The death of the gay bar
February 23, 2021 7:21 PM   Subscribe

 
There's a heck of a lot to digest in this—and I haven't even read the book he's reviewing—but I feel very passionately about this (especially as fired off by the, I feel intentionally-provocative framing). Rather than going off on a rant :-) I will confine myself to doing two things.

First, I'll share this bit from the end of TFA:
As Obama said after the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, they are “a safe haven, a place to sing and dance, and most importantly, to be who you truly are.” “We go out,” Lin writes, “to be gay.”

At the same time, they are also places that inform us that to be gay is to like a specific kind of music, that enforce certain norms of beauty, that all too often exclude those not masculine enough, wealthy enough, or white enough. Even as we go there to feel the embrace of community, we often feel isolated and alone.

Gay bars may, indeed, be a dying breed. Should we mourn their passing?
And second, I will say:

Sure, every gay bar is outdated and problematic and exclusive and replaceable—except for mine.
posted by Zephyrial at 8:02 PM on February 23, 2021 [21 favorites]


There's so much in this piece and I'm not ready to process it all yet, but wanted to say great post and thank you for sharing it. I miss my gay bar terribly.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:27 PM on February 23, 2021 [1 favorite]


Also, definitely picking up Gay Bar - Why We Went Out on audiobook.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:29 PM on February 23, 2021


Having spent some time in (and living above) my local Eagle, I think that gay bars are not dying, they are just turning more specialty like Irish bars. The mainstreaming of Irish culture is probably a template for what is happening with gay culture. I just hope every red-blooded american wears a "kiss me I'm gay" t-shirt at least once per year.
posted by chuntered inelegantly from a sedentary position at 8:52 PM on February 23, 2021 [33 favorites]


To say nothing of lesbian bars--which have been dying for a very long time.

Contemplating a world without LGBTQ-focused bars makes me deeply, deeply sad. It is really nice to go somewhere where people do not assume I am straight. Even if I still feel like I don't belong--and I have never been to a LGBTQ-focused bar where I felt like I was cool enough to be there--it is still comforting to think "well, at least they don't think I'm straight." Being queer is not all that I am but it is an important part, and it is comforting to be somewhere where the unseen is seen.
posted by Anonymous at 8:55 PM on February 23, 2021


...they are just turning more specialty like Irish bars.

In Seattle, those were known as Fake Irish bars.They are mostly gone and thankfully forgotten. Oh, wait. We still seem to have an oversupply.
posted by y2karl at 9:02 PM on February 23, 2021 [2 favorites]


Some gay bars are trying to overcome the restrictions of Covid. The El Rio in San Francisco had several issues which closed it, but it's reopening, slowly.
posted by blob at 9:02 PM on February 23, 2021 [3 favorites]


(TW: Suicide.)

Beautiful essay, and I'm buying that book immediately.

I'm sure it speaks strongly to my age, class, and social status that I have missed gay bars during this pandemic more than any other public space. Doubly so to know that, epidemiologically, they will be one of the last things allowed to come back (for the few that manage to).

I recall, in high school, gazing longingly at a giant B-52's poster in my local record shop, and wishing aloud for a place where people actually wanted to dance together for fun. As a fat Jewish introverted boy growing up in a narrow Midwestern industrial town, it was a dream that felt too far out of reach.

A few years later, in late 1996, I was taken to my first gay bar by the first person I dared to call my boyfriend. The mainstream queer media of the time always showed young people bursting into these spaces, as if finally liberated from their cocoons of torment and silence. But, like all actual transformative experiences, it was terrifying. Whatever utopian dreams I had about this mythical planet where "52 Girls" was on constant rotation, this wasn't it. Everybody was so skinny and pretty and seemed to know one another and carried an air of degraded ironic sophistication. And, now that I was in a physical space where dancing was the currency, I found that I had no actual idea how to do it ... at least, not to the standard that they all were.

