Tag: geography
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Gay bar writings
Since 2015 I have been researching and writing on the role of gay bars in urban processes including gentrification, LGBTQ+ community development, and social inequality. This forms the basis of my forthcoming book with Redwood Press, Who Needs Gay Bars? It is based on interviews with more than 130 gay bar owners and managers, site…
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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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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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Road Note 1: Virginias are for Lovers
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…
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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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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, queer futurities?
What if the paucity of lesbian bars represented not a present failure or a return to a bad gay past, but the future of queer sociality for everyone? This was the challenge posed by Lyndsey Beutin when she, Crystal Biruk and I hung out a couple weeks ago. When San Francisco’s Lexington Club closed in…
Greggor Mattson 