As a result, the bars and venues that remain feel less edgy, say some old-timers, and the spotty scene no longer cultivates a cohesive-feeling gay culture.Īll of this is part of a larger trend, affecting cities from San Francisco to New York, and should set off alarm bells regardless of whether you’re gay. At the same time, marriage equality shifted some of the cultural emphasis from White Parties to white-picket fences. Meanwhile, gentrification changed the face of gay ghettos: Yuppies wheeled in expensive baby strollers, helping shoo away the colorful queer artists and others who gave neighborhoods such as the South End their appeal. Industry vets I spoke with chalk the loss of gay bars up to the price of progress: As Massachusetts helped normalize LGBT inclusion faster than just about anywhere else in the country, businesses that originated as safe spaces suffered the rise of online hookup sites and mobile apps delivered the fatal blow. Given the friendly climate, you might expect to find more gay bars here now than ever. Boston’s annual Pride Parade is the largest of its kind in New England. Our former state Senate president, Stan Rosenberg, is gay, as is Attorney General Maura Healey. Ours was the second state to add sexual orientation to its anti-discrimination statute (in 1989), and the first to legalize gay marriage (in 2004). Ironic, don’t you think? After all, Boston is generally perceived as a liberal stronghold, and Massachusetts is regularly ahead of the country on LGBT issues. Today, even using “LGBTQ bar” as a loose term, the number has dropped by more than half, he says. Over the years, though, one club after another has shuttered-and local gays grumble that the scene simply isn’t what it used to be.Īnd for good reason: There were at least 20 known gay bars in Boston in 1977, according to Andrew Elder, cochair of the History Project, a nonprofit that archives documents, photos, oral histories, and ephemera related to Boston’s LGBT history. I began to appreciate their stories, and stopped taking Boston’s scene for granted-including its gay bars. And at each spot, I learned from seasoned vets of the equal rights movement about the people, places, and events that shaped my community’s history. At Axis, when I took my slack-jawed straight friends to Monday-night drag shows, I learned that being a token can be tiring-but being a tour guide can be really, really fun. At ManRay, a Cambridge club that skewed toward underground goth and fetish crowds, I learned to let my guard down and celebrate every stripe of freak and geek. They opened the doors to a whole new world. More than anything else, that’s what Boston’s gay bars represented to me. I didn’t struggle specifically with my sexuality, but I felt lonely and stifled, and wondered if I’d ever find a place where I would feel plugged in to a larger universe of exciting possibilities. I remember it sounded suspiciously like what I grew up booming in my bedroom in a one-stoplight rural town, down the street from a dairy farm, as I stared into the eye of a Spencer Gifts strobe light and imagined what it felt like in the Real World, where attempts at normal human intimacy didn’t have to start in an AOL chatroom and end in a parking garage by the mall. We didn’t know Buzz was a gay club, but the writhing bare torsos, smell of sexed-up sweat, and anthemic music quickly clued us in. I first entered one by accident as a freshman at Boston College, when a party bus dropped us off in the Theater District for a first weekend out, and we eagerly shuffled our circa-2000 dancing shoes into the nearest place blasting music. Gay bars have given me quite an education.