I am turning 30 this month and I am feeling very isolated and lonely. Here is a little background story... This year the one lgbt-friendly bar shut down during covid and was unable to reopen their business. A woman from the community bought the old night club and is turning it into a cafe/hangout by day and bar by night. Initially I was excited because of the opportunity to come back to the community. Sadly a lot of people in the community are vocal about boycotting this place when it opens. The woman running it is straight, caters to gay men who do drag, and referred to herself as queer mama to the community. She I guess also gets extremely vocal about straight hate in the lgbt community. So a lot of people are turned off. But there are some people who are still open and are hoping for good things. My personal worries for this new space is that it will be full of high school kids during the day, and the bar goers by night. I am 30 which is not old, but too old to hang out with high schoolers, and I am in alcohol recovery so I do not drink or enjoy that environment. While I know a lot of people who are part of the queer community, we really have nothing to do with each other past the age of 25. We grow up, get jobs, partner up, and that is it. At almost 30 I feel myself retreating back into the closet. It's hard being a lesbian in healthcare because of the homophobia I encounter. There are patients who are of the 'female caregiver only' group which I worry that if the information I am a lesbian ever leaks out that I could be falsely accused of something. I do work with I know at least three other lesbians and 1 gay man that I know of. We pretty well all have nothing to do with each other except for two of them. It is really sad because I wish we could be a group who sticks close to each other. But meeting other gay and lesbian folks over a certain age can be rather blasé at this point (unless you are on the dating market, which I am off it). How do you cope with having no community or solidarity even when members of the community exist in your life? Should I go to that cafe/night club thing when it opens (during the day, not night)?
I do not know if you are up for this but when a friend of mine moved to a new city with her partner where neither of them really knew any LGBT people because her partner got a job there she started organizing a group. They would meet for coffee and snacks on Saturday at a coffee house. She used two different social platforms to get the word out. It was actually how I found people when I moved to that city because I am also not really into the bar scene. They did eventually organize drag king shows which did happen at one of the calmer local gay bars so that there was one lesbian night. I would go to the drag nights and they did not really push me to drink, I had one woman offer to buy me drinks and when I asked for 7-up she simply said "are you sure, I am buying" and when I said "yes" that is what she got me. So it might be possible to go if you just say no when offered, though do not do this if it will be too difficult for you to abstain. Also, I am nearly 60 and for more than a decade I have usually socialized with people younger than myself (where I have lived most people near my age were closeted), there are issues of differences but if the people you find are open it is not too bad. So you might try the daytime younger scene and see if you can find anything in common with them. Lastly, due to the virus the LGBT groups around here are not meeting. I socialize mostly with people that I have other things in common with, for me this is gaming. Within that group there is a pretty high incidence of LGBT people. It helps meet my social need and I am still accepted even though I have differences (I was married to a trans guy when I started with this group and they all were fine with it). Maybe you could find some other sort of thing to socialize around and see if those people might be accepting even if they are not organized entirely around being LGBT.
