'I've been out for ten years, and nobody's ever said that to me.' 'I was at a bar the other night, when this guy started calling me a 'fucking queer,'' Jon Kelly, a burly 29-year-old real estate developer who moved to Williston four years ago, told me. Homophobia never lingers far from the surface. But the sorts of fleeting and-for the most part-one-on-one interactions they enable don't do much to break the overall sense of solitude. Online platforms like Grindr provide a means for some gay workers in the area to connect with one another. Same-sex relationships are often intensely private-if not wholly covert-affairs, and LGBT-friendly spaces remain exasperatingly limited. Attitudes are shifting, but the state's socially conservative heritage still looms large. 'That kind of puts a damper on relationships.'Īnd it leaves little time for gay men to build a community. 'You make money up here and you leave,' another gay worker, a 23-year-old who works for a company that rents and sells motors to drill wells, told me. When you're working in the fast-paced, physically exhausting oil economy, there's little time for romance. This is a sacrifice made by nearly all those who have flocked to find jobs in North Dakota's booming Bakken shale formation.
I'll never really know whether he was able to get time off or not, but when he told me he had to work, it seemed plausible enough.
