Dear Bachelorette Party: Gay Men Are Not Your Props

When a night out gets hijacked

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels

We’d just sat down for dinner at the Palm Springs restaurant when you started touching my friend’s shoulders.

You were the drunkest one at the bachelorette party, one of ten such parties that had effectively taken over a restaurant known for its gay clientele and welcoming vibes.

You entered our conversation as though you were seated with us, as friends, rather than at a table behind us, as total strangers.

You did the usual drunken banter, asking where we were from, where we were going later, and how we all knew each other.

Soon, you were touching another friend’s shoulders. The kind of behavior that, if done by a straight man to you, might be considered aggressive, even threatening.

But, hey, we know the drill.

We’re gay men, and you’re at a bachelorette party, so tonight we’re not so much individual human beings as we are objects of amusement. We’re ornaments. We’re NPCs in the story of your wild night out.

As you continued to invade our space and our conversation, I looked across at one of my friends and said, “She’s going to do this all night, isn’t she?”

We whispered to one another about whether to bring over a manager, whether to tell you to stop (knowing it would cause a scene), and whether one of your friends might help by saying enough.

No one knows better than gay men the reasons why you might want a night off from the energy of straight men behaving badly.

Studies have even explored the motivations of straight women who frequent gay spaces. And this explanation rings especially true:

“Straight women are seeking out queer spaces as a way to escape violence, suffering, and the male gaze, and instead pursue the joy that they understand to be an inherent characteristic of queer space.”

But seeking refuge in our spaces is not a license to act as though you’ve claimed ownership over them.

Gay bars and gay-friendly restaurants are not just places where we eat and drink. These are sacred spaces where we feel safer to be our authentic selves. Where we’re freed from the suffocating rituals of a culture that still too often demands conformity and heterosexuality. Where we get to forget, for a moment, the world outside.

These spaces are filled with real people who’ve encountered stigma, discrimination, and, all too often, violence.

We know straight women face even more disparate rates of violence. From the same study:

“Globally, 26% of ever-married/partnered women over the age of 15 have been victims of physical and/or sexual violence (World Health Organization, 2018).”

A gay space provides a haven from much of that threat. But there’s a sad irony in choosing a venue partly to be free from the behavior of the most egregious behavior of some straight men, and then proceeding to act like one of them.

As a gay man, we’ve been through this kind of evening’s routine before. So we knew there would be a grand finale.

There always is.

As your group stood up from your table in preparation for your exit, you locked eyes with one of my friends, the kindest one among us.

You have a knack for spotting that, the way a straight man might ingratiate himself into a closed circle of women by chatting up the apparent quietest one, the least likely to tell him off.

You pointed at my friend and said, “I’m not leaving without giving this one a hug.”

You marched from your table to the far side of ours. There, you decided an unwanted hug was simply not enough.

You sat in my friend’s lap, draped your arms around his shoulders, kicked up your bare legs near his face the way Madonna does with one of her back-up dancers.

You joked about how you could floss my friend’s teeth with your hair. Yeah, that was especially gross.

But you were determined to get the full experience with Gay Men On Display For Your Enjoyment.

My friend feigned a smile, the kind that comes when you don’t know what else to do, and you just want something to end. Every second of the interaction was painful for every one of us at the table. Maybe for your friends too, who watched it all unfold.

We just wanted you to leave us alone.

Finally, you departed. We could enjoy our dinner and one another, instead of feeling like the supporting cast of your evening.

But what you’d done lingered over our table like a cloud that doesn’t quit.

On our way out of the restaurant, one of my friends told the manager about the night’s events. He left his phone number, but we’ve not heard back. We know businesses are struggling to survive. And bachelorette parties mean big money.

But still…

After dinner, we moved on to a gay nightclub.

A friend in our party of six bought a round of drinks for all of us. We gathered side-by-side around a table and took our first sips. And then we looked out onto the dance floor.

Twenty-plus women, part of still more bachelorette parties, moved in waves. Not a single gay man joined them on the floor.

Had we forgotten how to dance?

Or had all of us decided that being overwhelmed by a gaggle of straight women was not what we had signed up for when we chose to come to a gay bar?

Something like disdain simmered within me.

I fantasized about going onto the floor and asking, “Do you have any idea why no gay men are out here?” My friend, the one who’d just dropped more than sixty bucks on drinks, looked out at the dance floor and said this:

“Let’s get out of here.”

Hallelujah. He’d spoken for all of us.

We left, fled really, and found refuge at a breezy restaurant where the waitstaff wore shirts with the word Cock emblazoned on the front and Tails on the back.

A space where the tables were filled with gay men. Where we no longer felt like creatures on display at a petting zoo.

In that space, we were freed from the parading bachelorette parties. In that space, we shed the weight of invasive questioning and touching.

In that space, we could do what we couldn’t do before — we could relax.

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