This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.

There are a lot of things about my adult life that would blow my pre-teen self’s entire mind, but one of the biggest is finally having the kinds of friendships I always admired in the fictional stories I watched and read. I was always especially envious of the way they depicted childhood summers, like in the movie Now & Then, which recently turned 30. In that movie, four best friends live in the same neighborhood, so they spend the summer showing up at each other’s houses, using walkie talkies to invite each other to come outside and play, riding their bikes around together, and going on self-made adventures.

My childhood was…not like that. I didn’t live in a cute suburban neighborhood, I lived on a main street in an urban city where I wasn’t even allowed to walk further than my parents could see from the front porch because it wasn’t safe. We lived on the corner of a dead end (which for some reason was called “The Court,” probably leftover from a former street name), so that’s where my brother and I often played, but there weren’t that many other kids around. For a little while, I was friends with the girl down the end of The Court, but she wasn’t very nice. She was very bossy and tried to make me drink cough syrup for fun, at which point I would pretend I heard my mother shouting for me to come home. And once, when my mother wouldn’t let me outside to play, she flipped my mom off, so I was forbidden to see her anymore. Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly living out my Now & Then summer fantasies. I didn’t even know how to ride a bike.

Smash cut to 2025. I still don’t know how to ride a bike, but my summers look a little more like those Now & Then summers than my pre-teen self could have dreamed, especially since I managed to combine it with our lifelong dream of living in New York City. Slowly over the years, every person in one of my friend groups ended up moving to my neighborhood in Queens. All of us are within a 20-minute walk of each other — our own little “gayborhood” — and it’s my favorite thing.

I love getting messages in the group chat about who is working from which coffee shop, who is heading to our favorite queer bookshop, and who randomly ran into each other while doing errands. I love being able to visit my friends and not have to get in a car or take the train. I love getting a text asking if I want to meet up at a nearby restaurant for a beer and being able to just throw on pants and head over to enjoy some outdoor seating, refreshing beverages, and impromptu friendship. Just last week, I was walking back from having backyard beers at one friend’s apartment and ran into another friend at the street fair I had to walk through to get home. And a bunch of us in the neighborhood all play D&D together, which adds to the magic of it all.

My friends and I get to spend the summer showing up at each other’s houses, inviting each other to come outside and play, and going on self-made adventures. Just like I’d always dreamed.

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