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 … More Guest Post: Surpassing Tex-pectations by Tory Sparks
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 … More Road Notes 4: Natchez on the Mississippi
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 … More Road Notes 3: Abbey of the Grand Palmetto
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 … More Road Notes 2: Nothing Could be Finer
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 … More Road Note 1: Virginias are for Lovers
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, … More Who Needs Gay Bars? Summer 2017 Tour, Updated
[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 … More Learning from Pulse, Listening to Latinx Queers
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 an evening watching the entertainers at Fort Wayne’s Babylon Nightclub in March 2017. As patrons were brought on stage to … More Regional gay bars as outposts
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 … More Counting bars with Damron Travel Guides
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 … More Oklahoma City bound
