Think black walls, Bud Light, bearded men and perhaps a large wooden cross with cuffs dangling off.

It’s the closest thing gay men have to a global franchise. You can walk into one in many cities and know what you're in for, like a gay McDonalds.

“I would call the Eagle an idea. A concept that has spread,” said Dan Henderson, general manager of the Eagle Portland.

Over the years, he told me, he has become more curious of the history behind the name.

Curious myself, I set off to catalog every outpost I could find, and to try and make sense of this ad-hoc network of bars.

The first came in 1970, right after the Stonewall riots, when a longshoreman’s pub on Manhattan’s far west side was transformed from the Eagle Open Kitchen into a leather and cruising bar called the Eagle’s Nest.

A year after its New York founding, an outpost opened in Washington, DC. By 1981, not only had the bars moved west to California and Washington, they popped up in Munich and Amsterdam.

Over time, independent Eagle-branded bars opened in at least 59 cities. When one closes — or burns down — a new one frequently takes its place in the same city. In at least five instances, when one closed, a bar called The Eagle in Exile popped up to fill the void, itself a small tradition.

Most have evolved from a leather crowd to something more akin to a cruisy sports bar — though you probably won't find sports on the TV. You can still find men strutting around in a harness and chaps, but you'll more likely come across people in jeans and a t-shirt.

A selection of similarly themed posters from Eagles around the U.S.

What's in a name?

So why propagate the Eagle name specifically?

“It's an interesting question, but a tough one to answer,” said Gayle Rubin, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan.

“Eagles are the biggest diurnal predatory birds, and all that power and deadly equipment is easy to absorb into the semiotics of potency, strength and domination,” she said.

When I asked Alan Kachin, owner of the former Eagle bar in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., why he chose the name, he told me it was because of the manly connotation.

“Eagle Bars were and still are remembered as masculine meeting places. Therefore, Fort Lauderdale Eagle,” he said.

However, its history is diffuse, a casualty of its nature. Pegging the locations involved hunting down liquor licenses, emailing owners and comparing websites, which frequently list the locations of sister bars.

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Going online

Unsurprisingly, gay bars were early adopters of the Internet, and some Eagle websites go back to 1998. With the help of the WayBackMachine, I was able to peer back at parties, messages, drink specials and a lot of low-resolution flesh.

Many of the sites served, like the bars themselves, as community hubs. More than one hosted a guestbook where people chatted and left reviews. One site hosted photos of the patrons’ pets — among them cats and dogs named Foo Foo, Argus and Titan.

When the Eagle in Charlotte, N.C., shut down, the bar posted an outpouring of messages from regulars. “I can't begin to tell you how many people I now know because of visiting the Eagle,” said one man. “Thank you for some of the best years of my life.”

I put together an exhaustive list of cities, dates and names of Eagle bars. Each row has the date the first opened its doors to the date the last one turned out the lights, as well as the different names the bars went by.

Here all the cities that have current and former Eagles. How many have you been to? Do you spot a missing city? A wrong date? Please let me know: ken@thethrust.net.