You don’t escape to the nearest gay bar after years living in the closet so that you may experience community, belonging, and sex for the first time - we do. You didn’t find refuge in drag shows during the height of the AIDS epidemic - we did. You didn’t fight for these spaces - we did. We see your sex scenes in every romantic comedy. We see your relationships every day on TV. Yes, changing social mores, gentrification, and hookup apps are partially responsible for the death of the gay bar, but frankly, gay men don’t want the spaces where we feel most at home flooded with straight people there to gawk at us. Our bars are disappearing, yet your shitty hetero-centric gastropubs stay open. If we seem defensive of our spaces and threatened by your bachelorette parties, it’s because our spaces are aggressively outnumbered by yours.
#Chicago gay bar with backroom tv#
Straight people, haven't you ruined enough of our stuff? Haven't you taken enough of our culture and called it yours? You use our cultural terms and watch our TV and degrade us every day and still want red carpet invites to our parties.
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Fearing a police raid (something we gay men are rather familiar with), the owners of my home base recently installed painfully bright lights, took down the curtains, and turned our backroom into a well-lit smoking lounge. The hallmarks of our culture don’t seem to matter when you, heteros, feel threatened by them - you who can go anywhere and find bars, films, restaurants, billboards, and a million stupid Top 40 hits catering exclusively to your relationships, not ours. Guys who don’t like anonymous sex stay on the dance floor or by the bar. If you feel the need to do this a lot, you shouldn’t be back there. If someone starts feeling you and you’re not interested, gently push his hand away. Here’s a lesson: When you walk into a backroom, you waive a degree of consent. This was my go-to gay bar’s backroom until two months ago, when a straight woman wandered back there, got touched, and threatened to call the cops. All you can hear are shuffling feet, the throbbing bass from the dance floor, and the wet, padded slap of someone getting fucked. It takes a minute for your eyes to adjust. When you walk through the curtain, the room is completely dark. The backroom of a seedy gay bar is one of them. This refusal received publicity in the New York Times and the Village Voice.Straight people, there are places where you do not belong.
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However, at Julius’, which had recently been raided, the bartender refused their request. They then moved on to Julius’ and were joined by Randy Wicker. At their first stop, the Ukrainian-American Village Restaurant, the bar had closed, while at their next two attempts, at a Howard Johnson’s and at the Hawaiian-themed Waikiki, they had been served. The Sip-In was part of a larger campaign by more radical members of the Mattachine Society to clarify laws and rules that inhibited the running of gay bars as legitimate, non-mob establishments and to stop the harassment of gay bar patrons.ĭick Leitsch, Craig Rodwell, and John Timmons, accompanied by several reporters, went to a number of bars, announced that they were “homosexuals,” and asked to be served a drink. This was particularly important because bars were one of the few places where gay people could meet each other.
#Chicago gay bar with backroom free#
The SLA regulations were one of the primary governmental mechanisms of oppression against the gay community because they precluded the right to free assembly.
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On April 21, 1966, members of the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights group, organized what became known as the “Sip-In.” Their intent was to challenge New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) regulations that were promulgated so that bars could not serve drinks to known or suspected gay men or lesbians, since their presence was considered de facto disorderly. By the 1960s, Julius’ began attracting gay men, although it was not exclusively a gay bar.
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1930 when the bar began to become popular with sports figures and other celebrities. There has been a bar on the corner of Waverly Place and West 10th Street since the mid-19th century.