Why I Struggled To Say Goodbye To Gay Bars

Gaybarsused to be the safest places I knew. They were also the most fun. Since I turned 21 (and got a blowjob from a bartender in the bathroom as a birthday gift), I learned to proudly embrace my sexuality and humanity in these liberated, rainbow-marked establishments that stood for so much more than just drinking. Every time I stepped into a gay bar, it was one more step away from all my heteronormative insecurities.

But of course, there was a dark side to this journey, at least for someone like me. After over a decade of partying *in gay,* it’s difficult to discern at what point ordering another round stopped being an intentional choice. I knew my drinking was problematic, but I refused to accept my gay social life was destroying my well-being. 

On a given night out, the first and second drinks were like water. The third cocktail loosened me up enough that my body felt less planted into the ground. By the fourth, my “thank you” to the bartender sounded like an invitation. As I added the fifth to my tab, strangers became friends, and my friends manifested as beautiful beacons of light. The dance floor was my oyster, and the night was mine for the taking.

Unfortunately, my safe space soon began to become dangerous to me. 

One Saturday night, after relishing the pure joy of gay tipsiness, I found myself in an alarmingly familiar apartment without any recollection of getting there. The new tenant of my former apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, thankfully a fellow gay man, told me I buzzed my way into the building and claimed my keys weren’t working, forgetting I had moved. Apparently, I forwarded my mail but didn’t update the autopilot part of my brain that maneuvered my blackouts.

Sensing my intoxication, the guy had let me pass out on the couch and, in the morning, graciously offered me coffee. “Fun night?” he joked, and I nodded.It always was until it wasn’t. I kept putting my hangovers in the rearview mirror, insisting to myself that next time I would drink less. 

My drunken anecdotes walked a fine line between hilarity and tragedy, depending on sheer luck, the kindness of strangers, and my own risk tolerance. Despite all my self-awareness, alcoholism was my blind spot. For a long time, I thought I’d break out of what I now know as addiction as if I could’ve dropped it like a bad habit. 

Culture splits alcoholism between those fucking up their lives and those in recovery, but many of us are caught in between — functioning fairly well, but desperately trying to get to the other side. 

After accepting that I needed to deal with my binge drinking, I thought I could enjoy all the social aspects of gay bars without it. I quickly learned I couldn’t limit myself to one or two drinks — “just to hold” — before they turned into a dozen. Abstaining felt like a bigger, more conscious action than drinking. 

And so I stopped going out. It was relatively easy to stay sober in my day-to-day life in the absence of parties, but I missed the thrill of gay bars. 

I’m the only gay brother among fraternal quadruplets, the gay best friend to countless women, and the sassy gay of any workplace. Although I’ve been lucky to have never encountered prejudice directly, being out and proud tends to single me out. Not every queer person has a tight-knit LGBTQ+ circle of friends, so gay bars have always been where I got that fix, a ground uniting patrons in the joys and woes of queerness.

After visiting 250 LGBTQ+ spaces across the country, Greggor Mattson, author of “Who Needs Gay Bars?” found their universal value to be community and the exchange of shared experiences. For people marginalized in multiple ways, he tells me, these are the only spaces where they see their identities and struggles reflected. 

The author’s mission was inspired by the fact that gay bars have been on a steep decline. A gay bar closing down in New York or Los Angeles might not sound like a big deal, but in many conservative cities and rural areas where there are only a few to begin with, it’s a big deal.

“I mourn these [shuttered] cruisy men’s bars because growing up, we don’t have a lot of models for what it means to be a sensual or sexual person outside of Internet porn,” Mattson says. “The younger me learned all kinds of lessons at gay bars and needed them.” 

This resonates. I remember being at the Cock in New York’s East Village for the first time in 2014, a bar famous since 1998 for its unencumbered gay sexual energy, an ambiance too potent for straight bars to contain. All the torsos in the world on Grindr couldn’t compete with an evening at the Cock. There’s nowhere else my manhood felt so validated, whether it be through my voice, how I dress, or the way I dance. 

Me and gay bars, we have a history — which is why I didn’t expect to struggle more with saying goodbye to them than to alcohol. 

Business mogul Tristen Schukraft just purchased The Abbey in Los Angeles and all the businesses in the gay resort town of Fire Island. He tells me that gay bars were always meaningful to him coming of age in Europe, as it’s where he discovered his identity, met boyfriends, and made his chosen family.

“This space, along with many other bars across the country, is where we organized to fight the HIV pandemic and strategized to make Marriage Equality the law of the land,” Schukraft says. “We fundraised and fought for representation in media and government, and we built a community around gay bars.”

I failed to appreciate The Abbey’s cultural history the few times I visited because I was three sheets to the wind. Years later, as I pondered my departure from gay nightlife, I wondered: Am I disconnecting myself from gay history if I stopped frequenting these spaces? Let’s be real: It’s not like I was contributing to the legacy by being a drunk mess. 

In our community, it feels crucial to uphold the legacy of freedom that our elder queers fought so hard for. I came to realize though, that this can exist in places other than bars. That’s what motivated Christian Parker, founder of Gay & Sober, a community nonprofit that supports queer people in recovery, to create an alternative space for people who thrive in social environments but feel caged by a reliance on substances that often come with it.

Parker grappled with the loss of a social life during his road to recovery in his early 20s. “In my early adulthood, gay bars or clubs were the only places to go if you wanted to meet other gay people, hook up for sex, get a boyfriend, etc.,” he says. “My drinking kind of got accelerated because I was always looking for all these things.”

When Parker did a little research in 2013, he discovered that 33% of gay people reported struggling with substance abuse, according to a Pride Institute Research stat. Fast forward a bunch of societal progress later, studies still show between 20-25% of the LGBTQ+ community have moderate to severe alcohol dependency, compared with just 5-10% of the general population.

Gay bars might’ve been crucial to the gay rights movement, but for many of us, they can result in a boozy sense of belonging. What prevented Parker from initially getting sober was the idea he’d never have fun again. 

In 2010, Parker and his like-minded friends decided to pool their money and throw a sober spectacle, expecting, at most, 50 people. However, 400 LGBTQ+ guests showed up, and thus, his organization grew to foster connections for sober gay people beyond Alcoholics Anonymous.

“Active alcoholism and active drug addiction can be very isolating,” he says. “So the antidote to that is connection. The antidote to that is community. Regardless of how someone wants to find that community — Facebook groups, Instagram, sober running groups, LGBTQ-focused hobbies, Gay & Sober, or AA — whatever works, whatever gets you there.”

I know sobriety requires sacrifice. I also know that I cannot replicate the vodka-infused lively spirit of gay bars. Parker tells me there are lots of sober gay people who go to them with the right support group, but that doesn’t come without doing the work first. 

Whether it’s goodbye to gay bars just for now or indefinitely, at least I know what I love most about these spaces is still accessible to me. The walls of these structures aren’t what makes them great, but the gay people inside. I need only to be daring enough to find them elsewhere.