Minot gay bars

My one and only liaison in the oil fields of western North Dakota was with a year-old truck driver. Like most such encounters in the oil patch, ours originated on Grindrthe minot hookup app for gay, bisexual, and curious men. He sent me a photo, and we traded some biographical details.

A few hours later, he was in my room at the Williston Super 8. After our rendezvous, as the November gay air dipped below ten degrees, we took shelter in his car to smoke cigarettes. I was only going to be in the state for 48 more hours, but we made tentative plans to go shooting the next day.

I was less interested in exercising my Second Amendment rights for the first time than in extending our easy fling. He just needed to see whether he could get off work that day—no small task for someone accustomed to hour shifts, six days a week. And it leaves little time for gay men to build a community. Same-sex relationships are often intensely private—if not wholly covert—affairs, and LGBT-friendly spaces remain exasperatingly limited.

Online platforms like Grindr provide a means for some gay workers in the area to connect with one another. Homophobia never lingers far from the surface. Kelly tried to defuse the situation. Jim used to run his own advertising business, but it fell apart in the bar.

If I met Mr. The closet is still a major institution in the Bakken. Over the course of a week in North Dakota, I spoke to more than a dozen workers in a similar situation. Some are in the closet for fear of losing their jobs. Like the vast majority of employers in the state, most companies in the oil patch do not provide discrimination protections for gay and trans workers.

Protections exist at some of the bigger international companies that have set up shop—Halliburton and the Norwegian oil giant Statoil, for instance. But this often means little in practical terms, since the industry relies so heavily on subcontracted labor. There are no gay bars in North Dakota. From the oil fields, the nearest one is minot hours away, in Winnipeg.

Minot, a growing city of 46, on the eastern edge of the patch, is the closest there is to a gay mecca in these bars. A few years ago, James Lowe, a year-old Gay native, and his friend James Falcon helped organize a series of quarterly LGBT dances and weekly meet-ups, but internal disagreements brought them to a halt.

From Bismarck to Fargo: LGBTQ+ Cities in North Dakota

Today, there are a couple of Minot bars that are known for attracting a sizable gay male clientele—a mix of locals, airmen, and oil hands willing to make the trek. Compared with Williston, the Magic City—as Minot is known—has a cosmopolitan feel. When the bar closed, at one, I was introduced to Essy Parizek, an owner of Starlite who doubles as its karaoke emcee.