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The American Gay Bar Is Down, But Don’t Count It Out Just Yet

Reports on the state of gay bars in the U.S. vary wildly, from merely disastrous to full-on dire and doomed.

The American Gay Bar Is Down, But Don’t Count It Out Just Yet
Attendees gather during a Stonewall Inn 50th anniversary commemoration rally in New York, U.S. (Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- Fifty years ago this week, a riot took place at the Stonewall Inn as police raided the New York City gay bar. That story is told so often that Stonewall is enshrined as a national monument and regarded as the birthplace of the modern gay-rights movement.

What goes less mentioned is that Stonewall was just two years old at the time, and when the first pride parade—then known as the Christopher Street Liberation Day March—was held the following year, the bar had already shut down after timidly limiting its drink selection to juices. The space became a bagel shop, a Chinese restaurant, and a shoe store until its current iteration opened in 1990. As much as Stonewall galvanized the gay community, that community navigated both its 1970s heyday and the apocalyptic throes of the AIDS crisis without it. Pride finds a way.

Today, as LGBTQ America reaches unprecedented levels of acceptance, devaluation and violence persists, especially against transgender individuals, and particularly those of color; in 2019 alone there have been 11 violent murders, by the Human Rights Campaign’s count. Concurrently, the gay community’s most common safe space—the gay bar—is in decline.

Reports on the state of gay bars nationwide vary wildly, from merely disastrous to full-on dire and doomed. In 1976 there were 2,500 gay bars in the U.S., according to a history of the Stonewall riots; today there are fewer than 1,400 worldwide, according to Damron, a gay travel guide. In 1973, the year the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders and before the advent of HIV/AIDS, there were 118 gay bars in San Francisco; today there are fewer than 30—and only one them is a lesbian bar. Far more social media posts are shared outside of the Stonewall Inn than inside it, despite visits from Madonna, Taylor Swift, and Joe Biden.

The American Gay Bar Is Down, But Don’t Count It Out Just Yet

Blame mostly gets shoveled onto the rise of dating and hookup apps epitomized by Grindr, the market leader for audience engagement. The reality, as always, is more complicated.

Gay identity at its core is about who you have relationships and sex with, so bars have traditionally been the only havens for LGBTQ people to flirt openly, reliably, and safely. (Meeting your future spouse at the grocery store was not ever likely to happen.) So most of gay history has been a fight for sexual identity; it wasn’t until 2003 that a Supreme Court decision legalized sodomy nationwide. Now as LGBTQ identity expands, their traditional spaces are in flux, too. A new generation of next-wave activists are learning to assert something more broad and brash: social identity.

John Moore, the owner of the Saloon in Minneapolis since 1980, conducts weekly meetings about the “tribal spirituality” of the LGBTQ community. “We were told for decades that we were just sexual beings,” he says. “We’re just now taking the first steps towards our fuller humanity. It’s an exciting time.”

The American Gay Bar Is Down, But Don’t Count It Out Just Yet

Alternatives to the Bar

“Circuit parties [gay raves] and parades are thriving. Grindr isn’t killing them and Grindr isn’t killing gay bars. Boredom is,” posits Daniel Nardicio, an impresario of gay nightlife in New York who also runs his own gay bar and cabaret, Club Cumming, with actor Alan Cumming. “Ooh, you have drag bingo? Drag brunch? Drag karaoke? Stop. Give me something new, not just a rainbow on a bottle of Absolut or a retirement home cliché hosted by a drag queen.”

Even as gay bars have ridden the acclaimed historic visibility of television shows including RuPaul’s Drag Race and Pose, they’ve merely become “vessels for viewing parties” of those shows, adds Nardicio.

Gay bars are “stuck,” he says, and he has a theory about why.

“AIDS killed lots of artists and free spirits, but it also killed people who would’ve grown up to become mentors to everyone under 50 now. We grew up alone and without that sense of connection across generations. We lost them, and we’ve paid the price by slipping from the creative class to the consumer class. We went from radical to basic.” “Basic,” according to the Urban Dictionary of American slang, is one “only interested in things mainstream, popular, and trending.” Consider how derivative 2019 queer culture seems compared with 1967. Gay liberation pulls its punches.