Within a few months, the boy was history, but the gay bar remained. And all through those next few pivotal years, it shaped - literally - my identity as a young adult gay man. (Alongside the gay bookstore, of which Boston had two, and which deserve other FPPs of their own.) Looking back, they were the best and the worst of lessons. The gay bars were an aspirational space for how I felt I should look. Within the first year, I'd shed most of my huskier frame. I changed the way I walked, adopting more of a swish to signal to other potential mates. I bleached out my hair and developed a gel addiction. I stopped wearing my glasses and started wearing more form-fitting clothing (now that I had a form to fit). My college shelf stereo now blared those awful "club mix" compilation CDs as often as Elvis Costello and The Fall. And oh, the dancing. Night after night, four to five times a week at the height. Entire galaxies of faces and acquaintances who didn't exist in broad daylight, except those few I'd run into at the free STD clinic.

It was the first time in my entire life I'd felt seen and heard. I didn't care how conditional it was. I was willing to keep myself within the confines of the subculture because it was far better than being alone in my room another night after two decades of waiting, waiting.

Buuuuuuut. As the article notes, gay bars can be a tremendous enforcer of unforgivingly rigorous cultural norms. It turns out that having one particular cultural platonic ideal seared into your brain at an impressionable age after a lifetime of rejection can have negative long-term repercussions. I never got that into drinking, which was a popular form of self-erasure among my friends, but I sure loved the rewards of restricting my eating. I've been in and out of disordered eating and body dysmorphia my entire life. (I learned the notion of "body fascism" from a young man who self-identified with that term - i.e., "I'm a body fascist" - and who later became the first person I ever knew to die by his own hand. There was no place too dark for those ideas to seep.) And oy vey, so much pain and conflict tied up in class and race and gender and desire. To witness every way a human being could be dehumanized, from fetishization to erasure and every grey area in between. So much of that was commensurate with mainstream white gay culture, both in and out of the clubs. But again, the bars functioned as highly regulated sites of cultural enforcement. I was just lucky that I could, here and there, with enough concentrated effort, fit into it from time to time.

It wasn't until I moved to LA in my 30s that I found a vibrant queer underground that Boston couldn't even scratch. I was endlessly fascinated by the city's multiple parallel queer histories and narratives. Plaza on Fairfax and Jewel's Catch One in Arlington Heights and Mustache Mondays at Crash Mansion and Silver Platter in MacArthur Park. The crowds became truly mixed, the looks got wilder, the nights got later. I found whole new communities, deeper friendships, and more fulfillment than I'd ever had as a younger person. Lord knows all the same issues persist, but there are more spaces that feel alive with possibility - and not with the same roll call of burdens they carried in my former life. Seeing more kinds of people having more kinds of fun, well ... it's the whole point, yes? I'm 44 now, and I hope I'll still be out in gay bars and queer spaces when I'm 80.

The young folks, it is interesting. I have an older-person outsider perspective on their habits and proclivities in the public sphere, but it's really not for me to say. I feel like I see more young folks just going out to have fun, no pressure, hooking up is for apps, just be with your friends. I sense less of the craving for, and possibility of, erotic charge that drove so much of our going-out in decades past. Whether that's good or bad, or even true, is outside my purview. As the talking matchbox said in that episode of The Young Ones, "Don't look at me, I'm irrelevant."
posted by mykescipark at 9:04 PM on February 23, 2021 [101 favorites]


Also, a rant: the article does not touch on the way these bars are dying. Maybe it is my resentment talking, but it seems like it is not from lack of interest by the LGBTQ+ community and more because of, well, a growing excess of interest by straight people. Straight cis women who travel in packs to these bars because they want to dance without being groped (which, OK, I understand) and they think of queer men as cute, fun pets (gross) and queer women as opportunities for experimentation (also gross). Then more recently (like the past decade) straight cis men have started to follow them, because they want to dance with the straight women and we are starting to reach a point in society where not all straight men are panicked by the idea of another man possibly hitting on them. And sometimes there's also this undertone of gawking, especially if a drag show is involved.

This is all reflective of a growing acceptance of the community--which is good! From the business owner and performer standpoint these are more dollars going into their pockets--also good! But it takes away the feeling of being seen that I mentioned in my comment above. I would not trade the acceptance and the livelihoods for that, but jeez one wants a space somewhere.
posted by Anonymous at 9:09 PM on February 23, 2021


I know of at least one closet case who was a stereotypical straight guy at a gay bar. At that I no longer judged straights at gay bars. Maybe we are all trying to figure things out.
posted by geoff. at 9:16 PM on February 23, 2021 [17 favorites]


sending endless love to Akbar, Big Chicks, Heaven, The Imperial, Cubbyhole, The Eagle, Sidetrack, Twin Peaks, Lone Star, all the other gay bars that have given me so many unforgettable nights with friends and strangers
posted by roger ackroyd at 9:59 PM on February 23, 2021 [6 favorites]


I'm one of those people who's never found himself at home in a gay bar. They don't go well with my particular brand of social anxiety. But I've been in the community enough to understand that these spaces play a crucial role in our communities, and losing them will change what it means to be LGBTQ+ in America.

