I like to arrive before dark if I’m going to be camping somewhere. But here I was, driving down the dirt road an hour after sunset, going nowhere but deeper into the country. I sent a voice memo to the woman I was meeting up with and tried to make the best of it. At least I could see all the lit-up Halloween decorations people had out.

At my destination, a friend had revived a century-old tradition on a farm she’d inherited from her family. The family before hers had held “barn dances” in the expansive upper floor of the farm’s larger barn. I’d attended her inaugural one, arriving early to help set up. A barn dance, in this case, was a public event, open to anyone who wanted to come — family, friend, neighbor, or stranger. The night involved a potluck, various coolers and bags of bring-your-own beverages, and a live band. People from the surrounding farm community and folks who went to these kinds of dances attended. But also, because of the person who’d now revived the dances, a lot of queer people, especially sapphic-leaning folks, now showed up to dance, too, making the crowd an odd mish-mash of people who’d maybe done some farm work that morning and city queers who’d driven up from Pittsburgh or over from Erie.

As for the dancing, the style was contra dance, a kind of folk dancing with mixed European origins. The fiddle is the main instrument in the band, and the band needs to be skilled, to keep tempo for the dancers. One notable thing about a contra dance is that you can attend it alone — it’s considered good manners to dance with different partners song-to-song. And while experienced contra-dancing enthusiasts attend these barn dances, you don’t have to know what you’re doing to go. A “caller” explains the various movements and continues to call throughout the song, telling you what to do.

I’d met a woman at the last barn dance. We’d gotten to chatting and hit it off, but I’d left my phone back at the place I was staying with friends, and hers went from being on 1% charge to shutting down the minute she tried to enter my number. I had to go on a quest for paper and a pen as people filtered out of the barn with their empty ceramic potluck dishes and crockpots. We laughed at how I gave her my number the old-fashioned way. We were texting the next day and continued to strike up a flirty friendship. It seemed to me like we were both feeling it out, seeing if it could be more. So we decided to meet again at this next barn dance. It wasn’t just her I was meeting either, but also her gay mountain biker friends — “my wives,” as she called them, because they were two sets of wives.

I parked on the side of the dirt road in front of the farmhouse, lunchbag of beer and Trader Joe’s baked goods in my arms, and walked as carefully as I could through the dark toward the sound of fiddles. Clouds covered the moon and stars, blackening the sky. The yellow lights of the barn blinded me to anything below my feet until I stood in them. When my eyes adjusted, the friend who organized the dance was right there in front of me. We chatted some, and I asked her where to park to camp in my car, only for her to tell me a room in her house had just opened up and I should take it. It felt like the good luck brushed off some of the dust of my lateness.

I climbed the wooden steps past the compost toilets and emerged to find a couple dozen dancers skipping and spinning across uneven floorboards to high energy fiddling, with just as many onlookers talking, taking pictures, and munching on what was left of the potluck dinner. A giant farm table was littered with carefully labeled dishes: salads, pastas, breads, meatballs, chicken, pork, cheese and chips. Some of it was lovingly homemade, some of it clearly deposited there by some other overworked millennial who’d just bought something. The dessert table was the same. I put my baked goods down — no need to label, that was on the packaging — and went to go find my friend. I spotted her dancing with a person who looked extremely enthusiastic about touching her, taking her by the hand, by the waist. I found another person I knew who was filming shamelessly and joined her, capturing a video of the dance, and my date? Was she my date? That was unclear. But video footage, nonetheless, of the woman I’d come to spend time with having a great time dancing with someone else, and then turning to me, waving with that bright smile. The dance ended, and she ran toward me, grabbed me into a hug, and immediately told me she’d already promised the next dance to someone else.

“Did you eat? Go eat. Eat.” Her bossiness cracked me up.

I got a little food and found a wooden bench to sit on and watch the dancers. While watching yet another queer person who I’d met at the last dance swing my friend around, I made fun of myself a little in my head. Sad at the barn dance because the lady you like is dancing with someone else? How many of my ancestors had felt that? How many people had felt that feeling in this barn over the past hundred years?

I could smell the hay and the night air and the food and the wood, hear the fiddle music and folk songs so old they’d emerged before the people I’d come from ever set foot on this continent. It felt like I’d become a part of a line stretching back through the ages, connected with the dudes in my family tree, accessing a memory deep in my bones — a bit jealous, a bit mopey at the barn dance, hand in the pocket of my overalls, drinking a beer.

Accessing a new ancestral feeling, though, is kind of fun. There needs to be a word for this one specifically, like how a Tumblr user had long ago coined the word “sonder” to describe the overwhelming sense that everyone you pass is living a complex and totally unknowable life all their own. I’d been contemplating that word on the drive up. It’d been a lonely little trip, coming up here solo instead of with a group of friends — they were all working, nothing big. But it feels like I’m doing more and more just by myself these days, and it does get to have a certain stoney taste to it after a while of just going it solo without a break in the flow.

The fiddling paused, and my friend came back over, a bit frantic, glowing a little. She swigged from her alcoholic seltzer, and I asked her if she was down to dance or if she needed to rest.

