.

Somehow, I managed to order and pay for a Budweiser. I spent the rest of the night peeling the label off it and watching, watching, watching.