So I think we should fight to keep them. But perhaps we should also start asking ourselves if these are the only centers for queer community that we need. Because of their nature, they do exclude a lot of people; people who don't drink, people who have difficulties with loud noises, and so on.

One thing that I've noticed that's coming along with the beginnings of trans acceptance is a renewal of the sense of joy in being LGBTQ+. There seems to be a movement towards being more open to different ways of thinking and different ways of being queer. It turns out that gender roles really do keep everyone from being themselves. I'm seeing a wave of warm, accepting, happy LGBTQ+ literature, movies, and music, where the creators are making positive inclusive stories about queer people and queer communities, and it would be amazing to see that reflected in a physical space.

I know the world has come a long way since I was a teenager trying to get into the No-Name Saloon (its actual name) as the single conduit between me and whatever reality gay people lived in. Now there are some places with youth centers and coffee shops and book stores and it's great that there are safer, more welcoming spaces in which to figure out what being gay means. But it still doesn't seem like enough.

Absolutely we should save the bars. But being LGBTQ+ means a lot of things now, to a lot of people, and not all of us feel like the bars are our space. It's frustrating to me that it seems like there are so many more possibilities for what queer spaces could be, and if we weren't stuck on that model, we might be able to create places where everyone could feel more included. A place, as mykescipark dreamed in front of a B-52s poster, "where people actually wanted to dance together for fun."

The pandemic we're living through is going to change how we think about socializing for a generation, at least. As long as we're re-thinking social spaces, let's put some serious thought into queer spaces, and the different ways in which our unique community needs to be supported.
posted by MrVisible at 10:06 PM on February 23, 2021 [22 favorites]


Gay bars can be interesting and powerful sites of worker exploitation because they get marginalized people to accept worse pay and working conditions than they would elsewhere thanks to the sense of community and belonging they offer. Working in a queer environment is huge, particularly for trans people who often really struggle with finding employment to begin with, let alone work in an environment that is comfortable and affirming. And queer people are very often unhoused or on the edge of being unhoused (e.g. estranged from parents and recently landed in town is common), etc. Someone historically minded in my bar’s union tracked down someone who organized at a different gay bar in SF in the 90s, and it was fascinating all of the parallels between the organizing efforts. So I have mixed feelings. I loved my neighborhood queer bar as a community space, but management turned predictably nasty after the staff first organized and then even more nasty when the union went public when COVID hit and made the organizing efforts more pressing. I suspect most other queer bars are powered by a similarly nasty and exploitative engine because, y’know, capitalism. Anyway, organize your workplace.
posted by Gymnopedist at 1:28 AM on February 24, 2021 [22 favorites]


The guy who owned the mixed/gay-friendly all ages club that I grew up going to, and later opened a 21+ gay club after the city shut down the first venue by changing city ordinances, recently made it pretty clear that he is a Blue Lives Matter type. A small part of my childhood died when I found out, but it was a good example of how a person who helped a certain part of the population (at minimum, by providing a place to belong in a small town for LGBTQIA people in their teen years and 20's) can remain blind to other issues and people.

I wouldn't be who I am without gay and gay-friendly clubs and bars, but it's true that some of them can be far from perfect.
posted by bootlegpop at 2:38 AM on February 24, 2021 [1 favorite]


Check it:

http://www.lastcallnola.org/


Last Call is a multiracial collective of queer artists, activists, and archivists. Drawn together by the closing of the last remaining dyke bar, Last Call creates innovative, multi-platform performances, events, and digital media that document and interpret neglected queer history, creating connections between those who lived this history and those who have much at stake if it is forgotten. We conjure up intergenerational gathering places where the movement for queer liberation is carried forward.

