On a balmy evening in August, I went to what passes for a gay bar in Iowa City with some friends. The entrance reminded me of the feed store I’d gone to with my grandpa in Alabama. It had the feeling of a space that had been improvised, made out of a warehouse or something like it. I’ve only ever been to a gay bar a few times in my life, perhaps because I find bars too much like the house I grew up in: loud, full of alcohol, music blasting from every dark corner, and a series of forced intimacies that I find hard to look away from even as they threaten to drown me.

I don’t drink because everyone I knew growing up was an alcoholic; I believe in genetics and environmental priming. But here I was in a gay bar in Iowa City because that’s what people do, I guess. They go to bars. They laugh. They touch each other’s shoulders, and they pretend if only for a moment that they are somewhere else, somewhere better. And besides, I like these friends. They are good and smart and beautiful and kind. To be among them is to remember that the world can, in fact, yield moments of grace and understanding.

We were just getting started for the night, and the place was mostly empty. Iowa City is the sort of small town where it’s possible to arrive at a place and be the only ones there. You aren’t embarrassed that there are only three people in your establishment, and you aren’t embarrassed to be only one of three people in an establishment. Shame doesn’t really enter into things. The water’s always so low that everything looks like high tide. My friends and I were catching up, exchanging news, settling in, warming up to one another’s company, because despite whatever friendliness exists between people, we are always fundamentally strangers, and no matter how much you care for someone, you are always triangulating, adjusting, trying to find the place where you enact what passes for intimacy — the sort of spontaneous flailing of friendship.

After we had been there for about 30 minutes, and after I had drunk to the middle of a large gin and tonic (the only drink I know the name of and that I know won’t make me ill), other people started to trickle in. By other people, I mostly mean one other person and a couple of drag queens out of drag who would be performing later in the evening. The man in the bar who was not a performer was skinny and had blue eyes. He wore a cap and a denim jacket. He smelled like cigarettes and whiskey. He had a raspy voice and a long, narrow nose. One of my friends waved him over.

My friends chatted him up, but he kept looking at me, which made me squirm on my barstool. I hate when people look at me. At some point, he said that he had to go watch a movie. Did we want to join him? We all laughed and said no, no, but we’d be here when he got back. And he said, to my friend and then to me, that he found me sexy. And he came around the table and kissed me on the cheek, hard and wet. And he put his arm around my neck. And my friends laughed. And I laughed, or tried to. And then he wanted to kiss me on the mouth, but I said no, and he kissed me on the cheek again and left. And my friends were laughing again.