There was a social media post regarding a Gay Bar in Hackensack NJ, called The Bell. I posted the original post from the above post date called ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’.
I took the post and did a Google Gemini rewrite as a James Baldwin essay:
The first domain of my awareness—that place where the terrifying knowledge of oneself begins to take form—was a establishment in Hackensack, New Jersey, called the Bell. In another season, in another incarnation, it had been a rock-and-roll hall or a disco, a venue where my older siblings went to lose themselves in the noise of the day. But somewhere in the middle of the nineteen-seventies, it underwent a transformation. It became a gay bar. And in becoming a place where those who were exiled from the mainstream might gather, it alarmed the respectable citizens who lived on those quiet, uncompromising streets.
I was, at the time, an androgynous child, suspended in that brief, treacherous innocence that precedes puberty. But when puberty arrived, it brought with it an absolute and terrifying clarity. I knew who I was. And yet, for a thirteen-year-old boy in Northern New Jersey in that hour of our national history, there was no sanctuary. There were no institutions designed to hold a child who had discovered himself to be an outcast; there was no language provided to us except the language of contempt.
To grow up in America is to be subjected to a relentless, unthinking indoctrination. One lives in a world that assumes its own righteousness, a world that routinely hurls slurs—*queer*, *fag*, *dyke*—into the air as casual jokes, as casual violence. And then comes that agonizing moment of realization, that sudden, blinding terror when you understand that those jokes are directed at *you*. That the world’s laughter is designed to deny your very humanity. The weight of that confusion, compounded by a suffocating, manufactured shame, is enough to break a child. I believe now that during the long, sweltering summer of 1976, I suffered a quiet nervous breakdown. But I kept it to myself. In America, the afflicted learn very early how to hide their wounds.
There was nowhere to turn, no elder to consult, no friend to trust with the monstrous secret of my existence. And so, on a afternoon when the house was empty—when my family was away at work and I was left alone, climbing the walls of my own despair—I did the only thing my desperate mind could conceive. I picked up the telephone and dialed the number for the Bell.
A man answered. He was, I suppose, a manager or a bartender, someone moving about in the dim afternoon light, preparing the room for the night’s trade. I did not know him. But into the ear of this complete stranger, I poured out the entire agony of my soul. I told him that I did not know how to go on. I told him of the crushing certainty that I was a disappointment to my family, that I could not bear the prospect of living a life condemned to the shadows.
We stayed on that line for what felt like an eternity—perhaps an hour, perhaps longer. I do not know his name, and I have never spoken to him since. But that man, standing in a quiet bar in Hackensack, reached across the silence and talked me down from the ledge. He listened. He spoke to me not as a monster, but as a human being worthy of life.
Eventually, as one must if one is to survive, I came to terms with my own nature. I accepted my sexuality, and in doing so, I accepted the fact that I was forever out of step with the society around me. From that day forward, I was forced to walk to a rhythm entirely my own, a rhythm dictated not by the crowd, but by the necessity of my own truth.
Yet, over all these years, I have never ceased to wonder about that nameless man on the other end of the wire. I wonder what kind of night he had after he hung up the receiver. It must have been a heavy, terrible burden to carry—to hold the raw, unadulterated anguish of a thirteen-year-old boy who was drowning in his own skin. He was under no obligation to care. He could have brushed me off; he could have hung up the telephone and returned to the mundane logistics of his workday.
Why didn’t he? Perhaps he was paying a debt. Perhaps, years earlier, when he was a boy drowning in his own silence, someone had reached out a hand and pulled him from the fire. Or perhaps—and this is the far more heartbreaking possibility—no one had ever been there for him when he was young, and he resolved in that moment that he would not allow another child to suffer the unbearable coldness of being entirely alone.
