Gay bars are under threat but not from the obvious attackers

The disappearance of gay bars and clubs is an unhappy side-effect of a far more cheering trend

Daphne Sumtimez, a drag queen, dances so vigorously that it looks as if she might bring the low-slung ceiling down. It is the last Friday night of This N That, a gay dive in Brooklyn, New York. Essentially a long brick tunnel, the venue has a bar running down one side and disintegrating leather banquettes along the other. Covered in sparkle, Daphne gyrates and does the splits; her diamante belt flies off, to the delight of her audience. A young man in a black skirt and cracked leather boots pounds the stage with appreciation. “We’re here, we’re queer and that’s what makes us family,” she sings in elegy for This N That over music from “Beauty and the Beast”. A fairy tale is ending.

Punters take their final photos of the wall beside the stage, where a mural depicts skyscrapers, warehouses, robots, a rainbow, a walking pizza slice and a joyful unicorn. “It’s gonna be turned into stores,” says one regular, in the smelly toilets where all genders pee together. “I heard a sports bar,” sighs another.

For its regulars This N That was its own particular place; one in which to dance, hook up and be as outrageously camp as possible. But the experience of going out to a gay bar is an almost universal one for homosexual men and lesbians in the rich world. They are places that contain memories of first kisses or heart break; they are where people, often persecuted or misunderstood by others, made friends and felt accepted at last. As such, they became central points for gay people. This is why, when 49 people were killed by a homophobic shooter at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando in June 2016, it carried such an emotional burden. Thousands of people conducted vigils in their local gay bars in America, Britain and elsewhere. Outside the Admiral Duncan pub in London’s Soho, where a nail bomb killed three people in 1999, hundreds of people came together as they had that night, waving rainbow flags and holding one another in grief.

And yet despite their importance, gay bars are vanishing. A month before Daphne wiggled her hips at This N That the aptly-named One Last Shag, also in Brooklyn, shut down. Dozens of others have disappeared from cities over the past decade. At least 16 bars closed in London between 2014 and 2015, though the number is likely to be higher. The disappearance of these bars and clubs is upsetting to some past and present patrons. But their decline also points to a larger, and overwhelmingly positive, trend.

Places in which gay men and women can gather have long existed in different shapes and forms over the centuries. In 18th-century London taverns known as “molly houses” were places in which men could meet, dress in women’s clothes and conduct “marriage ceremonies” (although they were not technically brothels, sex often took place in them too). In the Weimar Berlin of the 1920s freewheeling transvestite shows, colourful drag revues and bars for men and women all jostled for attention, buoyed by a steady influx of foreigners escaping persecution elsewhere. In Paris gay life flourished in the decadence of Montmartre, with its Moulin Rouge cabaret and rows of smoky cafés and bars.

In America these bars popped up more and more after the second world war, during which millions of people, many of whom were from small towns or suburbs, were posted in big cities such as New York and San Francisco. When the war ended many gay people wanted to stay together. This is partly how homosexual districts, such as the Castro in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York, developed. In these neighbourhoods gays and lesbians had their own restaurants, book shops, church groups and newspapers.

Along with being places to hook up, the bars in these districts also let gay people try on new identities, says Jim Downs, a historian at Connecticut College who has written about the gay-liberation movement. Some men went to bars dressed as police officers or leather-clad motor bikers. Others preferred the “ballroom scene”, in which they wore extravagant dresses and competed to throw the wittiest put-downs at each other. Lesbians could be “butch dykes” or “femmes”. Hairy, burly men called themselves “bears”. Such subcultures still exist (“for bears and their admirers”, reads the slogan for XXL, a London nightclub).

More important, these bars were where many gay people finally felt they belonged. Andrew Solomon, a writer and psychology lecturer, writes about “vertical” and “horizontal” identities in his book, “Far From the Tree”. Vertical identities are those that come directly from one’s parents, such as ethnicity and nationality. Horizontal ones — such as sexuality — may put a child at odds with his family. For many homosexuals, the experience of going to a gay bar for the first time was a nerve-racking one, but also one in which they finally felt accepted, finding those with the same horizontal identity.

“This place got me through the most difficult part of the past eight years,” says Leigh Gregory, a patron of London’s Queen’s Head pub, which closed in September 2016. In Washington, DC, Judy Stevens, who has worked in gay bars for 50 years, “sits with the drinker when business is slow and you become friends,” says Victor Hicks, a long-time patron of bars in the city. “My partner and I actually went to her for her blessing when we first started dating. There was no one else’s approval we cared about above hers.”

Radical drinking

It is this sense of community that drew members of the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church together for their weekly worship, held at the Upstairs Lounge, a gay bar, in New Orleans every Sunday in the early 1970s. They gathered there to pray and sing together. On June 24th 1973, an arson attack on their congregation consumed 32 lives, including those of the assistant pastor and his boyfriend. Their death pose, frozen by the flames, showed them cradling each other.

