Year: 2017
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Road Notes 6: Our Arkansas in Three Gay Bars, by Tory and Greggor
Northwest Arkansas contains all the contrasts and contradictions of other small city gay bars, isolated from gay neighborhoods but close to American landmarks. Fort Smith and Fayetteville are one hour apart, but their two gay clubs are entwined by more than their relative proximity in northwest Arkansas, home of Walmart’s international headquarters and the tiny,…
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Back home, for now
A short tally of what we accomplished so far this summer on the Who Needs Gay Bars Summer Tour: 5500 miles driven 53 gay bars visited, including: 31 formal interviews with bar owners or managers, 21 of whom ran outpost bars more than an hour from the next gay bar 17 ethnographic visits without…
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Road Notes 5: The Least-Gay Gay Bar?
“This is the least-gay gay bar,” claimed Matthew Heath-Fitzgerald, the owner of Fat Mary’s in McAlester, Oklahoma. The bar is in a former goat barn on a country road, next to the cemetery for the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, whose lights gleam across the fields. The other major employer is the Army ammunition plant at the…
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Guest Post: Surpassing Tex-pectations by Tory Sparks
In my imagination, Texas has always been 100% Republican, 100% Christian, 100% cowboy. When I decided to come to Texas on this trip, I told myself: I can handle anything, as long as it’s for research. When I’m a researcher, I am detached—I’m not really there, I am an observer, and everything is interesting because…
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Road Notes 4: Natchez on the Mississippi
I knew it was a long shot that the Under-the-Hill Saloon in Natchez, Mississippi would be a gay bar. It’s been listed in Damron’s since at least 2007, but there’s nothing on the internet to corroborate: none of its effusive Yelp reviews mention anything remotely queer. The town is a regional tourist destination chock-full of…
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Road Notes 3: Abbey of the Grand Palmetto
Also see The Who Needs Gay Bars? Tour parts One and Two. Club South 29 in Spartanburg, South Carolina is hard to find. It’s the only gay bar in the 10-county Upstate region of 1.4 million people. Like many other bars, they have no sign, their website is defunct, their Twitter inactive, and only during…
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Road Notes 2: Nothing Could be Finer
No gay bar road trip could be finer than to be in North Carolina AND Tennessee for leg two (Part 1 here): Dog is my co-pilot, but pictures of Blanche in the car don’t properly show off the Mardis Gras beads she got from DC’s Casa Ruby, the bilingual LGBT community center: Greensboro is a…
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Road Note 1: Virginias are for Lovers
The 2017 Who Needs Gay Bars Road Trip has begun, in West and East Virginia. Also, I may have received free sunglasses at DC Pride: The first bar on this leg of the tour was Vice Versa in West Virginia, the largest of the remaining five gay bars in the state. Co-owner Montaz Hazleton met his husband…
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Who Needs Gay Bars? Summer 2017 Tour, Updated
First published May 17. Gay bars are closing and there’s misleading agreement on why: gentrification, social networking apps like Grindr, and the rise in the social acceptance of gays and lesbians. Yet bars are closing fastest in the regional cities of Middle America, such as Cleveland or Birmingham, cities where gentrification is a pipe dream,…
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Learning from Pulse, Listening to Latinx Queers
[This piece is an excerpt from the book I’m writing on changes in gay bars–written as it was for print media, it has a works cited rather than hyperlinks.] In 2016, two gay bars became national monuments, one in the early hours of June the 12th in Orlando, Florida. The way we learned of the…
Greggor Mattson 