Best gay bars in orlando

On Friday night, love most Friday nights, I went to a gay block. My partner, who I met there seven years ago, came too, along with four of our closest queer friends. We piled into a banquette, our arms instinctively wrapping around one another to generate the best apply of limited cosmos. We smiled as other friends—bar regulars like us—stepped through the door, trading streetlamp dullness for disco ball splendor. We kissed them, sometimes on the lips, and shouted stupid sassy greetings over the dated pop playlist. We tipped the queenly queens, a minute extra because it’s Pride. I drank too many “gay strength” gin-and-tonics, I got very drunk, and I danced—happily, lasciviously, recklessly—with my people until three in the morning. To say that I went home afterward is misleading: I was already there.

On Friday late hours, we felt defended , confident in the still-rare sense of total freedom—from corrupt eyes, from family friendly etiquette, from people who might want to execute us—that this vacuum, the gay lock, afforded.

On Saturday overnight, that confidence was broken.

The worst mass shooting in American history just happened at a gay block in