I’m one of those people who hardly ever drinks alcohol. I’ve probably had one glass of wine in the last three months. When I’m offered a drink at a bar or a party, I usually just say, “No, thanks, I don’t drink.”
Whenever I don’t say “I don’t drink” and just say “No, thanks,” there are a lot of follow-up questions, like “Will you have a drink later?” or “Did you just have a drink?” or “Are you pregnant?” People have a lot of surprising logistical and procreative queries when you refuse a drink. So saying “I don’t drink” just clarifies the whole thing, right?
Actually, what it usually does is prompt other kinds of questions that people are less comfortable asking. They may hesitantly say, “Oh, right, because you’re Muslim?” (No, I don’t drink because I get headaches that sometimes trigger migraines. Maybe Allah just didn’t want people to get migraines?)
The most common misunderstanding is that people think I’m a recovering alcoholic. Their faces immediately become ashen because they assume I’m in Alcoholics Anonymous. That I hit rock bottom real hard, lost my job and my family, and probably sold my body to get drugs, and when that didn’t work, killed a guy and this is the first bar I’ve come to since I’ve been released from prison.
This is the kind of backstory that people often create in their minds and it makes them uncomfortable. So then I have to say something like, “I used to drink all the time. I was responsibly drunk three or four days a week and you would have felt really comfortable around me and the amount of appropriate drinking I did!”
Because that’s what people want. They want you to drink a lot, without it ruining your life.
Recently, I was at a show with a two-drink minimum with my husband, who also doesn’t drink (because he runs an al Qaeda sleeper cell, naturally). When the waitress came around for our order, I asked for a round of chamomiles for the table. But she was really pushing the cocktails. I told her, “Sorry, we don’t drink because of headaches.” She said, “That’s OK, you don’t have to explain” and then looked away to hide her pity. Again, she acted like migraines were a cover story for alcoholism.
Generationally, studies show the nonconsumption of alcohol is becoming more and more accepted. Gen Z doesn’t drink as much as older millennials and Gen X did. Apparently, they like a “clean” lifestyle. In the United Kingdom, I’m told, a forty-something is much more likely to commit a drunk driving violation than an eighteen-year-old. Ah, the kids these days, with their responsible driving! (Obviously, this is great.)
Oddly, though, some of my fondest memories have happened in bars. To me, once as a drinker and now as a nondrinker, bars offer a form of civic engagement. I learned about how men approach women. I would talk to strangers. I would hear music I hadn’t heard before. I would hear about sublets and jobs. I would encounter weird and subtle and divine moments of recognition with other human beings.
I think about the role of New York bars in the LGBTQ+ movement. I walk by the Stonewall Inn sometimes and look at the people regaling each other while enjoying their cocktails. I often experience a frisson of its past revolutionary energy. That bar was central to giving queer New Yorkers a place they belonged, but it was also central to organizing and movement building. It changed the sociopolitical landscape of New York and arguably the country.
Even though I don’t drink, and my nondrinking invokes confusion and sometimes concern, I still love bars for their place in the world of civic engagement. At first blush, it’s a place you get tipsy. But at second blush—the blush we usually gloss over—it’s a place to build community.
It’s a “third place,” as sociologists call it, where a person can find friends and merriment, sure; but it’s also a place where we’re being held accountable for a social order. Where we accept a little responsibility for others, even if that’s only a stranger having a beer next to us. At its best, a bar is a place that can give new meaning to the term “drink responsibly.”