So I hear your country kinda looks like this again.
Roughly two months ago, I was in a gay bar in Dublin. Oh, the foreshadowing.
It was St. Patrick’s Day. Two of my hostel mates and I had met a local named Jonathan after we scaled a building to get a better view of the parade. “I come every year,” he said. “When my parents stopped taking me, I just started taking myself.”
In our post-parade quest for water [me], a bathroom [me], and Guinness [everyone else], we eventually wound up at what I’m going to call “one and a half gay bars.” The first one was not so much officially so, but happened to be around the corner from the pink lamp-lit, two-dance-floored, loud-and-proud gorgeously-bar tendered watering hole that made no pretense about its primary clientele.
But back to that first bar. It’s the one I’m more interested in, right now. Because it wasn’t explicitly a gay bar. But it also wasn’t explicitly not. The patrons we were milling about with wore suits, jeans and t-shirts, tight crop tops and skinny jeans (yes, both sported by all genders), green tutus and crinkly ribbon wigs and even a St. Patrick costume. The bar was your typical mahogany-bedecked, low-light mellow-ambiance run-of-the-mill “stop in for a pint” kind of place. It had your most stereotypical, straight-laced sallow-faced business men drowning their work day worries and your most stereotypical, flamboyant queers spilling a bit of whatever-that-pink-liquid-is all over your shoes as they sacheted past. And they had everyone who fit in between.
And, to paraphrase Jonathan, the bar honestly didn’t give a shit.
While it would have been anathema to show up in even just that only-mildly-sacrilegious St. Patrick’s costume as little as a year or two ago, Jonathan told us, now, it was just accepted for what it was – just like the clientele. People had just sort of got over themselves about it all. Gay, straight, a long-dead saint resurrected for the sake of some Guinness, it was all just taken as normal now. Because the bar and the people in it had looked around, nodded, and all just sort of collectively decided that yes, this, this was Ireland. Or at least Dublin. Even on days when the city wasn’t erupting in a parade of pride over itself.
Which is what appears to be happening right now. As it should. As it better. Yes.
Sláinte, Ireland.
p.s. Northern Ireland – you’re pretty much surrounded by rainbows. Hurry the fuck up.
Quill Aquiver 
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