It is a fact of queer life: Your favorite gay bar, the one where you found your tribe for the first time, will someday close. Neighborhoods are gentrifying, nightlife is changing, and the Gay Bar — home—feels increasingly like a relic from when cities were cheap, dirty, and wild. I posit — for the first time in my writing career — that maybe this is OK, mostly because of some recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Last November, the CDC released an alarming report. In recent years, “excessive drinking” accounted for one in five deaths among Americans ages 20 to 49. That’s a lot of people. Most of my friends fall in that range. Following COVID-19, another report from the CDC showed equally grim numbers: In 2020, over 93,000 Americans died from overdoses,