“No, let’s do it.” She turned, all high energy, and paced right back into the middle of the floor.

The caller was a commanding woman who might have been in her seventies. She stood tall with rigid-straight, incredibly shiny gray and white hair that went past her shoulders with impeccably neat curtain bangs. She had sparkling hair tinsel in and wore a country-style colorful dress that went to her ankles. With microphone in hand, she directed us to our starting places and walked us through the dance moves. It’s hard to stay mopey when there’s fiddle music like that and you’re trying to remember when you spin or turn to face a different person. I could see how these dances served as an antidote to loneliness, a way to glue a community together. How can you be mad when you’re all holding hands and skipping under an arch made by two people holding hands?

My friend insisted on being the “man” role for this dance, and I agreed to be the “lady,” which confused some of the straight people because I am several inches taller and more masc than my dance partner, so they kept trying to make me the man. We wound up switching halfway through the dance, which we agreed was perfect anyway, that we’d gone into the dance with one gender and come out with another. My friend punctuated our discussion with just, “Gay!”

Between dances, my friend pointed out two people she’d met on apps, and it turned out she’d been on a date with the woman I saw her dancing with before. So, that was where that energy came from. I also met a pair of wives from Erie who identified, cheerfully, as “Queeries.” It was good I caught them when I did, though, because despite being rugged mountain bikers who certainly had the cardio for dancing, they tapped out halfway through a complicated dance and decided to call it a night. My friend made faces about it when they said they were going, but there was no dissuading them.

The band took a break, and I wound up at a table with my friend and each of the other queers she’d danced with.I watched what appeared to be some one-way flirting from across the table while we all talked and took a group selfie I’ll never see on someone’s phone.

The band finished their break, and the louder of the two other queers at the table asked the one flirting with my friend to dance, and I breathed deeply. A sigh of relief at the barn dance because the person who’s after the person you want to dance with got whisked away by a helpful person who has no idea they just intervened on your behalf? Another new ancestral emotion unlocked.

I asked my friend to dance with me again, and we found our way to the middle. This dance involved a lot of spinning my friend around with an arm around her waist, and it felt like there was a spark there, especially when she told me how she liked not having to think too hard about where she would wind up after the spinning because I just put her where she needed to go. But what was truly silly and fun was the final dance, a waltz. This one had no calls, no changing of partners, consisted of just pairs of people spinning around the floor — or in our case — not knowing how to waltz and making shit up. We twirled each other around and, at one point, I asked my friend if I could dip her just for fun. She agreed, but when I leaned her down, she let out a SHRIEK. I was not even close to dropping her. Her straight friends were sitting and watching, and oh they heard. They laughed, and we cracked up while the band played on, locked in as usual, right next to us. We tried the dip again, and she did not shriek again.

My friend had work in the morning and was in a hurry to go, so, as one does when they’re not sure if a thing is a thing, I asked her if she wanted me to walk her to her car. Unluckily for me, her straight friends needed to get back a radon testing kit from my friend that they’d let her borrow. Of all the things. We walked her to her car as a group of four, and my friend gave me a long hug under the watchful eyes of her straight friends before climbing in and pulling away. I waved and then went to find my room in the farmhouse.

After some contemplation, I sent my friend a text. Would it have been welcome if I’d asked to kiss her? Obviously I COULDN’T, because her friends were right there. That would have been a move. She replied quickly, saying that I was so funny, and that she wanted to make out with me, but she couldn’t do anything casual, that she was too monogamous and she got too attached. It was the old “we want different things.”

I had accessed my final ancestral emotion for the evening: rejected at the barn dance. Or really, after the barn dance. Had my offer of a goodnight kiss turned down after the barn dance. I felt solidarity with whoever had felt this in the past and took a lot of comfort in knowing that while it was maybe a more unique permutation of rejection in 2025, I certainly am not alone in the vast sea of humanity throughout time, many of whom have certainly been rejected at the barn dance, and some of them even had to be gay.

Like you do when it’s dark and country-quiet, I slept hard. I woke up to crisp morning and went into the kitchen to help my friend prepare brunch. I met her friends, ate with strangers, and learned about the guinea hen that one had heard die in the night while he lay awake in his tent.

“I heard a distress call from one in one place, and the others call out to it, and then another few calls, and then the distress calls stopped.”

My friend went to check on her guinea fowl while we ate. I went for a walk when I finished so the group, who all seemed to know each other, could talk and I wouldn’t have to keep being the odd one out. The walk was pleasant. The air was still not cold enough for an October morning, but at least it was getting there, the leaves changing some, plants dying back. When I returned to my car, my host had also just gotten back. I hugged her, and with tears in her eyes, she told me she’d buried the hen. We talked for a while about her thoughts on getting a protector donkey, which, honestly, yes. That would be the perfect addition to the farm personality-wise. And when the mood was a bit lighter, I got back in my car and drove alone back to Pittsburgh, stopping at a farm market along the way for ridiculously fresh produce, making things as pleasant as I could for myself on this solo day.

The sun was out, the fiddle music still rang in my ears, and I tried not to think too hard about the guinea hen who’d been killed in the night when she was separated from her flock.

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.

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