The thing about Joey was he didn’t expect me to be happy about any of it. He didn’t expect me to watch my language or tone. I realized that the first night someone grabbed my crotch.

I’d served five years in the Air Force, surrounded by all the toxic masculinity the military attracts and breeds in men. Never mind the Air Force, the Family was a fucking sex cult, and I’d never had a man grab at my crotch, but it happened a lot at Badlands. Gay men aren’t immune to misogyny. It’s often worse because they think they have an excuse. Not a night went by that some asshole didn’t make a comment about my vagina. But the first time someone grabbed me, I froze.

I’d told him to leave. He was too drunk, screaming at one of the bartenders about the ice-to-booze ratio in his drink. Which, for the record, is fucking stupid. You get the same amount of liquor. The ice means you get less of whatever mixer you’ve ordered. Anyway, I walked him to the door. He was shouting the whole time about how he knew the manager. He could have me fired. He was a paying customer. The universal script. I got him to the door and then it happened. He’d turned to leave, and I’d relaxed. That’s when he spun around, grabbed my crotch, and jumped back. Maybe he said something. Maybe he laughed. Couldn’t tell you. Couldn’t even tell you if he was young or old. Short or tall. No idea. I just fucking stood there, waiting for it to be over, not realizing it already was.

I ended up in Joey’s office, my eyes wet but my jaw tight. Some part of me, the part that wanted to fight, wanted to scream at the part of me that had learned better long ago. Men grab crotches, boobs, ass, anything else they feel like grabbing to show you they can. It’s humiliating enough without your breaking down and proving their point. I was shaking with the effort of holding myself together.

   Joey poured me a shot of whiskey and asked why I didn’t kill the guy. My brain sort of glitched there. I was expecting praise for self-control, praise that would’ve tasted like acid because I hated that I’d frozen. I said, “Fuck you,” and downed the shot. I thought that was it. I’d be fired. And in that moment, I didn’t fucking care. Instead he said, “Sorry.” Then, “Don’t let anyone touch you again. I don’t pay you enough for all that.”

It took a minute for the rest of it to sink in. I was still stuck on how good it felt to tell someone with authority to go fuck himself. Over the next few years, I made a habit of it. I probably went a little overboard at first. I still did my job. But if he bitched about a vomit pool I’d left too long on the dance floor, I’d tell him to suck my dick before I cleaned it. And he’d laugh. I’d tell customers to fuck off when they got out of line, and the crazy thing was, they usually loved it. But I didn’t stop there.

There’s a way of speaking in the Family, and I don’t just mean the vaguely continental inflection, the hard consonants, the rising intonation at the end of sentences, or the overreliance on “super” as a qualifier, though all that is super annoying. I’d covered most of that with a slight Texas accent. What drove needles into my ears was that they always sounded like they were explaining bedtime to a toddler. I mean, like you would explain it. They’d just hit the kid if she got up again. But their voices, didn’t matter if they were praising or cursing you, or sending you to clean the herpes bathroom (their attempt at containing one of the sexier benefits of a sex cult) because you’d sounded too harsh when you’d said “Pass the salt, please.” Every word out of their mouths sounded sweet and slippery as a Southern bon vivant describing the drapes.

   It’s entirely possible the way I speak, and, by extension, the way I write, developed in rebellion to Family-speak. And being able to sound like me, truly like me, without worrying about losing my job or even getting in trouble for what I said, or didn’t say, is how I found my own voice.

It was like I finally learned to inhabit my six-foot-tall body and the voice that came with it. Almost. I’d spent my childhood and most of my young adult life building layers of filters to avoid punishment and humiliation and pain and rejection, a constant effort to be a little less of who I was because I’d been taught who I was was wrong. It was going to take some time to figure that out, pull off each filter, one at a time, and discover who was underneath. I couldn’t even begin until I felt safe enough. Maybe a busy nightclub is an odd place to feel safe. But my boss gave me permission. That I could be an asshole was a revelation, but it wasn’t necessarily unhelpful.

The next time a guy grabbed my crotch, I froze again, at first. Then I swung, with my eyes closed, of course. These things take practice. But I caught him on his mouth. Before I realized what was happening, one of the other bouncers hit him with a walkie-talkie. Then there were more bouncers, and Joey, who never asked who’d started what. He didn’t care. To Joey, to the other bouncers, they were there to protect their own, us vs. them—made fuck-all difference who was right or wrong.

   I don’t have words for that feeling—to know someone’s on your side no matter what. It felt good. It felt like safety. Maybe it felt something like family, though I don’t use that term.

* * *

—

On any given Friday or Saturday night, we’d be invaded by six to eight hundred shirtless gay men to whom we were mostly invisible unless we were taking their money, taking their drinks, or kicking them out. I learned to weave my way through them, tapping their heads with a case of beer if they didn’t feel like moving, carrying them outside for a cab or an ambulance when they’d had too much, breaking up their generally half-assed attempts at fighting, and they never saw us unless we pissed them off, or god forbid they suffered the indignity of a poor person hitting on them. I once heard a Hill staffer tell one of my favorite bouncers, “Honey, I don’t date the help.” The Hill staffer overpaid for a gram of Equal every weekend for months. I wasn’t a dealer, but he wasn’t that bright.