Some of us found ourselves in rooms with sticky floors.

Dollar drinks. Music loud enough to feel in your sternum. Strangers who became your people before you even knew their names. A world that existed before the apps, before the algorithms, before you had to optimize yourself for someone else's checklist.

We are human first. Gay second. And this is a book about the human underneath.

Boys Bars Becoming is a collection of essays about gay men of a certain age - who we were in those rooms, who we became outside of them, and who we are still trying to figure out how to be. It is about the bars that shaped us and the ones that disappeared. About the friendships that held and the ones that quietly went dry. About grief and fathers and mothers and the particular loneliness of a man who knows exactly what he wants and can't quite let himself have it.

Funny, honest, and occasionally devastating, Boys Bars Becoming is for anyone who has ever had to strip away an old version of themselves to find out who they actually are.

Pull up a stool.

The first round is on me.