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Now people have cameras everywhere - that never would have happened 40 years ago. People would lose their jobs, their families. “You couldn’t take photographs in gar bars for forever. I ask Lauren to compare and contrast working in a 90s East Village gay bar to working in today’s Brooklyn queer scene? “Photographs,” she answers, a poignant sense of joy in her voice. “But I think we’ve gained more than we’ve lost. “It does feel like gay bars have lost something… that sense of us versus them,” Lauren admits. But - as someone who has lived through the AIDS crisis and seen violent homophobia firsthand - she welcomes the change, refuting the romanticised notion that things were “better” in the old days. Bartending in gay bars for over 20 decades, she has seen a litany places come and go (her first gig, The Bar in the East Village, mysteriously burned down in 1998 and she also bartended at lesbian spot adorably called Meow Mix). When people say NYC gay nightlife is dead, I say, ‘You’re just going to the wrong parties.’”īut constant change is woven into the fabric of the city’s queer nightlife, Lauren, a bartender at Williamsburg’s Rosemont says. “I don’t know if these are official numbers,” Will shares, “but I heard that when Macri Bar changed from being a straight bar to a gay bar, they doubled their profit numbers in only half a year. We’re just not going to the same old tired places. The success of places like Macri Park, and the imitators it has inspired, dispels the perception that the LGBT+ community doesn’t go out anymore. He says people from all walks of life frequent the space - turning it into a safe haven for drag queens, trans people, and people exploring their sexuality. “Now, it’s turned into this queer bar with a more political aspect to it.” Will spends his Sunday and Wednesday evenings bartending at Williamsburg’s Macri Park.
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“There’s a bar in Chelsea that I remember was always just a gay bar,” Will Sheridan, a bartender, party promoter, and performer, tells me, speaking on how the LGBT+ nightlife has changed since he first moved to the city many years ago. If sexuality is more fluid for Gen Z and millennials, so are the spaces we party in.Īnd gay bars in Manhattan are taking note of the growing disdain for homogenous groups. This Bushwick trifecta of queer-but-not-queer, straight-but-not-straight spaces perfectly capture how labels and signifiers are becoming obsolete in Brooklyn nightlife. And not too far from Bossanova is a queer bar called Happyfun Hideaway, which has become increasingly straight-friendly over the years (Proof: my female roommate met a manic pixie dream boy there). Not too far from Mood Ring is a straight techno club called Bossanova that has become increasingly queer-friendly over the years (Proof: I met a manic pixie dream boy there). You’d go out in neighbourhoods depending on what kind of “gay” you are. There were gay people, there were lesbians, there were black people, white people, trans people. “Those parties at Limelight and Tunnel and Club USA were so successful because everybody was there. He first moved to the city in 2004, before the emergence of Brooklyn’s queer warehouse parties. “I feel like I caught the tail end of the “old” New York nightlife,” Frank, a bartender at East Village’s Phoenix who tells me. My roommate and I just sat in a booth and talked. No one tried to dance with me or flirt with me or leave with me. Like everyone had received the memo to spend their adolescent years working out and not dancing to Rihanna’s Loud album (a masterwork of pop music, BTW). Something felt off about the whole experience. There was so much to take in: Muscled go-go boys dancing in jockstraps, muscled bartenders pouring drinks, and, again, muscled patrons standing around and devouring each other with their eyes. I can’t remember the name of the spot, or what Manhattan gaybourhood it was in, but I can remember how dark the space was and how chaotic things felt. “Let’s change that.” So we went to the lamest event you can think of: an 18+ night. “I can’t believe you haven’t gone out to a gay club yet,” he’d been saying to me for months. My roommate, a gay white boy, invited me out on a lacklustre Thursday with an obvious, slightly condescending, gay-fairy-godmother foundation to his actions. I was 19 and a sophomore at New York University. Then they rip their shirts off and dance like no one’s watching. You know, those EDM-soundtracked visions of gay men experiencing a sudden sense of belonging and liberation. The first time I went to a gay club was nothing like how it is in the popular imagination.