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The surfaces were smooth and impenetrable, like the staff.
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Their sleek, sanitised interiors connoted a place free from disease, an aesthetic the scholar Johan Andersson identifies as ‘chichi’. In London’s Soho after the crest of AIDS, soiled pubs were replaced by gleaming bars purpose-built for a socially acceptable image of gay. (Sometimes ‘the midwife’ instead delivered a block of Cheshire cheese.) This spectacle involved, according to a sensationalist exposé from 1709, much bustle and buffoonery.
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There, lying-in ceremonies were held during the Christmas season, with the mollies gathering to witness one of their own ‘give birth’ to a jointed wooden doll. The molly house, a meeting place for proto-gays and cross-dressers in the 18th century, is cited as a predecessor to the gay bar as we know it. In London, theatres provided a location to rendezvous since something like the 16th century. It’s also possible he was merely being ironic, not intent on coining a name. The venue he’d attended would have been specific to that time and place. The first recorded use of the term gay bar is a diary entry by comedian Kenneth Williams (“Went round to the gay bar which wasn’t in the least gay…”). There’s no Gay Bar Common Era, unless we presume to label a historical hotspot retroactively. The first gay bar? Depends what you mean. Dingy cellars were furtive and self-protective, but could come with a frisson impossible to replicate in a high-street club with colognes in the loo and swarming hen parties. The orchestra would strike up a tribute when a dishy young man entered the room. At flashy nightclubs, queerness hid in plain sight, indecipherable from cosmopolitanism. In the 20th century, the discreet and flamboyant (‘screamers’) congregated at pubs with a wink-nudge reputation. In London, proto-gays were on the move through the ages, taking to the shadows of gardens, arches and public toilets. The rhetoric had come to be of safe space, but I’d known the gay bar as a site of slight discomfort and risk.Ĭertain aspects that made the new models refreshing – such as parties that roam rather than fix to one place – hearken back to historical queer socialising. On the dance floor, I espied a semi-erection brandished like a Blackberry. But at the Joiners itself, my plimsolls soaked in an admixture of ambiguous fluids, I’d been groped at the bar and trapped in a toilet stall by a pair of overexcited men. A similar charter was issued by the Friends of the Joiners Arms, a collective throwing of events under the banner of the much-missed namesake. At the Chateau in south London, which took over from a wine bar with a holy communion theme (the stained glass with Biblical scenes remained), the house rules were posted as the Ten Commandments. There were sober events, drag-king shows, activist meetings, literary happenings and policies forbidding inconsiderate behaviour idealistic visions, whereas nightlife venues have often reflected the worst of society – like racism, ableism, ageism, lookism, transphobia and misogyny. Nights were devoted to womxn and femmes of colour. Pop-up venues paid heed to the LBTQ+, after decades dominated by alpha Gs. In London, young promoters re-envisioned queer space. Their flickering out altered my cityscape – as if signalling the demise of gay identity altogether. Gay bars were already shuttering across the UK and the States, a trend blamed on property developers, hook-up apps, assimilation. This definitely pertains to the gay bar – an institution I’d contend was never only one thing. Hovering over all the ‘When things get back to normal…’ conjecture, a question: What normal, and why was it so? The status quo of cities developed over time and resulted from fissures – like war, like plague. It’s hard to imagine when I’ll hang with them at a gay bar again. A film director and a museum curator come to mind. But I’ve been thinking about hugging, and some of the great gay huggers I know. This distinction has been rendered irrelevant by the pandemic. The beginnings and endings of queer sites of belonging Taken in the Nelsons Head pub, photography Rebecca Zephyr Thomas