Also, and this isn't as true anymore, but when I was a young man, pretty much all of our events centered around alcohol. Not so much by design, but because bars were the only places we could go to be ourselves.

I wasn't even quite 18 yet when I started hanging out at my first gay bar in Des Moines. (The drinking age was 18 then, but they had a cafe in the back where you could eat and hang out even if you were younger.)

At that time in my life, there pretty much were no queer spaces or activities that did not center around alcohol.

Fast forward a decade or two and things had changed a bit for the better, but still ... Bars and other venues with alcohol remained the primary socializing spaces for us.

I think that only the rise of social media and dating/meeting apps started changing that paradigm in any serious way.

I don't know how much that is or isn't helping. Data show that we queer people are still more likely to abuse alcohol than the general population. Minority stress ...

Thanks for writing about this!