Queer Montana

Not only is there a gay bar in Missoula, but there are two!

We were pleasantly surprised ourselves. Being queer and on the road in rural America and the West can be a trying experience.  We’ve almost always been exposed to LGBT communities in urban and suburban areas, so we really had no idea what to expect in a small town.

So we found that Missoula and Montana have a thriving LGBT community. However, because of the smaller population and the distances between all of the towns, the community is a lot more dispersed.

After spending a few hours in AmVets, one of the two gay bars, we left feeling welcomed by a group of individuals that were just like our friends back home.  The bar itself was originally opened up as “The Monks Cave” and so the interior was decorated as though it were a cave. The bar itself was made of stones with the fridges popping out but somehow looking as though they belonged there.

Being gay definitely has its challenges in this country and even more so when you’re in a community that doesn’t have the social safety net of a large number of LGBT people to surround yourself with.  However, we observed something that our community does well – we can create a community and a sense of belonging.

We spoke with a number of people from the Missoula area and the recently relocated.  There was the usual joshing around that happens with queer folk, but you could also get a sense that to some extent, people looked out for each other around here.

What’s also interesting is that the bar was frequented by “breeders” [that means straight people for those of you who don’t know the lingo]. A number of people came in to take advantage of the dance floor. Although I think they were disappointed in the “DJ’s” – which is understandable since I think the songs were on an iPod and put on shuffle.

Oops

Apparently within the next couple of weeks the town of Kalispell is holding Montana’s Gay Pride parade.  As would be expected anywhere in the US, some people started protesting and asked the local government to revoke the parade organizer’s permits for the event. The mayor refused and said that Kalispell has always been a welcoming town.

Which just goes to show, not only are gay people everywhere, but so are blind-sighted protestors. But more importantly, so are our “allies” [that means breeders who stick up for us].

In love with Missoula

Funny thing, in my last post, I mentioned how I hadn’t ever really given any thought about Missoula. But having spent about 24 hours there, I think I’ll remember this town for quite some time. Talk about an incredible, wonderful town.

Missoula is host to the University of Montana and it has that small town / college town feel. It has a functioning downtown area, with very few chains in downtown.  There were a lot of coffee shops and it was quite a struggle to find the Starbucks.

We were also there during one of their downtown nights, where in the public park at the center of town, they have food vendors set up and musicians playing. As we walked by on the bridge overlooking the park, we saw scores of people sitting around watching a band play salsa. Kids were dancing with each other or with their parents or both. It was like all the happiness of Sesame Street in a real small town.

This town definitely has a liberal feel to it, though not as much as, say, a Berkeley.  Most, if not all, of the coffee shops here advertise selling Fair Trade coffee. In addition, the town probably has the highest number of Subaru, VW bugs, and Volvos per capita this side of the Mississippi. It also wasn’t unusual to drive around town and still see Obama bumper stickers on the rear bumpers of these cars.

Montana, much like Illinois & Maryland & Virginia, is a politically dichotomy wherein most of the votes for the Democrats come in from the “urban” areas whereas the Republican votes come tend to be strong in the rural areas.  I realize that that isn’t anything unusual, but it was really interesting to see the contrast between Missoula and Cody. We loved Cody, don’t get me wrong, but the liberalness of Missoula was palpable.

And it felt good, for us.

We both half-joked that it would be really cool to live out West. To have a ranch and raise horses and do whatever it is that ranchers do. It’s a fun game that we often play when we go on vacation. The most serious we got about wondering what it would live like where we vacationed was Chicago. After returning home, we both knew that if we didn’t make the move from Baltimore to Chicago, it would be something that we would most likely regret and definitely always wonder if we should have done the move.

And so we did it and we haven’t regretted it.

But the level of… infatuation we had with Chicago was much stronger than when we talk about living in the West (so don’t worry moms, okay?). The impracticalness of it all is one of the barriers – especially being a lot more remote from our family than we already are living in Illinois.  Plus, we’ve made so many wonderful friends in Chicago that the emotional costs of leaving the people we love in our new home city would be just too high.

But still yet, there’s just something about Missoula that leaves you captivated.