Beers For Queers

I can’t remember the last time I drank Bud Light. It was probably at the park during Atlanta Pride, though. Or at some gay bar during Pride. Or, I don’t know, maybe I was at someone’s house and it was the only beer they had, so I accepted it and thanked them, but what I really wanted was a Corona with no lime. That’s what I usually drink when I drink beer. Otherwise, I drink straight bourbon. Unless I’m experimenting with flavored vodkas with different flavored waters or Sprite or different flavors of Fanta.

But I don’t drink Bud Light.

Hell, I don’t even drink Budweiser anymore. Budweiser is for teenagers who sneak and get drunk at football games when their parents aren’t around. Or at the bonfire down by the river. That’s what we all drank when I was in high school. That or Jack Daniels. I still drink Jack Daniels, but only when I mix it with something. Not straight anymore. I like to think I’ve evolved, but really it’s because I can afford better whiskey and bourbon now than I could when I was fifteen years old and scraping together whatever was left of my allowance and the coins I found on the floor under my bed or in the pockets of the jackets and coats I hadn’t worn since colder weather.

Apparently, a lot of people do drink Bud Light, though. And not the people I thought drank it. See, I’ve only ever seen gay people drinking Bud Light. Like, my entire adult life, at every gay bar I’ve ever patronized and every Pride festival I’ve ever attended, there was Bud Light and there were LGBTQ people drinking it. Scantily clad women hammed it up with festival goers in front of Bud Light backdrops. Scantily clad men, too. Sometimes there were prize wheels to spin, like Wheel of Fortune, but you didn’t have to solve a puzzle, you just won whatever it landed on: a Bud Light trucker hat, maybe or a t-shirt, but mostly cheap tchotchkes like rainbow beads or a sticker to put on your car that would fade to illegibility in less than a month.

I grew up in rural East Tennessee and spent my summers in rural Alabama. Budweiser was the beer of choice in both places, with the occasional Coors (once it became available east of the Mississippi River) or Miller High Life, the “Champagne of Beers.” I never saw a grown man drink Bud Light until I saw gay men drinking it at the first gay bar I snuck into when I was seventeen years old. (Burkhart’s in Atlanta, if you’re wondering. They’re closed now, so I can say this and not get them shut down.) In my hometown, there was a place called Monroe’s Tavern that would sell to minors, as long as we drove around to a back window and didn’t mind paying something like $12 for a six-pack of tall boys. We didn’t mind. Liquor was harder to come by, but the guy my mom was married to back then managed a liquor store, so it wasn’t impossible and I was the go-to guy for Jack. Then we’d head off to wherever the party was that weekend and nurse our overpriced tall boys. Or we’d slip them into our band uniforms and get shitfaced in the stands during football games. Those were halcyon days for sure.

Summers in Alabama were different because beer and whiskey were easier come by. I remember asking my father to buy me a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill when I was, like, eight years old. My father was an alcoholic, so he just laughed and bought it for me. I expected it to taste like strawberry Kool-Aid, but when I adequately chilled it and poured myself a glass, I learned the truth about wine: I didn’t like it. It didn’t taste like Kool-Aid. It didn’t taste like fruit at all. I couldn’t even say what it tasted like, but it wasn’t strawberries or grapes, so I handed the rest of the bottle off to the woman my father was dating at the time, a horse-faced woman named LeMerle who drove a Cobra II Mustang and thought she looked like Farrah Fawcett doing it, just because she feathered and hot rollered her hair. Whatever.

When I hit fourteen and my father decided I could be left alone during the day, I realized I could either die of boredom or I could go do things with cute, older redneck boys who always seemed to have beer and whiskey on hand. They’d want to do things I found idiotic, for the most part—shooting at empty beer cans on logs, riding three-wheelers through the woods, fishing—but it got me out of the house and they always had booze.

We’ve all heard the joke.

“What’s the difference between a straight man and a gay man?”

“About four beers.”

Well, there is truth in that, and my first sexual encounters happened those summers in Alabama, alone in the middle of the woods with this or that redneck boy who smelled like sweat and car parts and Marlboro Reds, shooting rusty beer cans off logs and sipping Budweiser and Jack Daniels. I became adept at knowing which boy would be amenable to a handjob or blow job, and how much alcohol it would take to get him there. It was always considerably less than it should have taken. And these were not the gay boys I would meet later at college and go dancing with at gay bars in Birmingham and Atlanta and Knoxville. Oh, no. Those boys were still in the closet (I guess I was, too, then), singing in their church choirs or working as a counselor at Bible camp. No, these were the straight boys. These boys had girlfriends who wouldn’t have sex with them because they were saving themselves for marriage, just like their Meemaw did when she was younger. Those girlfriends wouldn’t suck dick, either, because they didn’t like having things in their mouths like that. They felt like they were choking to death. I actually heard girls say these things. So, that left a lot of frustrated “straight” boys tooling around in F-150s looking for a quick, easy blowjob and they didn’t even give a shit if it came from a guy. As long as the guy was cool. That was where the work came in—I had to spend a lot of time convincing them I was cool. That I would suck their dick and not blab about it to everyone they knew. The Bud and the Jack helped with that. You’d be surprised. Like, there is really a culture of sexually frustrated “straight” boys who will get themselves just inebriated enough to let a guy go down on them and disassociate from it because, well, they had too many tall boys.

Not Bud Lite tall boys, though.

Apparently, the straight men who drink Bud Light would never consider such a thing. (I call bullshit.) These men are the pinnacle of masculinity and can’t even accept that the makers of Bud Light, in a free market economy, would target a demographic like the LGBTQ community in order to generate revenue. They’re also so fucking stupid that they don’t realize Bud Light has been sponsoring Pride events for the last 20 years and even had a fucking rainbow aluminum bottle in 2022. Like, did they just not fucking drink it that month, for fear the beer coming from the rainbow bottle would infect them with The Gay? Did they buy it and not notice the rainbow bottle? Because apparently, it took putting a transgender woman in an ad for Bud Light to have all this come crashing down on them and now they are so shook. Like, they bought cans and bottles and cases of Bud Light to shoot at or crush with a steamroller, just to prove to Anheuser-Busch that they are not going to give their money to a company that endorses trans people. This was, apparently, the last straw.

There is even some shmendrik who has created a new beer for manly men and, I shit you not, has christened it “Ultra Right.” Like, you cannot make this shit up. And, at $20 for a six-pack, it seems the guys behind Monroe’s Tavern may be in on it.

Getting just drunk enough on Budweiser to let a guy suck your dick, that’s okay. But they draw the line at having a trans woman hawking the shit.

What the fuck ever.

Humanity is doomed.