From the start, the existence of these bars was precarious. Police raids were common: in Paris in 1967 412 men were arrested in one month. But rather than stop patronising them, many gay people used these bars as a space for resistance. “NOW is the time to fight. The issue is CIVIL RIGHTS”, shouted the text on a flyer that was distributed in bars in Los Angeles in 1952, to drum up support for Dale Jennings, a 35-year-old man who had been charged with soliciting sex from a plain-clothed police officer in a toilet. In 1966 a “sip-in” took place at Julius, a bar in New York’s West Village, in protest at a rule prohibiting bartenders from serving so-called “disorderly” clients. The most famous incident took place at the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969, when its patrons (including Stormé DeLavarie, a butch lesbian from New Orleans who performed as a drag king) fought back against a police raid. The protest lasted for six days and sparked the start of the modern gay-liberation movement in America, which led to the repealing of homophobic laws and, eventually, to same-sex marriage.

In the rich world it is no longer raids that threaten gay bars; the biggest problem facing most is rent. These places are often in scruffier parts of cities. As cities become wealthier, and as pressure on space intensifies, they are squeezed out. In Brooklyn the Starlite Lounge, which had been open since the 1950s, faced a rent rise in 2010. The managers were forced to close despite a campaign to save it. Today the building is occupied by a local deli, the owner of which also says that his rent has become too steep. In London the Candy Bar, a lesbian venue, closed in 2014 after two decades of serving drinks to women in a dark, rather dingy space when its landlord increased the rent. In an ironic twist, the bar is now a lap-dancing club.

Another pressure is increased competition in the hook-up trade. Technology means like-minded people are just a tap away more or less wherever you are: mobile-phone apps such as Grindr for men and Her for women have eliminated much of the need to lock eyes across a crowded room. Instead potential partners can be found while at home or in the lunch-break at work by “swiping” to find people nearby. Some 2m men use Grindr globally. The app allows them to see and talk to other men who are online nearby, to either forge relationships or have casual sex. Other apps allow people to search for people in other countries, suddenly making the gay bar global. “The efficiency is unparalleled,” boasts Robyn Exton, the founder of Her, which has 1.5m users.

“We’re here, we’re queer and that’s what makes us family.”

But perhaps the biggest reason gay bars are disappearing is because of increased acceptance of homosexuality in the rich world. According to a study in September from Pew Research Centre, an American think-tank, 87% of those asked knew someone who was gay or a lesbian. One in five American adults say their views on homosexuality have changed over the past five years (most have become more accepting). Similarly in Britain, views on homosexuality have become markedly more tolerant. This means that many gay men and women, particularly youngsters, do not feel the need to congregate in one spot. In big cities such as London or New York they can display affection in many bars and pubs, while they frequently live in areas of cities that are more diverse. According to research by Amy Spring, a sociologist at Georgia State University, who looked at 100 American towns between 2000 and 2010, the vast majority of gay men (87%) and lesbians (93%) living with partners now live in neighbourhoods where gay and straight people increasingly live side by side.

This does not make the disappearance of gay bars in the West any less painful. Indeed, many gay people are trying to fight the trend. In 2015 campaigners managed to save the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, a former Victorian music hall in London which hosts drag shows and cabaret nights, from demolition by getting the building listed as a heritage site. Similarly in San Francisco patrons of The Stud Bar formed a co-operative to raise money to secure the lease, after its rent increased 150% earlier this year. Many European cities are now appointing “night mayors” to try to prevent music venues, clubs and bars (both gay and straight) from closing in cities such as London and Amsterdam.

And while these places close down in the rich world, they remain as important as ever in the developing world. In Kampala, the capital of Uganda, where homosexuality is illegal, a gay club night takes place at a particular restaurant every Sunday evening. “We dress up, cross dress, dance, dance, dance,” says Frank Mugisha, a gay-rights activist. “But you wouldn’t know about it unless you knew someone who goes,” he adds. These places are facing many of the problems that gay bars in New York or London experienced four decades ago. In August the Ugandan police stormed a gay and transgender fashion show, beating the participants and locking them up in jail for a night. Similarly in Yaoundé in Cameroon, where homosexuality is also illegal, police officers surrounded Mistral Bar in October, holding the patrons inside for some time before arresting all of them.

That such seemingly ordinary bars — often rather scruffy, with peeling leather seats and the sodden smell of stale alcohol — can offer so much to their patrons is perhaps remarkable. But it is the other people in the room who make them special. Many remember their first experience of going into a gay bar with affection: “I was…visiting my [gay] uncle in New York,” says Stavros, a 24-year-old from London. “It got to 1am one night and he said, ‘Let’s go out’. It just blew my mind. It was the first time I saw guys kissing. It was more than I dreamed of.” Generations to come may not experience the same sense of release when they enter a gay bar, if they go into them at all. But, in the rich world, they are also less likely to feel alone.

This article first appeared in the Christmas double issue of The Economist.