Your first gay-bar experience: Slate asked several well-known peeps the question

I was contacted out of the blue a few weeks ago by June Thomas of Slate to answer a memory hole question - what was your first gay-bar experience like?

She also asked Alison Bechdel, Mart Crowley, Susie Bright, Dan Savage, and others the same question. Everyone provided interesting answers. Below is Crowley's and my contribution.

Mart Crowley, playwright, author of The Boys in the Band

I can't remember the first gay bar I visited-it was more than 50 years ago. I went to college at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and I didn't want to get caught in gay places there, but I loved to come to New York on weekends. In 1955 or so, one of my favorite New York bars was Lenny's Hideaway in Greenwich Village. It was in a basement. How well-dressed we all were in our Harris tweed jackets, our repp ties, and our pink oxford cloth button-down shirts. We looked like we were in a Ralph Lauren ad. I also liked 316, which was at 316 E. 54th Street-even the address is gone now. It was a different crowd from the Village: Guys would come in from parties in black tie. We thought they were snobby, but they were awfully glamorous. When I was in those bars, especially Lenny's, I felt I was taking my life in my hands. There was a danger that was terribly exciting. It was scary, but scary in a thrilling way.

Pam Spaulding, editor of Pam's House Blend

Despite living in New York for many years, the first gay bar I ever visited was a lesbian bar in Durham, N.C., in the early '90s. Competition was in a very seedy (at that time) downtown area near abandoned warehouses. It was a members-only place, so patrons had to pay $5 to join for the evening. My first impression: dreary. There was a smallish dance floor, with several women enjoying themselves to music blaring over the horrible P.A. system. There were some butchy gals playing pool at the tables adjacent to dance area. At the bar, there were a couple of apparent regulars, chatting up friends. There was a notable lack of racial diversity, with maybe a handful of women of color in the place. I took a bar seat in the haze of cigarette smoke, ordered a soda, and spent an hour there, with perhaps one person bothering to talk to me. It made me wonder why anyone would find this a place to meet someone. A few years later another Durham lesbian and I started up TriangleGrrrls, a group that provided alcohol-free opportunities for lesbians to socialize, and it was at one of these gatherings that I met my future wife, Kate.