There are four interwoven components to Last Call: (1) a digital archive of full-length interviews; (2) a podcast series to cull these interviews into curated stories; (3) live performance that honors these stories; and (4) community events that bring together queer people across lines of race, class, gender-identity and generational difference. Last Call was founded by Rachel Lee, Sara Pic, and Bonnie Gabel. Last Call is co-directors are indee mitchell and Bonnie Gabel.

Last Call is thankful for the support of MAP Fund with funds from Creative Capital, Platforms Fund, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, The LGBT Community Center of New Orleans, Dancing Grounds, the Distillery at the Contemporary Arts Center, Alternate Roots, The Network of Ensemble Theaters and our community. Last Call is fiscally sponsored by The National Performance Network.
posted by eustatic at 3:32 AM on February 24, 2021 [9 favorites]


Big Chicks (if you mean the one in Chicago) just reopened! One of my dearest friends works there, go say hi!
posted by Lawn Beaver at 5:29 AM on February 24, 2021 [1 favorite]


The only place I have ever felt at home flirting/dancing with strangers is a lesbian bar. I am younger - mid 20s. The idea that we should just be okay with the demise of these spaces is fucking unfathomable to me. How the hell else am I supposed to meet people as a lesbian? Yes, apps, but for me its soooo much easier to just meet and talk to someone and just be among my people! I also feel this ridiculous imposter syndrome all the time when I'm there, even though I can be walking-stereotype levels of butch sometimes. They're not perfect, but I'm not done with them at all. Especially from a lesbian perspective.

There's so much I could say about the pure alienation of being a lesbian, masculine, and South Asian. Fucking zero spaces in the world are made for me and I have lots of complicated psychology about fitting in - being in a space where at least my gender and gender expression are not given a second look is huge for making me feel a little less like a Martian. Even though I get all these follow-up thoughts about how I'm awkward and I don't know how to flirt with people and I'm not a Real Lesbian because I don't have this robust community of exes and I feel Not Butch Enough....I'd rather be in a place that lets me get to that point than in a place where I can't even engage with that because there are so few opportunities to do so outside of there.

My experience of going to straight clubs/bars is that occasionally there's another queer woman there. This is probably COVID cabin fever/thirst talking but imagine trying to go out and find a low-effort hookup with a rando, and just *not being able to do that* because there's nowhere to meet anyone. We don't have Grindr. (We do have Lex but im still figuring out how to use it.) And whenever anyone talks about gay people, they're still mostly talking about gay men. Who do legitimately face an amount of violence i can barely wrap my head around. But yeah this is a long way of saying there's a certain level of erasure here, and with many articles about ~the community~.
posted by scruffy-looking nerfherder at 7:32 AM on February 24, 2021 [23 favorites]


The answer is yes.

Yes I mourn their passing.
posted by Dr. Curare at 7:44 AM on February 24, 2021 [1 favorite]


So I think we should fight to keep them. But perhaps we should also start asking ourselves if these are the only centers for queer community that we need. Because of their nature, they do exclude a lot of people; people who don't drink, people who have difficulties with loud noises, and so on.

Absolutely we should save the bars. But being LGBTQ+ means a lot of things now, to a lot of people, and not all of us feel like the bars are our space. It's frustrating to me that it seems like there are so many more possibilities for what queer spaces could be, and if we weren't stuck on that model, we might be able to create places where everyone could feel more included. A place, as mykescipark dreamed in front of a B-52s poster, "where people actually wanted to dance together for fun."

I haven't met anyone who thinks that gay bars are the only centers for queer communities that we need. The article is centering gay bars and that's okay, doesn't mean it's the only modality that matters, just the one that is the main focus of the article and the book. It's an urgent emergency - 37% of gay bars in the US closed between 20017 and 2019, before the pandemic even hit.

The only place I have ever felt at home flirting/dancing with strangers is a lesbian bar. I am younger - mid 20s. The idea that we should just be okay with the demise of these spaces is fucking unfathomable to me.

To say nothing of lesbian bars--which have been dying for a very long time.

Yeah I was absolutely shocked at the stat from the article that "In the entire country there are only fifteen lesbian bars left, a fact that spurred the creation of The Lesbian Bar Project in October of last year."