The American Gay Bar Is Down, But Don’t Count It Out Just Yet

What Nardicio is complaining about is a sameness across gay saloons, which is an odd problem for a community that is countercultural by its very definition. It makes the venues less exciting, amplifying a greater generational divide. Older gays who were more ostracized from mainstream America might not feel at home in simulacrums of it, while younger gays may be unwilling inheritors of gay culture’s antiquating heirlooms. In a heightened example of this conventional queerness, No Bar opened this year as a link in a glossy hotel chain. Vogue covered its debut.

Clint Jones, owner of Phoenix, a 24-hour, gritty, fetish-forward gay bar in New Orleans, agrees about the like-mindedness of most gay bargoers: “They just drink vodka and soda or tequila and soda. Maybe bourbon and coke. You know what these millennials thought up? Puppy parties. They dress like puppies and have masters or owners. That’s the best they can do: being adorable, needy centers of attention.”

“When we opened 10 years ago, layout was all about drink rails for cruising,” says Bob Fluet, a co-owner of Boxers, in reference to stand-and-stare strategies of gay hookup culture. “Now it’s tables. People come in groups of 10. They bring their parents.” The sports-bar chain has even been dubbed “the gay Hooters” by the New York Times.

Shouldn’t Gay Bars Be Thriving?

The LGBTQ community certainly has plenty of economic power to flex. The combined purchasing—and boycotting—strength of bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender adults in the U.S. hovers at about $1 trillion. The untapped market is considerable: About 4.5 percent of the U.S. population is gay, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, but only 0.8 percent of U.S. bars are gay.

“This is the price of inclusivity,” says Jonathan Lovitz, a spokesman for the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce. “There’s not a market or a demand for a place like the Stonewall Inn the way there was before the Stonewall riots.” Fifty years will do that.

The American Gay Bar Is Down, But Don’t Count It Out Just Yet

Changing Urban Centers

“The Castro isn’t what it was. The Village isn’t what it was. WeHo [West Hollywood], which has held onto its power the most, is even distanced from a lot of where the community is going,” says ethnographer Nisarg Mehta, citing traditionally gay areas in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, respectively. Even newish gay neighborhoods—Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen or Seattle’s White Center—are already vestigial echoes of what anthropologists call the less-diffuse Great Gay Migration, a bygone era when gays felt the acute need to live shoulder-to-shoulder. (Although walking the so-called “gayborhood” streets on a balmy Friday night, the illusion of togetherness asserts itself convincingly.)

Mehta wrote his master’s thesis at the University of Chicago on Chicago’s gay bar scene, centered around Wrigleyville, aka Boystown. He points to what he calls “place-making,” or imbuing anywhere with the cultural capital of a gay bar. Gay bars have long been problematic in their fusion of gay identity and intoxication; millennials and Gen Z are both drinking less. And so a Chicago outpost of Jerry’s, a sandwich-shop chain, becomes a de facto lesbian bar on Wednesday nights, says Mehta. Or there’s Annie’s, a 70-year-old diner favored by gays in Washington that was anointed an “American Classic” this year by the James Beard Foundation.

“We’re still a long way from seeing Dallas or Asheville on their own terms in their own queerness, but we’re getting there,” he says.

The American Gay Bar Is Down, But Don’t Count It Out Just Yet

In Asheville, N.C., Casey Campfield, who owns The Crow & Quill and identifies as queer, flags gay bars’ identity crisis on top of their economic crises. “Everyone who works at the Crow is queer. Half the staff is trans. We have drag nights occasionally, but hardly anyone refers to this as a gay bar. The clientele is well mixed,” he says. “I think all the queers in town are relieved to feel safe enough to have options for their nightlife.” In an LGBTQ world, bars that are merely gay can seem anachronistic.

