The George

When I eventually felt ready to test the gay scene waters here in Dublin I was a little surprised to find The George, the oldest and most famous gay bar here, at a very prime location just up from Dame Street and Great George. There doesn’t appear to be any ‘neighbourhood’ here, no ‘gay ghetto’ of bars, bath houses, speciality coffee shops and underwear stores catering to homosexual mans which exist in practically every urban centre in North America. Nope, here the George and the Dragon sit alongside curry restaurants and traditional pubs on one of the busier commercial streets right down town.

So I walk into the bar and am surprised how small it is. It’s decorated with old-fashioned red lamps and there cliental is, how shall I say... in general older. I order a cider (at least in a gay bar I assume my masculinity will not get questioned for ordering a cider) and sit by myself for ten minutes or so. Echoes of my experiences in Barcelona start waving over me. Then an older Irish gentleman approaches me (I’m guessing he was about 55) and just starts talking. I couldn’t really hear or understand everything he said, but here’s the gist of it (do the accent yourself): “Hello there! Are you havin’ a good evening? I’m not trying to chat you up at all. I’m really not. If I bore you, tell me to go away. I just thought I oughta tell you that this section of the bar is for older gentlemen like myself. On the other side of the doors, that’s for younger men like yourself. You’re not from around here, so I thought someone should tell you. Just in case you were wondering why people were staring at you. I’m not bothered at all. And I’m not trying to chat you up, but if I can’t give a young lad like you advice, now who can I?”

Some rational of this speech continued for quite some time. Oh, and he also wanted me to know that the gay scene was all about sex (isn’t that what they always say?) and that there is more to life than being gay. I nodded along, answered the few questions he asked and smiled genuinely; in my years of going to Canadian gay bars an older fellow had never taken me under his wing like that, and I was glad for the information and his welcoming nature. I did eventually have to lose him, because I could tell the same conversation would just continue along the same lines, not that he was trying to chat me up or anything, so I made my way to the other side of the bar.

Through the doors it looked more like a modern gay bar: dance floor (which my friend actually called a “disco”), leather couches, homoerotic vaguely-Greek statues. I got another drink, then another older gentleman began talking to me. Then a guy who worked at the bar came over to get me to fill out a questionnaire for a Family Feud-ish game show they do. I tried to write naughty, snarky answers for all of them, and my funniest line I believe (I can’t remember all of them now) was answering the question “Name a wild creature which is native to Ireland” with the only honest answer that came to my head: “Sinead O’Connor.”

So already I was thinking: this is 300% more people talking to me than the last time I was at Woody’s (in Toronto). Maybe the friendly, talkative character of the Irish offsets the often-times cold and clique-ness of the gay community? Best of all, it encouraged me to be more outgoing. Inspired by my conversations already, I turned to a cute, tall, bespectacled guy next to me and asked him how his night was going. It turned out he was an American visiting from France at the moment, and we spent the rest of the night talking. It seemed we had almost everything in common, and what we didn’t led to interesting conversations. We were fast friends, instant mates in a mutually foreign land. Of course, he is leaving this weekend and of course he has a boyfriend back in the States, but it’s the potential of that first night at the George that excites me.