Category: Who Needs Gay Bars?
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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…
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Gay bars in the Pacific Northwest
Home for the holidays, time for a few more interviews. Some summary stats calculated from the Damron Guides (regular caveats apply): The Portland area has the same number bar in 2017 than it did in 1997, meaning the city has bucked the national trend of losing 24% of its gay bars (there was one more…
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Centering Provincial Gay Bars
I’m giving this presentation at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference. It’s below. By the way, I don’t mean anything bad by the word provincial. I grew up provincial and I again live in the provinces, and I like it that way! The abstract is as follows: Our understandings of changes in gay bars are…
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Guest post: Stop Blaming Millennials For Killing gay Bars
Guest post by Tory Sparks Stop Blaming Millennials for Killing Gay Bars: Generational Absolutism in the Gay Community I was born in 1994. If you’d like to stop reading now because of that, there’s nothing I can do about that except to ask you to consider: why do you want to stop reading? If you’re…
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Straight men in gay bars approach me
“Man, have you been in there yet?,” asked the clean-shaven bro in polo shirt and Oakley sunglasses. “Not yet,” I replied from my perch outside Splash Bar Florida, where I’d been interviewing Tony Boswell, the owner, for the past hour as part of the Who Needs Gay Bar Tour? “Man, you gotta go in there,…
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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,…
Greggor Mattson 