And as much as love is love is love, humans are humans and gay bars aren’t immune to their own bigotry. In 2017 the Philadelphia Commission on Human Rights identified 11 local gay bars for fostering “preferable environments for white, cisgender male patrons.” In May, Progress, a gay bar in Chicago, was broadly criticized for racism after it banned rap music as part of its newfound mission “to promote a positive, happy, energetic, and most importantly … a FUN vibe,” according to an email it sent widely. More plainly, Ryan Lee, a columnist at the gay publication Georgia Voice, recently called Atlanta’s gay scene “100% segregated.”

In contrast to broad LGBTQ acceptance by the mainstream, queer culture itself has fought and fractured internally largely along racial lines. The idea of a united gay community in 2019 is as much a fantasy as there ever was for a demographic group whose sole uniting factor is sexual preference and societal marginalization—not, say, age, creed, career, class, color, health, or regionalism, the identities around which Americans often coalesce. So as gay bars embrace bachelorettes and other straight audiences even as they tell trans women they “aren’t real women,” or assert that centering blackness too much is “not good for the businesses,” there is actually more of a need for more vulnerable members of the queer spectrum to have spaces that feel safe to them, and exclusively for them.

The American Gay Bar Is Down, But Don’t Count It Out Just Yet

Outside the Major Cities

Gay communities in midsize cities and rural areas are emerging from the enormous cultural shadows of Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco (of a list of 47 dead and dying gay bars compiled by the Advocate in 2018, 37 were in those cities, and 8 of the remaining 10 were in Washington). Gay bars’ daring vanguard is now driven less by big-city density and more by small-town urgency.

These regional gay bars have a certain circle of life. When the Wayward Lamb, the only one in Eugene, Ore., closed in February last year, its replacement, Spectrum, was registered by mid-April as a business. In St. Paul, Minn., the closure of Town House was met with the opening of R Lounge. In Reno, Nev., Splash replaced Tronix and Faces NV, an offshoot of a Sacramento mainstay, opened downtown. And the Back Door, in Bloomington, Ind., opened in 2016 as the state’s infamously anti-gay governor, Mike Pence, became the country’s vice president. By year’s end, three gay bars will have opened in Seattle since January 2018. Even tiny Lima, Ohio, (population 40,000) has its own gay bar, called Somewhere. The whole point of Syracuse Guerrilla Gay Bar, an LGBTQ meetup group based in Syracuse, N.Y., is that the entire city should be a safe and accepting space for queer life.

The American Gay Bar Is Down, But Don’t Count It Out Just Yet

The Age of Instagram

Some gay bar owners think that social media and the apps have actually helped their businesses survive.

“Grindr has been great for gay bars,” says Moore, the Minneapolis bar owner. “Ten years ago, if you’d turned on the lights at the Saloon, we’d be an S&M spot—lots of ‘standing and modeling.’ Everyone was cruising, showing up just for sex. It was creepy, uncomfortable, not quite an addiction, but a little too much of a focus.” Grindr has cut that out, because the searching-for-sex aspect of gay life happens more outside of bars now. “It’s a lot friendlier now, a lot more of a Cheers community.”

“And as for young people hypnotized by their phones,” Moore says, “they’re doing their best with the life they were given. In the ’90s, you might see an older gentleman who seemed grouchy or rude, but you had to remember they had seen lots of their friends die and they were doing the best they could. Older gays deserve our empathy for surviving AIDS. Younger gays deserve our empathy for surviving Facebook.”

The American Gay Bar Is Down, But Don’t Count It Out Just Yet

The most popular gay bar in the country, as measured by Gravy Analytics, a location-based marketing platform, is Parliament House in Orlando, a 10-minute drive from Pulse, the gay nightclub where the second-deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. occurred in 2016, killing 49 and wounding 53. And yet marginalized communities—the shooting happened on Latin Night—still need places to come together, safely and joyfully. The phrase “It gets better” wasn’t coined to gloat about progress, rather to offer hope amid despair.

“Dance fused us, magical and cleansing. We were all in a swirl of color and light. It was like a rainbow,” wrote Gilbert Baker, who created the rainbow pride flag in 1978 as part of an art collective in San Francisco, about how gay bars inspired the design.

Fifty years after gay bars and queer America found their power, they’re now grappling with something far more interesting: their purpose.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Justin Ocean at jocean1@bloomberg.net, Chris Rovzar

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.