Category: Who Needs Gay Bars?
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New data: gay bars and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.
This report is currently undergoing peer review but the preprint with data table is freely available at SocArxiv. Abstract: “What was the impact on gay bars of COVID-19 public closure orders? Gay bars were already quite vulnerable, retaining only 63.4% of their business listings from 2007 to 2019. Historic data from printed business guides were […]
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Chapter: The changing role of gay bars in American LGBTQ+ life
In Introducing the New Sexuality Studies 4th Edition, released June 2022. “Gay bars are iconic in part because they are the most common and accessible LGBTQ+ places, but they are in decline. About one third of gay bars closed in the 2010s, but new ones continued to open to serve their communities as one of […]
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Interview: Fox Market is Vermont’s 1st LGBTQ+ bar in 15 years. What took so long?
Erin Petenko interviewed me for a piece about Vermont’s newest LGBTQ+ bar-cum-grocery store, the first of that kind I’ve ever heard of, and for which I apparently said something about “skipping through the maple trees.”
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Interview: Cleveland’s gay bars fought to survive the pandemic. Will patrons return?
Peter Kusnic interviewed me for a very comprehensive look at the challenges facing Cleveland’s gay bars as the COVID-19 pandemic drags on.
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NPR conversation: Why Gay Bars Matter
On August 16th I was a guest on KERA’s program Think with Krys Boyd to discuss “Why Gay Bars Matter,” along with reporter Miguel Perez.
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Chapter: Update to “Style and the Value of Gay Nightlife: Homonormative Placemaking in San Francisco”
I updated my 2015 piece in Urban Studies for Christopher T. Connor and Daniel Okamura’s edited volume, The Gayborhood: From Sexual Liberation to Cosmopolitan Spectacle. “Reductionist conceptions of gay nightlife and the neighbourhoods they anchor have obscured their diversity amid claims of gentrification or displacement. The divergent trajectories of San Francisco’s three gay bar districts […]
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Article: Are gay bars closing? Some data.
My undergraduate research assistants and I built a dataset to try to figure out if, where, and why gay bars are closing. The first piece is short, snappy, and open access on Socius. It’s less easy to click to, but the piece has a lengthy methodological appendix that contains the data table and lots of […]
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Stonewall didn’t spark the gay rights movement
(Now a piece in JSTOR Daily, the blog of your favorite academic digital library) Stonewall was not the spark that ignited the gay rights movement, despite what you may hear during this year’s 50th anniversary commemorations. The story is well known: how a routine police raid of a mafia-owned gay bar in New York City […]
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Article: Small City Gay Bars, Big City Urbanism
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. Just presented at the Eastern Sociological Society in the Small Cities miniconference. The slides for my presentation are here. They detail the 9 ways that small city gay bars are different from […]
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Gay bar book project update
(updated Feb 17, 2018) Here’s what we think we know: Gay bars are disappearing and everybody already knows why. Gentrification is pushing them out of the neighborhoods they made hip, LGBT social acceptance has liberated their patrons to visit any venue they choose, and social media dating has eliminated their social function. Gay bars thus […]
Greggor Mattson, PhD 