Why are gay bars so hostile?

Most are welcoming, but tales of disapproving stares and worse are all too common

It’s easy to cope with sticky floors and smelly toilets. Or strange angel statues attached to the wall, as in the Arty Farty gay bar in Tokyo. Punters tolerate all sorts of eccentricities when they step into a gay bar, because they know that these spaces should still feel like home.

But sometimes gay bars are hostile. And that’s usually down to the other punters. I’m collecting stories of experiences in gay bars for an article I’m writing for The Economist. As well as the many positive stories about finding freedom, good beats and love, I’ve heard many negative tales too. I thought I’d share a few with you, offer some thoughts why hostility persists, and ask you to tell me your thoughts.

First, there’s the story of Polly, who went to Dempsey’s in Sheffield, an old industrial city in the north of England. “It was like visiting a foreign country,” she says of her first time. She let her friend take the lead, but that made Polly feel nervous. “I was on show with a celebrity friend. Everyone knew her and said hello and did kisses and I felt so out of my depth.” This is just what happens when a person joins a group for the first time—it’s something everyone has to deal with on the first day at school or the first day in a new job.

But I think there’s something specific about how gay bars sometimes react to a new regular. Bars are where gay people go to hang out with other gay people. This is necessary even in societies where the level of acceptance for gay people is high. And it’s necessary anyway because if gay people want to meet people to kiss or to date, it’s better to go where there’s a concentration of options. This creates a ‘club mentality’, which is understandable, but it’s not great when you’re in Polly’s position as a newbie and you just want to be accepted. When the punters in Dempsey’s realised that Polly was also gay, they stopped ignoring her and started to see her as fresh meat, each of them eyeing her up and deciding whether they fancied her. That can also be not very welcoming!

Second, poor Rich, whose first time in a gay bar was a grimy nightspot on a main road frequented by lads driving clapped-out VW Polos and shouting abuse at the customers standing outside. In the bar, Rich was groped by several regulars and then mocked for not participating. “My heart was in my boots,” he remembers. “I thought going to a gay bar would help me feel more comfortable with myself but all it did was raise more questions: is this how I’m supposed to act?” Rich didn’t like the fact that the bar—the only gay bar in his small town—had a gloryhole in a backroom and a posse of regular, sleazy customers. “I made the decision after that night not to go back,” he says. “I saw so many characters I dreaded becoming.” Rich’s story is like emcee_gee’s, who told me on Reddit that after being similarly groped “it took me about five years to go back… despite it being the only gay bar in town”.

Being gay is of course a sexual identity at its base. So it’s no surprise that sex takes on as much prominence as drinking or dancing in a town’s only gay bar. Sex is the thing that unites the customers. But treatment like emcee_gee and Rich’s shows that not everyone wants to do sex in the same way. These poor kids had to go further afield to find the kind of touch and the kind of treatment they welcomed.

The third story is specifically to do with body type and the performance of gender. One lesbian told me that she used to wear the clothes she liked, but lesbians in her city didn’t pay her much attention. When she switched to a more butch look — checkered shirts and jeans—she started to get dates. This style was important to the lesbian culture she joined in her city. Similarly, Gustavo Casals told me about his time as a bear. This is a subgroup within gay culture that, Gus says of Argentina’s scene, used to be very welcoming to a range of body types even though the thing that unites that identity is a certain body type itself. “It seems there’s a bear rulebook and you can only be one of a few different types,” Gus says, explaining that only dominant forms of masculinity are allowed. “That sets back LGBT rights because they crack down on men who express any gender fluidity.” It’s not cool when you go into a bar where you think you’ll be allowed to be both yourself and part of a community—but you discover that you’re not welcome because you don’t look or act right.

The best gay bars are those that have enough freedom and enough range of customers to make everyone feel welcome. Many bars have unsegregated toilets open to all, which is just one way to welcome transgender people. And all bars try to give the impression that their customers are safe from the outside world, even if just for the night. Violence against LGBT people endures—reports consistently find a rise in homophobic murders or assaults, and the shooting in June in Orlando is sadly just the biggest known attack, not the only one. Gay bars give us the space to be ourselves and to be safe, and so we need to expect each other to foster that environment as much as we expect it of a bar manager.

In my opinion, bars should also sell chocolate bars but apparently that’s a service limited to Dempsey’s in Sheffield.

What are your thoughts on hostility in gay bars? How does it threaten what a gay bar stands for? Write a response below, and I’ll try to reply to you soon.