Grabbing somebody’s butt without first getting consent is wrong. Being at a Con is no excuse.
I might have had a similar experience had I accepted an old neighbor’s invitation to her own backyard BBQ, although in my case, I’m a straight woman.
When I did rotations on the Indian reservation, I drove to Gallup, the nearest town of any size, the day after I arrived, and went to the mall. I realized almost immediately that the overwhelming majority of the people there did not look like me, an Anglo, and then I also realized that none of them were paying any attention to me either.
Decades ago. Today- not so much.
They had Klingon Slave auctions, etc.
Not me, but a (straight!) woman I worked with many years ago went to a Lilith Fair (1990s female-dominant music festival) because she liked some of the bands that were playing. She was never hit on so much as she was there, in addition to being groped, having her tank top pulled out and looked down, etc. and all of it by other women! That was quite a shock for her, and yes, most of the women who acted this way were drunk.
In the mid-70s I was a hippie but not, I guess you would say, a “true believer”. My friend Q was, though. He was a vegan who wanted to get back to nature and live off the land. The only time I wanted to get back to nature was camping in the mountains. Anyway, we got up godawful early one morning and drove to The Farm in middle Tennessee. Even visitors had to work. For some reason, he and I were separated and I went to work in the fields. This was no fun. It was hot and uncomfortable but everyone else seemed to be really into it.
Now, I did meet some cool people who were also visiting but all the ones who lived there were boring as hell and came off as really smug. I can talk cosmic with the best of them but their “spirituality” just rang false to me. I wasn’t rude or sulky, just not enthusiastic. The only time I saw Q was at lunch and he was in heaven. I just wanted to get the day over with.
When we left that evening, he couldn’t stop talking about what an amazing time he had. I didn’t lie to him. I told him I did not experience the same enlightenment. He was a bit disappointed but glad I was willing to share the adventure.
Years ago, I was working on a project that would be installed at an R&D facility for Coca Cola. Then I found out I’d be going to the facility to oversee the installation. So I booked a plane ticket, room and car and didn’t really think much of it. When I arrived at the place in downtown Atlanta, I found out it was in their main headquarters building. I go in through the grand lobby, navigate the considerable security and wait in their finely appointed, wood paneled waiting room in my polo shirt and boots with a multitool strapped to my belt. Others waiting to be greeted on the leather couches were in suits that would probably cost me three month’s pay and wearing watches valued at the price of a really nice new car. These were not this fish’s waters.
The trip was memorable for other reasons. One, there was a fire alarm and we all had to evacuate. My contact lead me outside and then disappeared for like two hours. I didn’t know anyone else there and had an awkward time standing around. I really just wanted to get the job done and get back home.
Two, the equipment that had worked perfectly at our shop days earlier was malfunctioning in a catastrophic way. The fire alarm kicked on while I was troubleshooting it, terrible timing. Three, when I finally got out of there and back to my rental car to drive back to the airport, I noticed both the check engine light on and I had a nearly empty gas tank. I’m 99.95% certain that the (mandatory) hotel valets siphoned nearly an entire tank of gas from my car. When I stopped to fill up, the gas cap was off which was the cause for the check eng light to be on in the first place.
Funny you should mention Gallup. I was there in my 20s with a group of friends at a hotel for the night after finishing a week horseback riding through Monument Valley. We asked the front desk if there was anything to do at night in town and they said there was a local fair/rodeo going on. We drove over but from a distance could see it was a pretty ruckus scene of local navajos and a group of 20something year-old gringo guys probably wouldn’t fit in. So we just went to the hotel pool.
I was once the only white guy at a childhood friends bachelor party. I knew maybe about a third of the other attendees. There was only one guy who got a little hostile and he was quickly told to knock it off.
About 30 years ago I was dating a lady who belonged to an expensive country club. She was recently divorced and she was trying to maintain her social status. Once a week a group of about 10 would meet for dinner at this country club. I was a truck shop foreman and most of these guys were aerospace execs. The entire conversation centered around expensive trips, portfolios and a number of other things I had no access to. I made a couple of attempts to contribute something and it fell flat. I felt like crawling out of my skin. In reality all they were doing was getting drunk and bragging. Fast forward 30 years and I feel I have a much more accomplished crowd I hang out with today and get along with them just fine. The only difference is none of them are drunks and none of them waste time on small talk. .
In my junior year of college, I was on a semester abroad in London, and one of the faculty invited all of the students in the program to his apartment for lunch. As it happened, I was the only guy who accepted; six female students did. For most of the lunch, to my bemusement, I was peppered with questions about why guys acted as they did, what guys were looking for in relationships, how I thought guys and gals could get along better, etc.
