My First Pickup Line

This is the story that started it all, started, that is, my quest to document my gay life in the 1970s.
It was published in an anthology called Bar Stories by Alyson Books in 2000. (Don't worry. I hold the rights to it.)
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My First Pickup Line (January 1970)

It was a dump but it had a dance floor. And that made it beautiful to me.

My first night in Atlanta. The night before my first day of my first job in Atlanta. And my first visit to a gay bar.

Oh, it wasn't my first night “out.” That had been some six months earlier, in Knoxville, Tennessee. July 4th, in fact. Independence Day, though that bit of irony didn't hit me until the next afternoon, as I reflected on the night before, a night that had begun on a neighbor boy's front porch and ended on the floor of my apartment. In the days and weeks that followed my sexual Declaration of Independence, I'd become a part of the Knoxville gay subculture and, as “fresh meat,” I'd had my share of sexual opportunities. But it was always at someone's party, someone's apartment, for “K-town” had only two gay bars, tiny places located down back alleys of downtown that I wouldn't have visited in broad daylight, much less at night. Besides, I had the fresh-out-of-the-closet fear that every new gayboy has about entering his first gay bar. So I stuck to private parties.

But now I was in Atlanta, having landed a radio job in suburban Marietta that would start the next morning. I'd arrived that afternoon, found a motel for me, my Camaro-full of personal belongings and my cat. And now, armed with a map of a city I'd explored for a month while job-hunting, I headed in search of a bar I'd heard about from Knoxville friends.

The Joy Lounge was a two-story house, the first floor of which had been converted to a bar. It faced Ponce DeLeon, a main east-west drag north of downtown Atlanta, with an adjacent gravel parking lot. I probably noticed it was gravel that first night, but it didn't become important until a few months later when, while escaping through the back door from a police raid, I’d fallen and cut my hands on the stones, a fact I was unaware of until arriving safely home and noticing the blood on the steering wheel. But that's another bar story for another time.

It was a Monday night and so the front room of tables was empty and maybe a few dozen people occupied the back room, a room consisting of the bar itself, a few booths and tables and, oh yes, a dance floor. Well, at least a space from which tables had been removed and jukebox had been placed. Yes, a jukebox. I guess I should mention this was just six months after Stonewall and gay club life hadn't yet entered the Disco Era of lighted dance floors and DJ booths. In fact, the police raid I mentioned was because the club wasn't supposed to have a dance floor, at least not one on which boys danced with other boys.

Of course my presence immediately drew attention. I was short (very short), blond (bleached blond), young (24 and looking 16, if that) and not exactly (well not at all) a stud. But I was fresh meat. The scent of freshly packed USDA prime gay boy was instantly picked up on.
Now I'd been accustomed to this at some Knoxville parties, but at least there I had friends to “protect” me. This night I was on my own. So, having no friends to run to, I headed for the bar and ordered a beer, perching myself on a stool (from which my very short legs dangled) and turned my face toward the bar. Well, almost.

My defensive technique worked too well. While eyes were still upon me, no one approached; no one spoke. Finally, I turned a bit to the boy on the next stool, only to realize I had no idea what to say to him. “Come here often?” would be much too trite. “God, you're incredibly cute!” seemed much too forward. Until now, I'd never had to come up with an opening line.
Others had offered theirs to me.

So I did the obvious. I briefly stared, then looked away, then stared again, and then looked away. Smooth operator I was. Real smooth.

Then someone played the jukebox, a great dance number. I was definitely a dancing fool, if not yet a dancing queen. So I turned again and asked the cute boy, “Wanna dance?” That I'd never danced with another boy, much less asked one to dance, didn't matter. Another first for a first night.

“All right,” came his plaintive reply and we headed for the dance floor where we stayed for, oh, maybe three songs. They were all fast, so we never touched, but then came a slow song and, in another first night first, I was dancing in the arms of another boy, a boy I learned was named Danny.

From the time of my first-grade dancing school lessons, I'd loved to dance even if I'd never learned to love girls. And the girls I'd never learned to love loved to dance with me. My above-average dancing ability was a saving social grace for a guy not otherwise likely to be a “chick magnet.” I knew how to hold a girl; I knew how to lead. And I guess the girls especially liked the way my hands never “wandered” when I held them, although they may not have known why they didn't wander.

But dancing with Danny was different. It was almost like coming out all over again. If I'd had any doubts of who I was that personal Independence Day, all doubts now faded in Danny's arms. Yes, I was gay all right. I was a boy who was born to dance with other boys. I was in an unfamiliar town, in an unfamiliar place, with an unfamiliar boy, but it all seemed so familiar. The anxiety I should have felt – and prominently displayed – was absent. The Joy Lounge might as well have been called Heaven, for that's certainly where I was. It was a tiny, dumpy, hole-in-the-wall, police-protection-paying Heaven, but that didn't matter. I was there and so was Danny and we were slow dancing.

The music ended, for it was closing time, just before midnight. Yes, midnight, the hour when beer-only bars had to close. Danny and I returned to our adjacent bar stools, there to finish our beers and make our respective exits.

“So what are you going to do now?” Danny asked.

It was time for a final first.

“I'm taking you home with me,” I replied.

“You are?”
“Of course I am. You're going home with me.”

And he did. The next day I moved in with him.

My first pickup line. And it worked.