Dan Savage Profile picture
Nov 20, 2022 14 tweets 2 min read Read on X
It's not just that gay bars are supposed to be a safe space.
People who hate queer people want us to keep it private. Behind closed doors. Someplace they don't have to see it. And the doors of a gay bar are doors we keep it behind. A place we can go and be together and not bother *them* with the fact of our existence.
And behind those doors... is a place we can forget *they* exist. Not straight people. There are straight people in gay bars and clubs. Our friends. But behind those doors we can forget — we can suspend our disbelief — and pretend the haters don't exist. Just for a few hours.
An attack like this says "not even here." Behind closed doors isn't good enough for *them.* It's not that they want us to exist out of sight. They don't want us to exist at all.
So, if we're not safe in there... behind closed doors... where they say they want us... we have no choice but to fight to make it safe everywhere, for all LGBT people.
"Out of the bars and into the streets!"
That was a chant heard during the Stonewall Riots. The modern LGBT civil rights movement began with an attack on a bunch of queer people—gay men, drag queens, trans women, butch dykes—being themselves behind closed doors.
The raid on the Stonewall Inn was state-sponsored violence. The attack on Club Q in Colorado Springs last night... well, we're waiting on the full details. But it looks like GOP-sponsored violence. Not just the logical result of the "groomer" blood libel, but the goal.
They used to say there was something wrong with us because we only gathered in seedy bars. But that was where they herded us. That was the only space we were allowed. And when they attacked us in a gay bar one time too many... we poured out of not just that bar, but all of them.
Into the streets.
Behind closed doors was never enough. They knocked down those doors and arrested us in bedrooms and evicted us from our apartments and fired us from our jobs and made something that's already hard to do—loving another human being—almost impossible.
We fought back then. We fought back last night.

"The 22-year-old suspect... immediately began shooting at people once he entered Club Q and at least two people 'confronted and fought' with him, stopping him from harming others, officials said."

washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/11…
And we're going to keep fighting. Because if we're not safe behind the closed doors of a gay bar — if they can't let us have even that — then we're not safe anywhere.
So we will fight until we're safe everywhere.

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More from @fakedansavage

Jun 5, 2023
Alright, I watched it. And I'll bite:

What is a woman?

An adult human female — almost all of the time.
Almost invariably, but not invariably. When it comes to human beings... there's a lot of variance. Allowing for variance is the only viable option. The alternative—disallowing variance—will ultimately require constant terror and violence to enforce. Because variance is hardwired.
This answer—an adult human female, almost always, but not always—seems so obvious I'm sure some of the people interviewed gave that answer, or something close, but got left on the editing room floor so Matt Walsh could pretend no one but his wife could answer that question.
Read 5 tweets
Mar 28, 2023
I've never understood why gun owners themselves don't want the bar for gun ownership set high. If owning a gun required rigorous training, background checks, and licensing, you would hear that someone owned a gun and think, "That's someone I want around in an emergency."
Then even people who didn't like guns would associate gun ownership with safety, and security. But in a society where literally any idiot can buy a gun—where teenagers can open carry—you don't hear that someone owns a gun and think, "That's someone I want around in an emergency."
Instead you think, "This person is a probably a lunatic—or they might be one of those 'responsible gun owners' guns nuts insist they all are. But I'm not gonna risk it. For my own safety, I'm gonna assume this asshole is dangerous."
Read 11 tweets
Jul 30, 2022
"For your own safety, and to spare you the horrors of this disease, you might wanna think about maybe dialing it back for a few weeks while we roll the vaccine out." That's not discrimination. That's not homophobia. That's treating adult gay men like... adults.
That's giving gay men the information we need to make informed choices. Any gay man who can't see that... isn't a grownup.
And if public health officials weren't so afraid of blowback from gay men who aren't grownups, they would've been pushing this info out MONTHS AGO. It was already clear in May that this message—dial it back—needed to be sent.
Read 12 tweets
Jan 26, 2022
They think they're gonna drag us back to the days when the only thing a gay kid could find in school about homosexuality was a clinical definition in a dictionary. But kids have phones in their pockets. They carry them around. At school. Gay kids will find what they need.
That doesn't mean this isn't bullshit. This is also bullshit:

They can ban every book with a queer themes. They can remove every novel or memoir by a queer author or featuring queer characters. But they're not going to bring back the days when a gay kid could grow up thinking he was the only one in the world.
Read 14 tweets
Sep 19, 2021
So libs are pushing vaccine mandates in a reverse psychology triple backflip double secret probation effort to convince MAGA voters not to get vaccinated so that they'll all die and Texas will turn blue and we won't have to take their guns because they'll be too dead to use them.
Wish I was making it up:

joemygod.com/2021/09/breitb…
What's really going on here? The lunatic-MAGA-rube-cranker-uppers on the right—having realized they're killing their own voters—are trying to reverse engineer their way out of the trap they set for themselves and pull together an OWN THE LIBS argument for getting vaccinated.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 18, 2021
I don't know if I have the ability to absorb another show where teenagers played by thirty year olds break out in song in a high school cafeteria.
I'm not sure what our reaction is supposed to be. "Oh, singing! In a high school cafeteria! And elaborately choreographed dancing! I didn't expect that! I am both surprised and charmed!"
At this point... if I walked into an actual high school cafeteria and the students didn't break into song and dance that would surprise me.
Read 5 tweets

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