You can pick a trick or your next date using an app, so do we still need gay bars? Out & About’s new columnist Arca Bayburt investigates.
I often hear people argue that apps like Grindr and Tinder have eliminated the need for exclusively gay spaces. “But Arcaaaa,” they whine with pinched faces, tut-tutting at my depraved suggestion of real-time flesh-and-blood social interaction, “Society accepts us now. We don’t need sticky-floored hovels to hide from the heteros in!”
I watched a friend using Grindr once, dead-eyed, twisted and bitter, phone clamped in his sweaty hand, swiping his way through a smorgasbord of dicks.
I’ve seen lesbian pals set their thumbs alight from the sheer speed of their Tinder swiping, only to never start conversations with their matches. Ever.
The apathetic and defeatist “But we can internet now” reaction to the closures of lesbian spaces and the forced amalgamation of gay women into gay men’s spaces under the ‘queer’ umbrella really grates my tits.
We need our own spaces because that’s where we find and build our communities. These venues are little gay islands in a gigantic, heterosexual ocean. People forget that the function of a gay space isn’t just to facilitate fucking and dating, but to connect queers to each other.
Unbelievably, gay people can have interactions outside of sex! Who knew?
Sydney doesn’t have a dedicated venue for gay women. Like some nomadic tribe, lesbians must migrate from venue to venue. That said, there are some places that are famous (or infamous) for attracting mostly lesbian clientele.
I felt overwhelmed during my first year frequenting lesbian bars and parties. I was so excited all the time. I started making friends and creating a little homo family. The Sly Fox’s halcyon days in the mid-2000s were rife with debauchery. That in itself isn’t special – most every other club in existence can be described as such – but a place like the Sly was exciting to me because it was gay.
Going home with someone from a gay bar for the first time was something of a milestone for me. I felt like I’d completed my initiation into queerdom.
It was a lesbian night at the Sly Fox. I’d been moodily picking at my cider’s label and toying with the idea of going outside for my 20th cigarette for the night. My friend had dragged a chair onto the dancefloor and was attempting to do a handstand on it, legs flopping and flailing all over the place, trying to manoeuvre herself into sexy. If the crowd’s fervent cheering was anything to go by, she was definitely getting laid that night. I was just getting drunk.
I’d been navigating these new social mores clumsily. My heterosexual cultural programming hadn’t prepared me to interact with large groups of homosexual women. Making gay pals was easy, but I didn’t know how to approach a woman for something more.
That night, I didn’t have to. Someone walked over to me and told me her friend was interested. Said friend was hot so I went over to say hello. I’m sure I said something sophisticated and sexy like, “Hi, I’m really fucked up.” Half an hour later we were stumbling through her front yard, trying to get into the house. She lost her key in the grass so we crawled around on the ground, groping mud trying to find it. It only got worse from there.
Bad porno worse.
We managed to get into her house, and as we were furiously making out in the doorway, I asked her if she had any peanut butter and beer (evidently this combo is my aphrodisiac) and she said yes. We drunkenly rolled around, drinking beer, pouring it all over each other. At one point, as I shellacked peanut butter onto her naked body, I thought to myself, “Man, my friends are gonna be so proud of me.”
The notion that I could pick up in a bar was totally foreign to me. It made me feel like a giddy teenager. I’d been to countless straight spaces, watching them do all those things with a bemused detachment, wondering if I had to resign myself to clandestine internet hook-ups forever.
The point is that saying, “We have apps for that now so we don’t need gay bars to meet other gay people,” is like arguing that we can easily do away with going out to restaurants now that we’ve got Menulog. We’ll only end up going hungry.
This Week:
On Saturday August 20, head over to the Heaps Gay car park party at the Portugal Madeira Club in Marrickville. It’ll be an unpretentious affair, starting early and celebrating well into the wee hours with music from Wild Sunset, Honey DJs and Sideboobs.
Then on Sunday August 21, the House Of Mince presents Mince Спорт at Zoo Project, featuring Ben Drayton, D&D and Annabelle Gaspar with more to be announced.
Also on Sunday August 21,Melbourne’s Camp Cope[above] are heading to Sydney to headline Voices: A Femme-Fronted Fun Raiser with support from Scabz and more at Hermann’s Bar. It’ll be a celebration of female and LGBTQIA musicians with all proceeds going to the Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre.
[Main image: Apollo The Party]
