Tag: gay bars
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Who Needs Gay Bars? Summer 2017 Tour, Updated
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,…
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Learning from Pulse, Listening to Latinx Queers
[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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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A Christmas Wreath for the Phoenix Cabaret
Two sides of the Phoenix cabaret in 2012 via Google Streetview, wreath visible above main door, R. For 5 years after it closed in 2011, a wreath adorned what used to be The Phoenix Cabaret and Embers Disco in Birmingham, Alabama. Don’t ask why I was looking up closed gay bars in a…
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Gay bar holiday jukebox playlist
Holidays have always been important in gay bars, and most gay bars go all-out on decorations that change more frequently than the seasons. The Hawk’s crucifix is permanent, however, above the work schedules and sticky notes that change as often as the garlands and ribbons in the rafters.
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Chapter: #aftermarriage Systemic violence and pulse; Lesbian Bars, Gay Places, Queer Futures?
N.B. The panel presentation Systemic Violence: Reflections on the Pulse nightlife massacre became a chapter in After Marriage. Presented at the CLAGS After Marriage conference today in NYC on a panel about Pulse and about Lesbian Bars, Queer Futures. My slideshow is here.
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Digital project: Mapping lost lesbian bars, 2006-2016
I just finished the first draft of a map of all lesbian bars in the U.S. and Canada that closed from 2006 until now. It may not be the most depressing map of the 21st century, but it is seriously sobering: The Map depicts 93 100 addresses (as of 9/27/2016) that no longer are lesbian…
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Lesbian bar closures, Lost Womyn’s Space
I’ve been reading the blog Lost Womyn’s Space for a while now, but it’s proving invaluable to track what the author ruefully calls “the Great Lesbian Bar Die Off.” You can read about my interest in lesbian bars here. It’s impossible to contact the author: the blog is anonymous, there’s no “About” section, and comments…
Greggor Mattson 