The State of the Gay Bar

Queer nightlife is full of dreams, which at their best improve waking life. Coiled within conventional hopes for an evening is a utopian vision of society. “No one man owns house / because house music is a universal language,” Chuck Roberts announced on Mr. Fingers’s legendary 1988 single “Can You Feel It,” virtually a summation of the egalitarian intentions of not just dance music but the queer spaces that nurtured it too. Yet the LGBTQ+ scene also reflects the inequalities of the world at large. Rich, white, cis-gendered males in city centers usually have more access to queer bars and clubs, and when such spaces move to neighborhoods that are working-class, non-white, or on the urban outskirts, they’re often portents of gentrification. House’s idealism can become real when night falls, but only in exceptional environs. And these days, our reverence for queer establishments might direct the hetero mainstream to their doorsteps. 

During the last decade, the legalization of same-sex marriage and an increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights has led to a sentimental wave, generated partially outside of the queer community, in support of LGBTQ+ nightlife. There’s been an unprecedented flurry of media attention to longtime pillars, such as Julius’, the oldest gay bar in New York City, which the likes of The New York Times previously seldom covered. Since then, the Times has mentioned Julius’ on more than 20 occasions, including one article that followed mayoral candidate Kathryn Garcia as she greeted prospective voters outside the West Village watering hole. The change was so sudden it was bewildering to patrons, yet enabling for Julius’s future: Once a homey dive with older male regulars lining its stools, Julius’ managed to retain this core of its identity while simultaneously expanding into a present in which gays bars aren’t inherently hotbeds of lust or shelters for the excluded. On any given night, you’re likely to see gay men accompanied by friends of varied sexual orientations and gender identities and tourists crowding the bar, trawling through the recommendations they found on the Internet.

This comparative success story is facilitated by the large political shoes that the tavern feels obliged to fill: It was, after all, a site for one of the gay rights movement’s earliest protests. Adjustment came more easily than it did for most gay bars, which are suffering. According to data drawn from the long-running Damron Men’s Travel Guide, for a study published by the sociologist Greggor Mattson in the journal Socius, 36.6 percent of these businesses closed between 2007 and 2019 in the United States. But the causes of such closures are not crystal-clear.

Suspect number one, unsurprisingly, is the Internet and the rise of hook-up apps, which have ostensibly made gay bars less important for finding sex and romance. Yet the relevant data is scant—it’s difficult to collect—and this proposition could be countered with a similarly anecdotal argument that gay bars have gotten a second wind in much the same way Julius’ has. Other signs of life are rarely discussed: For example, LGBTQ+ bars in the United States decreased by 15.9 percent during the pandemic, but they rebounded 10 percent since their nadir in 2021, with lesbian bars and establishments that serve both men and women actually increasing in number since pre-Covid levels. Queerness worldwide is currently in the process of recentering itself away from gay maledom, and our ideas about what constitutes a queer bar are moving in tandem. The culture isn’t dying—it’s changing: While gay bars have shrunk in abundance domestically and abroad, queer nightlife’s imagination has only continued to grow.

What lingers is the warm promise heard in “Can You Feel It,” a belief in idealized futures. Gay bars may have fallen short on their potential for inclusivity, but the possibility itself hangs on, floating in the ether, waiting for a home that will do justice to its enduring spirit of optimism.

In his new book Long Live Queer Nightlife: How The Closing of Gays Bars Sparked a Revolution, Amin Ghaziani flips the script on doom-and-gloom narratives. There’s no reason, he argues, to despair about a resourceful culture that keeps learning fresh ways to survive. His ethnography uses the death of gay bars as its starting point, but not as the basis of its research. Long Live Queer Nightlife concentrates on an edgier movement of queer parties: ephemeral events that take over unused buildings or existing clubs and usually cater to a wider crowd than the cis-gendered white guys who, in the estimation of Ghaziani and many of the 112 people he interviews, are vastly overrepresented in more permanent gay establishments. Nomadic club nights are hardly a novel development; today, though, they’re mountingly popular in urban areas across the planet.

Ghaziani himself is a gay man—a Pakistan-born, American-raised professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who previously wrote a book about the decline of the American “gayborhood.” For Long Live Queer Nightlife, he leaves these traditional havens in the US behind for a more international milieu, a broad and roving swath of London’s queer nightlife. His respondents encompass Londoners of different races, gender identities, sexual orientations, and (to a lesser degree—his interview pool skews young) ages. Most impressively, he creates a context in which their voices can coexist for their difference, which he accomplishes not by slipping into professorial dryness but through his exuberance and his unwillingness to condescend to his subjects.

The book feels like a satellite image of London at night, with far-flung parties gleaming mostly on the edges, bright nodes in a darkened expanse. Ghaziani renders a complex picture of how going out as a queer person is changing; his approach to the topic, at once intimate and meticulous, ultimately enables his own perspective to shine through. Refreshingly, Long Live Queer Nightlife refuses anguish—Ghaziani’s jubilation at the emergence of the new outweighs his sorrow at the molting of the old.

He precedes every chapter with an evocation of a queer party, a lively and diverse entrée to the analysis that follows: The festivities include Buttmitzvah, a queer Jewish party at the Troxy concert hall; the CAMPerVAN, which involves a group that travels around England in a literal trailer, claiming a traditional British style of working-class vacation for queers who hail from that background; the Cocoa Butter Club, a POC performance troupe that stages a show at a pop-up festival; and Gayzpacho, which cheekily celebrates Spanish LGBTQ+ heritage through flamenco, wrestling in a pool full of tomatoes, and drag queens dressed like the Virgin Mary. In these sections both the author and his readers are made participants, voyeurs, and sociological students of what allows these parties to persist (low overheads, flexible financial outlays, and a rugged, undaunted desire to fill the holes in existing nighttime recreation). He tells us how much the entry to each venue cost, while also describing the emotions these evenings elicited. “We seized the joy of being melanated,” he muses about his night seeing the Cocoa Butter Club, “Something that, as I walked across Waterloo Bridge back home and then down memory lane later that night, I realized has not always served me well.” 

Ghaziani fluidly weaves testimonies from interview subjects into his own narration, much of which involves how and why these folks have felt excluded from traditional gay bars—racism, femmephobia, dull commercialism, too many bad pop songs, and a general reorientation in this scene, thanks perhaps to its geographical centeredness and the changing economics of the inner city, toward serving the wealthy. At Buttmitzvah, he wonders if Jews feel offended by the party’s camp-ifying of everything from tefillin to bagels to the Exodus story. A friend reassures him: “It’s all about having fun! Not making fun!” Ghaziani navigates the system of codes that separates the playful from the offensive, shedding light on ways that people today own the intersections of their cultural experience. The book keeps the author himself in the shadows until about halfway through, when the narrative briefly focuses on his own life, a smart shift that also reinvigorates the text.