Gay bar why we went out

Gay bars are, as anyone who tries to leave out in a homosexual fashion knows, disappearing for all sorts of reasons, most of which predate the pandemic: apps, rising rents, gender fluidity. For those who depart out in hunt of them, the fact of their closing can be quite sad. They are a theatre of gay experience, drawing men to a place where they can fulfil a dream – not, says Jeremy Atherton Lin, ‘to be who they’d always been, but who they wanted to be’. Lgbtq+ bars also carry a hallowed place in gay history. As Atherton Lin notes, ‘The label of a homosexual bar, Stonewall, provides the metonym for gay liberation.’

The phrase ‘gay bar’ covers many sorts of establishment, from 1990s hangouts like Rupert Street Bar in Soho (‘airy, glossy, continental. The style sent a obvious message: In here you won’t trap a disease’), to big black boxes such as Probe in Los Angeles (host to ‘a weekly party of happy hardcore’), to dark rooms (places ‘full of penises wherein each contains the strong possibility that it is, to use that old-fashioned queer initialism, tbh – to be had’). Then there are leather bars, kink bars for specific delights, piano bars for a sing-along. Atherton Lin proves himself a c