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I don't know about others, but I cannot be myself in the company of my straight friends. I'd never go to a gay place with them for fun, making myself an accomplice to their "let's go to the zoo watch the gays" mindset, I'd go to a gay place to get away from them. Straight people have no idea how tiring it is to mask for them. When I'm around people I need at least 4 hours to myself before I can interact with anybody else.
I get it. But if they are your friends, you shouldn't be masking too hard. Maybe what you call friends, I call acquaintences. "Let's go to the zoo and watch gays" is not what I was referring to. I'm talking real allies who accept you, not just politely tolerate.
Either way, I get it. It's great to have a space of your own. Good clubs often have occasional and even regular open nights where it's more inclusive, without losing the importance of what the space was always meant to be.
You have every right.
Dunno, in my life, the people who've claimed to be my "allies" or "friends" are the ones who've hurt me the most (humiliation, isolation, outing, assault, sexual assault, etc etc), so if one person from my entourage claimed that they wanted to go to a gay place with me, i'd immediately find it suspicious : why do they want to embed themselves in my private life? What will they get from accompanying me that they'll use to humiliate or confine me to the role of being their gay pet, and not a full human being? What will they do to me next? Why do they need to claim they're my allies, and how will that claim stand when things become serious?
Same thing with "representation". I'll never watch a gay character created by a straight person, even less if they're american. They're insults to what we go through and they silence our real problems without solving any, all in the name of an "inclusion" that's just silencing, social blindness or insulting caricatures.
I avoid liberals at all cost. They're all talk, no guts, they provoke the opposition and abandon us when it's backlash time (backlash THEY provoke by using us to humiliate the opposition, because the goal is not to advance our cause, the goal is to use us for a comfy feeling of moral superiority that allows them to not question what really make life shit for everybody -spoiler: capitalism, imperialism, etc-), and when they get to a good position in life, they just ditch us or side with the enemy.
I prefer enemies. At least I know where to stand, I know they hate me, I know to avoid them and they respect my boundaries because they want nothing to do with me and, good news, I want nothing to do with them either.
If one really wants to support us, they'll stay the fuck away from our safe places. Those place are all we have. They have the rest of society to fuck around, whereas we get gay bars and one day a year, and even that, corporations will exploit while it's a trend (now, tech bros are outright nazis, which is waaaay more honest and, in a weird way, sane). Fuck corpo pride, btw.
To sum it up: what you wouldn't do to a black person, a woman, a handicaped person, you don't do to a gay person. Society is made for you, leave our safe places alone unless you need sanctuary, because that's what those places are for us, even if they look fun. We need the fun because you make our lives miserable.
Shit man. You need better friends and allies. Friendship, like allyship can't be claimed, they must be earned. Neither would impose themselves on you, or the space or community if it weren't cool all the way around.
Enjoy your safe spaces.
Yup, I need people with at least basic class consciousness. Those are the friends I still have, they respect my boundaries and don't "support" me by worming their way in my intimacy for their weird voyeuristic needs. Else, I know they're just posturing, using me or worse, "tolerating" me (until they don't).