Do gay people still need gay bars?

[cronus]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26817128

Do gay people still need gay bars?

With the advent of gay marriage in Britain, and many countries moving towards total legal equality, is there still a need for gay bars, asks Elizabeth Hotson.

It's a Saturday night in March, unusually mild for London, and Soho is thronging with bar-hoppers, theatregoers and couples strolling along Old Compton Street.

The venues are a mixture of straight, gay and anything in between. From the non-too subtle GAY at number 30, to She Bar at 23a, its basement entrance so discreet you could walk past a dozen times and still miss it.

Yet tonight there's an imperceptible difference from the Saturday before. In England and Wales the law has now changed. If you happen to meet the same-sex partner of your dreams tonight you could marry them. So with huge steps being made towards legal equality, will the notion of a separate social culture die out? Have gay bars become irrelevant?

Dr Matt Cook, Social Historian at Birkbeck College, University of London points out that the nature of gay identity has changed fundamentally.

"The idea of a singular identity is very new. In 16th Century England there was a subculture loosely relating to the theatre. Men didn't identify as specifically gay. Things happened in the context of a sexualized, risque environment and being queer was a part of a more general underground culture."

In the 17th and 18th Century, "Molly houses" started appearing. Sometimes they were coffee or ale houses or private rooms in otherwise straight pubs. Even in this environment people couldn't be entirely at ease, Cook explains,

"A lot of the knowledge we have about early gay culture is from criminal records. Molly houses were often raided and people being prosecuted is the main source of information about what happened at that time."

A gay counterculture continued to emerge in the mid-20th Century. "In the 1940s and 1950s there was the A&B club, otherwise known as the Arts and Battledress and there was also the Rockingham, both in Soho. They were for a more middle-class clientele. There were also pubs such as the Salisbury in Covent Garden which weren't as exclusive."

The Salisbury is no longer considered gay, but the current duty manager, Jon Badcock says tourists still visit the pub and ask about its history.

"We're in the middle of theatreland, right next to the Noel Coward. Some of our older regulars remember sitting in the snug while Kenneth Williams held court."

Cook says that the early part of the 20th Century in Britain also saw women becoming visible on the gay scene, with the Gateways Club opening on the King's Road in Chelsea in 1931. "Until then, because women hadn't featured in criminal trials, there weren't any public records of lesbian culture."

In the 1970s and 80s a more defined notion of "gayness" was emerging and pubs, bars and clubs opened to cater for individual tastes, such as the dark, testosterone-fuelled Coleherne in Earl's Court, west London and the cathedral of disco, Heaven, in Charing Cross. Gradually, the gay scene moved towards Soho and Old Compton Street and although Vauxhall and Dalston are home to gay bars and clubs, Soho is arguably the epicentre.

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[rachelbean]

As gay men can still get beat up for hitting on a straight guy, yeah we still need gay bars.

[Rum]

Bizarrely, when I was in my mid teen and a stranger here in the UK (on home leave) I went to a youth club disco and kept eyeing up a girl across the dance floor who seemed to be eyeing me up too. I thought I was in luck, especially when she finally approached me and asked me if I would like to come outside. I duly went out with her at which point she asked me if I was looking for a fight and adopted the fisticuffs position!!

[JimC]

I think it's terrible when bars are decorated in a dull, boring and unadventurous fashion. They need to be lively!

So yes, bring back gay bars!