Category: Who Needs Gay Bars?
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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, […]
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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 […]
Greggor Mattson, PhD 