Fifteen. In the nation. Gods.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:23 AM on February 24, 2021 [6 favorites]




no mention of Grindr in this article, either? although it wasn't the bars that Grindr would have closed, necessarily.

not that I agree that "apps" or "millennials" kill "X," but that's usually the take in the press, because of the contemporaneous trend.

does anyone else feel like this review is some weird, pale echo of a series of articles that were written years ago that had a lot more insight?
posted by eustatic at 9:53 AM on February 24, 2021


Thanks for that, Lexica. I was texting with my queer sister re: the 15 lesbian bars remaining, and her reply was "it’s really sad. i hope there’ll be a resurgence of wlw spaces once we all figure out you don’t have to be transphobic to own a lesbian bar."
The SFGate article gives me hope that the increasing nuance of identity will translate into more inclusive spaces overall.
posted by lazaruslong at 9:54 AM on February 24, 2021 [4 favorites]


no mention of Grindr in this article, either? although it wasn't the bars that Grindr would have closed, necessarily.

not that I agree that "apps" or "millennials" kill "X," but that's usually the take in the press, because of the contemporaneous trend.

does anyone else feel like this review is some weird, pale echo of a series of articles that were written years ago that had a lot more insight?


It's literally in the subheadline:

"The pandemic may spell the end of many gay bars, but apps and increased acceptance for LGBTQ people meant most were already on the rocks. Should we mourn their passing?"

and in the article:

"Unsurprisingly, the pandemic has hastened these trends. Even before any of us knew what a coronavirus was, dating apps and the growing social acceptance of queerness had initiated gay bars’ global decline"
posted by lazaruslong at 9:55 AM on February 24, 2021


The Silicon Valley Metro alt-weekly published a good article on the history of San Jose's Watergarden bathhouse, which had just closed in the summer of 2020. It had been around since 1978, and was certainly a notable South Bay cultural landmark.
posted by JDC8 at 11:38 AM on February 24, 2021 [1 favorite]


The film Last Call at Maud's (available on Amazon prime and, I think, on Kanopy) is about the closing of a lesbian bar in San Francisco in 1989. And reportedly, the Lexington (San Francisco's last lesbian bar, which closed in 2015) opened in 1997 because there were no lesbian bars *in San Franciso* at that time, since Amelia's had closed in 1991. Queer women's bars have been a struggle for some time, even before apps--partly because women typically don't have the same level of income as men.
posted by needs more cowbell at 12:51 PM on February 24, 2021 [4 favorites]


I spent a lot of time in gay bars as a straight punk rock kid in the 80’s. We didn’t get carded and we didn’t get hassled for looking weird. None of us drank, we just wanted a place to be and dance and have fun.
posted by misterpatrick at 3:26 PM on February 24, 2021 [2 favorites]


[I]f Lin’s book does have an argument, it is that we have gotten the significance of the gay bar backwards: their magic is not in the ways that they foster community, but in the ways that they explode it. The best bring people of different classes, races, genders, and sexualities together, expanding the bounds of social possibility and the lines of identity and belonging. “I went out for the tension in the room,” Lin writes, “Perhaps you could call a gay bar a galaxy: we are held together but kept from colliding by a fine balance of momentum and gravity. I miss, more than any notion of community, the orbiting.”

Man, I really believed this for most of my life. And maybe it was true, maybe it still is true in some places. I love
a small town gay bar like few other things in this world, in part because it is much more likely to be a spot where very different people from very different circumstances are forced to mingle out of a lack of choice. Consumer choice, though, is a crazy thing. Now we have spaces that cater to niches of the queer pie, sometimes big and ditinct but often narrow and overlapping, and that just straight up dwindles the economic capacity for a bar to survive. And that's to say nothing of the social divisions between/among these spaces.

I met my ex-husband while I was working in a sex club, a bit like an American Berghain. We eventually moved in together, were parents together. The path from sex club staff to parent of three is a steep and lovable one, but... there weren't (aren't?) many social spaces for queer folks who have kids. Maybe this is more pronounced for gay dudes, in big gay cities, because there so much of the social scene is dominated by nightlife contexts that focus so much on the adult world that what's left in the community for families and kids can feel like scraps tossed out before closing. It was weird to feel that from the first person perspective, because I recognize that I'd have rolled my eyes at someone who'd said that when I still worked at the club. I probably did do that. Kids, I'd have said. These fucking gays and their kids.

