Gay bar
patrons in Chicago -- and across the country -- have
decided they don't want the fact that they can't marry
rubbed in their faces on a Friday night.
In her column in the
Chicago Tribune,
writer Dawn Turner Trice says
that she's been to a handful of bachelorette parties in
Chicago that take place in gay bars so that creepy straight men
won't try to flirt with the bride and her posse. By the end
of the night and a few drinks, however, the demure bridesmaids
turn into "pelvis-trusting vamps."
Add that to the fact
that gay bar patrons in 48 states can't get legally married
and some bars -- including Chicago's Cocktails and
Sidetrack bars -- have decided to close off their
facilities to bachelorette parties.
"The women are a
hoot, and some can be just delightful," Cocktail's
owner Geno Zaharakis said in the column. "But because not
everybody can get married, watching them celebrate, it's
such a slap in the face. Prop. 8 just reopened the
wound."
Trice said she also
noticed that the women became so rowdy, they often became
emblematic of the very straight men they try to avoid.
"As the show got
under way at Circuit with a theatrical mist floating over the
audience," Trice wrote, "I asked reveler Blythe
Thomas whether, in general, she believed holding bachelorette
parties in gay bars was 'heterosexist,' or
insensitive."
"I never would
have thought about it like that watching a curtainlike screen
rise on four soon-to-be-nearly-naked dancers," Thomas
replied. "I could see how this could be frustrating to gay
men. Maybe it's something I'll think about next
time."