Tiptoeing Up to the Bar.(gay liberation)

The village I call Bluestone, in upstate New York, is so small, you could fit its entire full-time population into the first three rows of "Urban Cowboy, the Musical." At that intimate a scale, the actions of one or two people can create--or reflect--a major trend. So when I walked into our local bar the other week and saw B & G, two gay guys from Bluestone, chatting affably with the straight couple who had just moved into the house across the road, it was like watching Lewis and Clark reach the Pacific.

To understand why, you'd have had to buy property in the hills between northeastern Pennsylvania and New York state about when my husband and I did, the late '80s, when the AIDS epidemic was raging. Back then, no gay man I knew would venture into the bar. "That place scares me," they'd say.

I could understand why. You could always find a clump of men in it who nicely fit the stereotype of gay-bashers. There were stonecutters, lumberjacks, factory workers, farmers and ne'er-do-wells, all sorts of he-men and huntsmen said to be as jumpy about challenges to their masculinity as to their right to bear arms. Included in their number was, no doubt, a host of Bible literalists who believed homosexuality an abomination before their creator.

But the biggest problem wasn't homophobes, because few of them were. The biggest problem was that the gay guys had no way of knowing that, because none were local. While the local gay boys fled to cities in search of jobs and companionship, urban gays with disposable income, college educations and a preference for pate in aspic over burger in ketchup bought second homes in those same rolling hills. Because the immigrants were culturally and historically outsiders, they never ventured far enough to learn the lay of the land. They couldn't, like a local lesbian ...