The club closed last February, just before the pandemic. The owner saw the writing on the wall with the collapsing economy of gay bars and nightlife and cashed in. He owned the building, which he'd bought when the neighborhood was in rough shape in the 80s, and he made a mint.

The neighborhood itself now feels much more like a galaxy than the club ever did. Old and young, gay and everything else, old timers and newcomers, and people, loads and loads of people, just out on the street every day. The liasons that used to take place in the protected enclave of the club are now arranged safely and happily outside the club, in the airy bars and restaurants on the same street, in mixed company socializing out in public, via app. Some people lament the smells of stale poppers and a musty wooden sauna going the way of the dodo, becoming disentangled from common experience, but no one memorializes the broken glass from a bottle of poppers dropped on the slate floor at the sauna's point of entry.

To say nothing of lesbian bars--which have been dying for a very long time.

I live directly behind the last lesbian bar in San Francisco. It is my favorite place to be in the city--on the patio on sunny, warm days, inside on chilly nights when they light the fireplace. It is legitimately nothing special as a bar. The service is bad (i.e. great if you're a regular, good luck if you're not), the drinks are bad, it's falling apart and cluttered... and I wouldn't change a thing.

Alas, I wonder if it will survive. It has been closed most of the last year. I got to pop out onto the patio during the tiny window when it reopened before the December shriek of new cases, and although that will probably be my last time on that patio I'm grateful. All through 2020 I was worried that my last visit had been in February of last year. I got a little reprieve.

It's a lesbian bar, have no doubt, and it has survived by being a neighborhood bar in the purest sense. All are welcome, and all are assumed to know their place. Respect the people for whom the bar was born and still exists, but please have a drink together in merriment. I'm moving out of town, out of state, out of the country next week. I will think of this bar often.

Change is the only constant etc.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 5:00 PM on February 24, 2021 [5 favorites]


>never ... at home in a gay bar.... understand... these spaces play a crucial role in our communities ... Because of their nature, they do exclude a lot of people ...

Absolutely. And for those people, what is there? ? When the alternatives outside of bars are sleazy or dangerous? When a culture depends on booze to lubricate gathering? What are the choices for people who are non-drinkers or want to avoid potential violence or painfully-loud music?

There has to be a better way. The fading of bars may lead to more inclusive options.
posted by Twang at 5:06 PM on February 24, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm pretty sure I mentioned this before on the blue, but I can't resist with this post title.
Sorry if you've heard this before...

I grew up around Harrisburg PA, and across the river, in Enola was one of the biggest train yards on the east coast. Across the street from the railyard was the bar that all the manly men who worked the trains went to. Being overly patriotic and not too far away from the end of WWII, and being in Enola, the bar was named for the aircraft that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima- The Enola Gay Bar.

Nobody had a problem with this until the mid-70's, when the name caused misunderstandings.
posted by MtDewd at 5:18 PM on February 24, 2021 [4 favorites]


1A: What We’re Losing If More LGBTQ Nightlife Spaces Close, including Jeremy Atherton Lin as a guest.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:32 PM on February 24, 2021


Well Crap... Last call for Electric Six while it lasts.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:43 PM on February 24, 2021


The lesbian bar in my city closed down a long time ago, and I've occasionally been to one in other cities but never had a bar as a regular hangout. There are a few gay men's bars locally, and there's a queer bar in St. Paul that I like okay, but it's definitely got the invasion-of-cis-straight-people issue. I haven't felt like I had queer space to hang out in that wasn't someone's home since probably high school, when my friends and I had a regular spot in the back of a local queer café.
posted by bile and syntax at 7:17 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


We used to go to a lovely gay bar that charged a membership fee, which I realize is problematic in different ways, but did pretty much eliminate the bachelorette party problem.
posted by nakedmolerats at 3:47 PM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


Gay bars can be interesting and powerful sites of worker exploitation because they get marginalized people to accept worse pay and working conditions than they would elsewhere thanks to the sense of community and belonging they offer.

I've rewritten this comment like 3 times because out of everything here... this is what hooked me.

I have a whole lot of strong feelings about the importance of gay party spaces, gay nightlife, gay debauchery in an era of people constantly re-asking the same puritanical, regressive questions of "why aren't there more queer coffee shops instead of icky, sexualized, sin hives of bars full of booze and drugs?". And i especially say this as someone who found herself both in underground gay parties and in clubs.

