Boys Bars Becoming

Some of us found ourselves in rooms with sticky floors.Dollar drinks. Music loud enough to feel in your sternum. Strangers who became your people before you even knew their names. A world before the apps, before the algorithms, before you had to optimize yourself for someone else’s checklist.We are human first. Gay second. And this is a book about the human underneath.Boys Bars Becoming is a collection of essays about gay men of a certain age — who we were in those rooms, who we became outside of them, and who we are still trying to figure out how to be.It is about the bars that shaped us and the ones that disappeared. The friendships that held and the ones that quietly went dry. The fathers and mothers who made us, failed us, loved us, or left us guessing. The grief we carried, the bodies we survived in, the men we chased, and the particular loneliness of knowing exactly what you want and still not being sure how to let yourself have it.Funny, honest, reckless, and occasionally devastating, Boys Bars Becoming is for anyone who has ever had to strip away an old version of themselves to find out who they actually are.Pull up a stool.The first round is on me. Read more