Why Are Gay Bars Shrinking?

Steve Weinstein investigates:

It’s hard to believe that a mere 10 years ago, up to 2,000 men [in NYC] were dancing into Sunday morning at the Roxy; in the ’80s, 3,000 members were packing the Saint for 18-hour marathons. Today, the city’s only dedicated gay dance club, XL, has an official capacity of 750, which along with a few smaller dancefloors in bars like the Ritz and Splash, is the only game in town. Meanwhile, Manhunt, the granddaddy of hookup sites, boasts 200,000 active users in the city. With more than 400,000 local log-ins a week, New York makes up 10 percent of Manhunt’s user base.

The Internet has done to gay bars what it did to the music industry. Add the mobile apps like Grindr and Scruff and we're close to unraveling the entire infrastructure of gay life that once brought people, however uncomfortably at times, together. There's nothing to be done, of course, except expand those physical spaces where gay men can hang outside of bars: gyms, sports leagues, resort towns, sports bars, diners, restaurants, coffee shops, and so on. And that is not the end of gay culture as such; just the end of what we knew as gay culture, and its isolation from the mainstream.

We asked for this. And there are times when we should take yes for an answer. Reinventing gay life is in some ways more liberating than clinging to its more moribund past habits.