But like... as someone who's also worked at those places, if we're gonna throw our weight into preserving them into the future -and i like, absolutely vehemently think we should-, this is something that we're gonna have to address real fucking soon.

Like, being one of the girls, having bounced in and out of the service industry all my life, and being a dj/producer i have a lottt of friends and chosen fam who have worked at these places. And every single time the subject comes up everyone ends up comparing stories of how these places have fucked us over, exploited us, and just pulled absolutely ridiculous "oh nnoooo are you KIDDING me?" shit. I've heard multiple "and then the whole staff besides one suck up walked out because the owners wouldn't address shit" stories, places changing hands multiple times in a decade, insane staff turnover bc of bullshit treatment... all of it. "I was fired after working a 24 hour shift during pride because i asked them to pay me what they owed me" type shit

So yea, save these places, but keep that. You know it's bad when i have multiple friends who still work in nightlife, but intentionally at "normal" bars.

And it really sucks because like i miss it. Who knows, i might even end up back there after covid in some way. Some of the coolest coworkers i've ever had were at those places. I loved the energy, i loved the nights where i'd end up sitting around having a kiki with the rest of the brain melted closing crew at 8am when there were after hours parties, i loved constantly running into friends and acquaintances and just feeling like i was surrounded by the right people. But like, fuck a lot of that shit lmao

The core of why this shit happens so easily is because its in the interest of petty bourg rich queers to flatten the community when it comes to race and class, and present a family vibe we're-all-in-this-together face. A lot of small business owners really overmilk this one, but holy shit does it run so rampant in this microcosm. Anyone who isn't white, and most trans women realize this isn't one big happy family... but goddamn do people who are trying to exploit people for their labor ride that one hard. And obviously not just in nightlife, but fuckkk is it bleak.

A good amount applies to any gay business that's branding itself as such too. Like, i've seen horrid shit go down and burn through entire rounds of staff and management the same way at... gay coffee shops. We're gonna have to demand a lot fucking better.

I could also go on a BIG rant about how as you said, this shit lands the hardest on the girls, very often with implicit "why aren't you groveling? it's not like anyone else will hire you" energy but that would be a way WAY longer comment.
posted by emptythought at 2:25 AM on February 28, 2021 [6 favorites]


...Being overly patriotic and not too far away from the end of WWII, and being in Enola, the bar was named for the aircraft that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima- The Enola Gay Bar.

Nobody had a problem with this until the mid-70's, when the name caused misunderstandings.


The name of the bowling alley near my hometown was the Gay Way Bowl -- it was painted pink for most of its existence and the nearest town was Fruitland, Idaho to boot.

The name came from a dance hall formerly on the same property but with all those coincidental details, it became a running bit on the Tonight Show in the 60s and 70s: Johnny Carson even called the owners up a couple of times.
posted by y2karl at 5:00 PM on March 2, 2021


I turned 21 at midnight on a Sunday in a gay bar in Little Rock, Arkansas that I'd been getting snuck into by my lesbian lady friends for months. It had the best dance floor in the state and maybe still does. My mom's mom had been taken there by her two gay male friends well before I even knew it existed. My mom had also been taken there by her gay guy friends. We all had a big laugh about how we'd all been on that dance floor with our friends. This was a long time before our friends could have gotten married, and also around the time a number of my and their friends were dying of AIDS. :-( We still danced in their honor. They had asked us to.

When I shouldn't have been there due to my age, my friends bought my drinks (I repaid them, of course.), we tipped all the various performers (pseudo-chippendales; drag queens and kings) very well, and I never caused trouble. What was nice is that it was safe. I never once felt in danger at all.

I walked up to the bar at a few minutes after midnight on my 21st, put my driver's license on the counter, and the bartender, who had seen me in there for months, said, "Happy Birthday, Sweetheart! Whatever you want is on me." He made me a fabulous drink, and I rode back to my friend's house in the hatchback of a car with the full moon shining down. Not because of the one drink, mind you, but because 21st birthday situation.

My point is that three generations of women in my family felt the love and the fun and the safety of this place with our friends.
posted by lilywing13 at 4:13 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


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