There were and still are bars for all kinds of specific groups or interests within the queer community. Provincetown, which turns into one of the gayest places on Earth every summer, enacts this diversity on a grander scale with themed weeks devoted to western dancing, women of color, bears, families, gay pilots, and so forth.
The heterogeneity can, at times, be a little dizzying. The London Eagle, for instance, has strayed far from its origins as a leather bar. But there was also a backlash to this cleaning up and commodification. One such London bar, Popstarz, held a special fascination for Lin. That night at Popstarz opened the door to the rest of his life. Every gay bar, wherever it might be, offers a kind of horizon of possibility.
There is a long tradition in queer letters of projecting desire onto the foreign. The late American writer Paul Monette, whose memoir Becoming a Man won the National Book Award in , described a one-night fling with an American sailor in a London apartment and the might-have-beens that rippled out from that one night.
Colonial literature was, of course, full of depictions of Arabs, Indians, Japanese, and others, in which queerness and racism collided. Nonetheless, most of us gay men lucky enough to travel probably have stories that capture this kind of imaginative desire. I lived in London between and while studying at the London School of Economics.
The room I rented was in the East London neighborhood Shoreditch, the same neighborhood, funnily enough, where Lin lived in those years. With a jolt of familiarity, I realized we went to the same bars, perhaps even on the same nights.
We might have known each other. In that year, I had my own one-night affair with an older man, a surgeon at a nearby hospital. My fling was only that, however, and like Monette I sometimes wondered what might have been. The thrill of going to Heaven in London or Berghain in Berlin is a visceral one. And the possibility is not just imaginary. I recall going out with a grad school acquaintance to one of the divier bars in East London one snoozy weekday evening.
I do not remember its name, but it is or was an old-school tavern with an eclectic clientele. That night it was quiet, just a few other people were there. But my acquaintance locked eyes with one of the other men there, a skinny, dark-haired twink. They left the bar together that night.
They are now married. Lin weaves queer pasts into his memories, revealing the ways in which history continues to resonate down into the present. Places where same-sex-desiring men gather have been around for a long time. The area is called the Adelphi, after a large, riverside housing development from the eighteenth century. Imperial Berlin evolved into a haven for queer people in the late nineteenth century, long before Isherwood ever chronicled the city.
In the United States, the s ushered in a period when queers and straights frequented the same bars in a sort of solidarity against Prohibition. George Chauncey, Jr. In California gay bars were only ruled legal in , with the California Supreme Court decision Stoumen v.
Lin mulls over those exclusions throughout Gay Bar. I remember arguing with bouncers to let female friends into clubs with me when I was a student. Many gay bars had racist door policies that also excluded women and trans people. And, once inside, a certain body fascism often reigned, privileging men who look, act, and dress a certain way.
Of course, Lin is hardly the first to point out the ways in which the modern gay community is predicated on exclusion. Gay Shame was one of the more visible ways in which the queer community, such as it was, fractured along political, economic, and social lines in the s and early s.
Similar to how Lin witnessed Gay Shame demonstrations, the graffiti aroused a certain discomfort. It was evident to me the damage the tech industry had done to the city. But it had not been some egalitarian paradise before. In the Castro, they were in their own way colonialist, displacing Irish Catholic families. Moreover, there are plenty of queer techies. I am friends with some of them, and it was never clear to me where they fit into that three-word catchphrase.
Nonetheless, gentrification is undoubtedly among the reasons gay bars are going under. As new communities move into the desirable parts of cities, including gay enclaves, old bars, cafes, and other businesses make way for luxury chains and third wave coffee shops. The bars that have been able to cater to their new, wealthier neighbors—at least the ones I know in Berlin and San Francisco—have thrived. Others have not. As we all become more comfortable with the idea that gender and sexual identities are fluid, demarcating communities based on them seems superfluous.
Even as Lin ponders the artificial and exclusive nature of gay bars, a melancholic air hangs over the work. It is clear that he feels a certain sorrow at their passing. 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 miss, more than any notion of community, the orbiting. Inevitably, they do. The advent of sexual identities in the modern era has been at once limiting and liberatory. Identity gave us queer people language with which to describe ourselves, to find commonality, to fight for rights. It led to the repeal of sodomy laws across the Western world and to the advent of marriage equality.
At the same time, these identities tell us how we should act in ways large and small. They tell us what we should like and who we should vote for. They tell us who is not like us, they narrow the range of sexual expression.
Even as we go there to feel the embrace of community, we often feel isolated and alone. It would be wrong to deny that, for many, they have been a refuge. 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. Yet, what might take the place of the gay bar is not clear. Queer people will undoubtedly still want to go out after the pandemic has passed, at any rate.
We will want to socialize, eat, drink, and flirt with strangers. I have no doubt that human sexuality will continue to express itself in a cacophony of desire.
Sexuality has a history and will continue to, long after humans have forgotten the name of Stonewall. No matter what takes the place of gay bars, however, I have no doubt that human sexuality will continue to express itself in a cacophony of desire.
At the same time, I am under no illusion that some utopia lies waiting. While the gay bar may be dying, and I mourn the loss of these places that have meant much to me, I do not take it as a sign of either progress or revanchism. Unfortunately, police reports and mainstream media coverage of a gay bar in proved to be extremely unreliable and hyperbolic, fueled mostly by pearl-clutching and fear-mongering rather than actual information.
We do know that it was quite the hotspot -- packed nearly every night. Men mingled with one another, some openly arriving in drag, with the occasional woman or prostitute mixed in. Even behind closed doors, the patrons and bar itself were subject to bullying and ignorant criticism from outside forces.
As anyone could have guessed, though, this was shortsighted, wildly arrogant, and hugely ineffective. Over the next several decades, gay and lesbian bars began to pop up all over the country, each one perhaps taking cue from those before it. These establishments would generally open and close with rather short lifespans. Despite their often short-lived nature, these early gay bars often served as hugely important battlegrounds in the fight for LGBTQ rights.
In response to this, the San Francisco Police Department began a campaign against the bar and its gay clientele. Just 15 years after the California Supreme Court ruling, on the opposite coast, another battle was brewing in America's largest city. In , the New York State Liquor Authority passed a law that prohibited serving alcoholic beverages to homosexuals. The Stonewall Inn, taken September The sign in the window reads: "We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the Village.
On June 28, police attempted to raid the Stonewall Inn once again, but quickly lost control of the situation. The result was two nights of rioting at the Inn and the surrounding street block, which led to national attention and the galvanization of LGBT people across the nation. Just two years after the Stonewall Riots, gay rights groups existed in every major American city, as well as Canada, Australia, and Europe.
Historian Adam Nagourney perhaps put it best, stating:. Throughout history, gay bars have been flash points for huge moments in the process of LGBT liberation. Whether you are a member of the LGBTQ community, work at a gay bar, are an ally in the industry, or if you plan on celebrating this June, just remember the bars and people who helped make it all possible.
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