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Now that we have more options, I think we are starting to realize how much a lot of gay bars just suck.
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If I were a tourist, I’d find this frustrating (as I previously discussed regarding the Creating Change conference).Īs Thomas writes, gay people are feeling more accepted and welcome at bars, restaurants, and other public meeting places in general. Like many Sunbelt boomtowns, Metro Detroit’s gays are very geographically dispersed consequently, so are our gay bars. But Affirmations has been in almost perpetual crisis for the past several years, and for a region of over four million people, this little clutch of institutions is pretty meagre. The closest thing we have to it is 9 Mile in Ferndale, with Affirmations, Just 4 Us, Soho, and 9 located within a few blocks of one another. One idiosyncrasy of southeast Michigan is that we lack the strong, centralized gayborhoods you see in other metros of our size.
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We made it out one night to the old-school, dimly lit R&R Saloon on Michigan Avenue, its walls plastered with Tom of Finland reproductions, for the theme night”Macho City.” And you know you’ll see the same people, plus some new faces, every time Kathy Griffin or Gaga come to town. We recently had an interesting Latin American-flavored night at El Bosque, deep in southwest Detroit, to see RuPaul Drag Race contestant Yara Sofia. Like GQB, these can be refreshing detours to places we’d never experience otherwise.
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(In that respect, I’m really a terrible person to be blogging on this topic!)Ī lot of the night life here centers around special events. As an old might-as-well-be-married couple, my man and I don’t tend to stay out late, especially on weeknights, so I haven’t made it out for most of these and, when we have, we don’t tend to stay long. In the Ann Arbor area, you have the monthly Elbow Deep, now housed at Woodruff’s in Ypsilanti. In Detroit, many of these are based in greater downtown: see Doggy Style at Park Bar, Fierce Hot Mess at Oslo, as well as most of the Guerrilla Queer Bars. Your customers will all go to that event and come back at 3 a.m., when you have an hour to go, and they’re already trashed.”… Former owner Elaine Romagnoli told me, “They will empty your room out. This sort of event is not popular with gay-bar proprietors. Since then, Backstreet has closed and the rotating gay meetup appears to have replaced it as the hub of nightlife. Ann Arbor was served by Friday nights at Necto, for those who fancy late-night dancing, and by Aut Bar, for those who fancy dining on the patio. Back when I arrived, Backstreet was still the premier gay bar in the city of Detroit. It’s been interesting to watch the gay bar scene evolve in the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas since I first moved to Ferndale from Lansing in spring 2007. Sadly, when I returned the night before Thanksgiving last fall to show my boyfriend, it appeared it had closed. It was the first place I was able to see my peers in their natural habitat, so while it wasn’t much compared to the big city bars I’d experience later, I was always excited to go. I sneaked in occasionally with a friend’s ID from the time I was sixteen until I was able to enter legally at eighteen. I was reminded of the very first gay bar I ever went to, an unmarked hole-in-the-wall in a rough part of east side Saginaw called Bambi’s.
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One learns how to make out, to use gay slang.” As activist pioneer Dick Leitsch wrote in Gay magazine in September 1970: “Gay bars … teach and enforce the ethics and rules of gay life and pass on traditions and gay culture. Bars are our Hebrew school, our CCD, our cotillion. Unlike other minorities, queers don’t learn about our heritage from our birth families.
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As Thomas describes, the gay bar is a crucial source of acculturation for baby gays:
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just ran an interesting series of articles by June Thomas on the future of the American gay bar, which got me thinking about my own experiences.