I didn’t have a helluva lot of experience with women myself by that point in my life and was certainly no expert, and told them so, but I still did my best to help out and share my views. A very strange but oddly fun experience.
When I lived in Montreal, I went to a French Canadian summer camp. On Sundays we were required to attend Mass. I’m Jewish.
I’ve been the only white person on an up-country African bus. I still imagine that I’m being my usual inconspicuous self. I always get a sense more of hospitality than hostility, though. It disturbs me that so many natives still kow-tow to the white man – Bangladesh was the worst.
I was one of two Jewish kids at a Jesuit high school.
In college, I was sleeping over at my girlfriend’s room on the 18th floor of a high rise dorm. In the night, a fire alarm went off, and I was the only male among many, many young ladies trudging down 18 flights of stairs.
When I was in college, I took a class at the local women’s college (as part of some agreement between the various colleges in the area that allowed such things).
The class itself was fine – I was one of two males; the female classmates were not particularly friendly (but then again I never really made friends in class, so it may have been me; and I was self-conscious, so I may have been standoffish).
But what struck me was the degree of overt suspicion and hostility with which I was treated when I was on campus (by the student body; by campus security), especially on the rare occasions when I was there after dark (but even sitting on a bench, reading a book, waiting for class, if I arrived early).
My wife and I were living in Manhattan in 2001. One Sunday in early September, we decided to take a bus out to Six Flags Great Adventure in NJ to ride some roller coasters. Turns out that there was a special event that day for a number of Muslim organizations - “Young Muslims’ Day”, I think - which means we were among the few non-Muslims at the park. Everyone was speaking Arabic, there were teenage girls in full burkas, and guys were walking around in shirts saying “Jihad” in English and Arabic. We didn’t feel threatened or anything, but we did avoid speaking Hebrew while anyone else was in earshot (my wife’s English is excellent, so it wasn’t much of a problem). It was a surreal beginning to a very strange week.
Bizarre story:
Fresh out of college and in my first “Real Job” I worked for a mid-sized, rapidly expanding company. One week, we were buying out a competitor and had a team of the top brass, and me go to the location. The top guys were all combing over financials and that kind of stuff. Me? I had to inventory and verify numbers on pieces of large equipment. Outside, in the heat, getting dirty and greasy.
Well, I had partied pretty hard the night before, and had to get up very early to drive out there. I was a little hung-over and tired, and was kinda on ‘Auto-pilot’ for the morning. A little hazy. But more than capable to crawl around looking for VIN numbers on tractors.
Lunch rolls around, and the team heads of to this Uber-fancy place. I get to go, too! Whoopie! Now, I used to work in some pretty nice dining rooms in college, but I ain’t never seen anything with this business model. Ultra-fine dining pared with lingerie modeling. What???
About half-way through lunch, enjoying some kind of most excellent Italian cuisine, my haze lifts, my mind snaps to full attention, and I look around table. I’m in a dirty, sweaty T-shirt and Levi’s, surrounded by guys in suits, in a place full of similarly stylin’ folks, mowing giant prawns wrapped in Prosciutto while women walk around the tables in the finest Victoria’s Secret undies.
I realized I didn’t belong, but was damn happy to be there!
When the father of a good friend died, I went to the funeral. It was held at the so-called Mussolini church. It was built in the 20s and the ceiling had a really large mural showing the dictator riding a white horse. It was a fine painting and nobody quite had the nerve to suggest destroying it. The other odd (to me) thing about the experience was being in a house of worship bareheaded.
I went to a Catholic elementary school, and there was a Jewish kid in my class (his parents thought it was a better school than their local public school). He got a pass from anything religiously oriented.
I’m used to mixed groups, so I haven’t really felt like a fish out of water much. I’ve went to a backyard BBQ where everybody else was African American, and I was the only white person. No problem. I didn’t care for the Faygo Red Pop, though. I was more on edge at a Mormon wedding reception. First, nothing but crappy punch and cake. Second, everybody was weirdly zombie-like…and on no alcohol. It was really creepy.
I used to live with a bunch of Chinese roommates in grad school so there were numerous social occasions where I was the only non-Chinese person there. But they were all very nice and I never felt particularly uncomfortable, although sometimes they would forget I was there and switch to talking Chinese, but at those points I just enjoyed the food.
The only time I was made to feel uncomfortable about my race (yay white privilege) was one time when my wife and I went to a local Mexican Restaurant to get some take out, and while we were waiting at a table for our order a large Latino man came to our table, noted that we weren’t Hispanic, and informed us that this restaurant was a bit of a dive and wouldn’t we rather dine at one of the many other fine Mexican restaurants in the area.
We had a number of Jewish kids at my Catholic high school. More conspicuous were the Sikhs.