Hello, friends. Before we start this episode of Against Everyone with Connor Bee, featuring

Hugh Lemmy and Ben Miller, the host of the Bad Gays podcast and author of The Bad Gays book.

I want to talk about bad gays and being a bad gay. I was thinking mostly about a conversation I had when I was in my late

teens, and I would go to a bar called the Stonewall. Stonewall was in Allentown, Pennsylvania,

not the famed Stonewall, but one a bit less known. It was a great place I, you know,

used to go there before I could get in because they had an 18 plus night, but then,

you know, most of the other nights were just normal bar nights. And so I would go and I would sit on the steps and I would wait for the guys to come out

because I wanted to be around other gay people because where I grew up was extremely, you know, repressed, oppressed, suppressed, all that.

And a dangerous place in a lot of ways to grow up gay in small town,

rural slash post-industrial Pennsylvania. So I'd go to Allentown, sit on the steps of the stone wall,

and wait for people to come out and try to talk to them, just look at them, see them,

say hi to them. Then when I could go in, I started hanging out with a few of the guys that went

there. One of the guys I hang out with my friend Dan was this sort of big muscular Italian guy.

And he worked at the mall at a clothing store.

And I, you know, he and I always felt a bit sort of left out by what was happening at the stone wall. The stone wall was fun.

There was a dance club downstairs and then just a typical sort of pub or bar upstairs. Um,

but, uh, you know, and I felt much more at home at the bar, but the sort of culture of the music that was playing and the

kinds of things that happened at the Stonewall, the ways that people felt belonging there,

which was much more of a club culture kind of thing, didn't really, you know, I didn't really align with what I was into.

I certainly didn't find a lot of resonance with my own interests.

And Dan and I would talk about that a lot because neither did it for Dan.

He was a little bit older than me.

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