It is almost 11pm on an evening in early June and a group of about 60 gay men have taken over the Enchanted Rose, a cocktail bar at Disney’s upscale Grand Floridian Resort. This is the last stop on the Gay Pride Disney Monorail Crawl, an informal annual get-together that serves as a warm-up for almost a week of parties and events attracting thousands of LGBT+ people to Orlando each summer.
The crowd in the Enchanted Rose ranges from men in their early thirties to those who have reached that stage in life where they refuse to say how old they are. Many of them remark on how the atmosphere harks back to an era when the small American gay bar was a staple of queer life, before Grindr and the never-ending party circuit came along and changed all that.
Comments