Year: 2017

• May 24, 2017

  Regional gay bars as outposts

  [N.B. This piece became a peer-reviewed journal article in 2020, available here); it was City & Community’s fourth most downloaded article of 2021. Gay bars that are an hour or more away from another are special. They are the only physical place where LGBTQ people gather in public–often for regions that cross multiple states. For example, I spent…
• May 23, 2017

  Counting bars with Damron Travel Guides

  My data about the changes in the numbers of gay bars over time are based on Damron Travel Guides. These slim address books have been published by the same company since 1964 and under the same editor, Gina Gatta, since 1992. This stability and their national coverage makes them a unique resource in an era…
• March 20, 2017

  Oklahoma City bound

  If you want to understand gay life in America today, you need to go to a city with a historic gay neighborhood and thriving a womyn’s center, where gays won victories against police harassment of gay bars in 1969, where its corporate titans win Supreme Court cases, a city that has confronted the realities of…