Are gay bars still safe spaces, or are they straight people's playgrounds?

I had no idea when I entered the Blazing Saddle in Des Moines, Iowa, on a Friday night in 1997 that I was not just entering my first gay bar. I was discovering the fraught history of gay bars at a relatively safe time.

I had many worries as I entered the door and saw a narrow room packed with men. But I did not have to fear a squad of police would rush into the bar to push any man who appeared femme or who dared to touch another man up against the wall, pulling their hands behind their backs and snapping on handcuffs.

In the years since I stepped into my first gay bar, queer acceptance has dramatically increased, and more recent generations of queer people are welcomed and comfortable in a variety of public spaces. This increased acceptance raises questions of the role and importance of gay bars (and other queer spaces).

Do gay bars still matter?

A Haven for New Generations

I am ringing in 2025 at my favorite West Hollywood gay bar near Santa Monica Boulevard and Robertson, just around the corner from The Abbey. Soon, I chatted with a group of young people who told me they had driven down from Bakersfield because "we had to; there's nothing up there."

One of the young men in the group proudly shows me his ID. "He just turned 21," says his gal pal, "It's his first time in a club." I hug the boy, congratulate him, and then watch his jaw drop as a hot go-go dancer jumps onto a speaker. I give him money to tip the dancer. He smiles broadly, walking shyly up to the handsome clad in the bare minimum. A few minutes later, they asked me where they should go next. I tell them to cross Santa Monica and walk down until they find a place they like.

I hug them all as they leave and find myself reminded that despite the increased gender and sexual identity fluidity of recent generations, someone new is always coming out.

A Historical Perspective of Queer Spaces

In Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, an insightful history of gay bars, Jeremy Atherton Lin describes both the essential function of gay bars and the means that Western societies have used to keep them and their occupants closeted. The most literal form of closeting was to keep gay bars out of sight with no signage, entrances in back alleys, and no windows. The latter was necessary because many municipalities had laws against serving alcohol to homosexuals. Bars with no windows made it harder for police to see, arrest men who appeared femme or women who touched other women, and in different ways deemed queer.

Indeed, the first documented public queer demonstration occurred in Los Angeles on February 11, 1967, more than two years before the Stonewall riots, when a group of queer people protested the arrest of fourteen men by undercover police officers who waited until midnight on New Year's Eve when men kissed at the Black Cat Tavern in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles. In addition to the arrests, the officers severely beat two bartenders and a woman who owned another gay bar in the area. Beyond the impact of the queer bar scene, the raid would later go on to inspire action within our community.

Not to mention the creation of what would become The Advocate, the nation's oldest-running LGBTQ+ publication.

Lin's recounting of the problematic history of gay bars is a clear reminder that queer history (particularly in the Western tradition) is rife with violence, prejudice, discrimination, and condemnation.

Preserving Our Sanctuary: The Ongoing Need for Protection

Minutes after my 1997 entry into the fraught history of gay bars, my friend handed me a drink and said, "I'm going to leave you now and go to the bathroom."

"No!" I grabbed his arm, "don't leave me!"

He smiled, trying not to laugh at my panic. "If I don't leave you, no one will hit on you."

Thirty seconds after my friend melted into the crowd, a man had his hand on my arm. "I like your shirt."

"Um, thank you," I managed as I leaned back slightly to break contact.

I could no longer remember his name, and I could not hear his friend's name over the buzz of the men packed into a space that would have given the fire marshal a coronary. I slid away as soon as I could, not sure if the guy who liked my shirt was cute or not, but for the first time in my life, I was in a place where it was safe for a man to hit on me, and I liked it.

Bridging Tradition and Modernity: The Complex Intersection

I sit on a stool in my favorite West Hollywood happy hour bar and start singing along to "I Wanna Dance with Somebody," playing over the bar's speakers. The handsome straight bartender who has always been sweet to me leans toward me over the bar and asks, "Who sings this?" I am speechless, my jaw hanging open. The cute gay barback sees my shock and asks, "What's wrong?"

"He just asked me who sings this," I manage, and the barback instantly shares my shock. We tease the bartender that he is going to have to up his gay game if he wants to work at a gay bar.

It is a strangely lovely moment, admittedly made more delightful by my second glass of Sauvignon Blanc. But the absolute pleasure is being in the majority: having the straight man being the odd man out because he did not recognize a gay icon.

We need gay bars (and other queer spaces) because, despite strides in queer acceptance that have occurred in my lifetime, heteronormativity is alive and well. We need places for queer joy, places where our aesthetics and desires are not only normal but celebrated.

Sadly, the increased acceptance of gay people and cultures is not all good, even in the relative sanctuary of gay bars. I have sworn off The Abbey on Friday and Saturday nights. I'm tired of drunken bachelorette parties monopolizing the hottest go-go, tipping poorly, and shrieking at each other above the thump of the music. The popularity of RuPaul's Drag Race fills gay bars with mixed crowds at 8 pm on Friday nights. It's not uncommon to see the "invasion" of mostly straight women appropriating queer culture and basking in the liberation of not having to deal with annoying straight men. Gushing over sparkles and spangles some of us wear, sloshing their drinks on our best shoes, and crashing the men's room.

Lin calls this invasion of gay bars and queer culture "secondary gayness" and notes that such appropriation is cheap for the invaders. Ironically, this new visibility and popularity of queer culture and bars also create a new kind of closeting—one that too often makes generations of danger and abuses invisible to newcomers.

We still need gay bars as safe spaces for the newly out, as reminders of more troubled times in our history, and as oases from the daily press of heteronormativity. And as more and more gay bars gentrify and become attractive to straight people, we also need to protect our spaces and our culture.

David Wallace is a professor of English at Long Beach State University, and he has published a number of articles about the effects of closeting on queer people. He lives in West Hollywood, CA, where he spends as much time as possible swimming laps, hiking, running, cooking good food, reading mystery novels, and joining friends for happy hour.

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