Honestly, I’m not at all qualified to even attempt to answer this question with any sort of academic force, so I’m just going to speak from my personal experience instead.
I never had much luck with physical queer spaces, but whether that was because the spaces themselves were collapsing, or those spaces were losing the ability to provide the sort of resources I was looking for, or because I was locked out of many of them at the time I was pursuing them (can’t get into a gay bar when you’re under 21) it’s difficult to really know. The queer club at my college didn’t interest me much, and seemed less interested in offering personal support and camaraderie than pushing for visibility and political action, which I wasn’t particularly interested in. Beyond that, I couldn’t enter into spaces reserved for queer adults, and I felt…really fucking alone for a while.
It was probably one of the worst depressions of my life, because I felt so alone, at a liberal college, which I had been telling myself for years would finally give me a chance to be gay in the way I wanted to be–but which I quickly found out couldn’t actually provide me with the sort of support/relationships I was looking for. In the end, I turned to online spaces instead–at the time, that was Bear411.
I can’t say that it was perfect–my husband and I met on there, but at the same time, I also suffered through a couple of abusive relationships with men on there as well. But at the very least, it was a place I could go to find men in some semblance of a community which reflected the sort of life I wanted to live. Seeing a bunch of older gay bears online gave me some hope that there was a future for me, somewhere.
I don’t know who or what I’d be without the internet, but I think you can’t avoid, with this question, the usurpation of physical spaces my non-physical ones instead. I think gay bars and queer spaces aren’t dying because of a growing acceptance–they’re dying because they’ve been replaced by apps and other internet spaces–which isn’t to say, of course, that these non-physical spaces are necessarily better.
I know that alienation is fairly prevalent. I feel it, and it’s a feeling that has been stated by other queer friends I know. You open up an app, and there are so many *men” around you, and yet it feels like you are completely, utterly, alone, typing at a screen, waiting for a reply, sharing pics. The few gay bars I have been to, especially in the Seattle area, can feel very…insular. Unless you know the right people, or are displaying the right look/gear/appearance, it can be…a really lonely experience. In Europe, the atmosphere is very different, for reasons I don’t quite know how to articulate. I feel at home in a gay bar in Amsterdam, even as a tourist, in a way that the Seattle Cuff, Eagle, or Diesel will always feel like foreign territory when I walk in.
As for gay culture, assimilation is real, and assimilation is a problem, but gay spaces can’t do anything to stop that, whether they are physical or not. The problem isn’t that gays are leaving spaces and joining mainstream ones–the problem is that displaying cultural and physical signifiers of queerness and femininity are, at the present time, really fucking dangerous for one’s safety. It’s a new closet: one where you can be gay and out, as long as you are white, nationalist, monogamous, follow the gender binary, and otherwise cater to the comfort of cishet society. It’s a closet I think a lot of people, gay men in particular, are more than happy to inhabit, but it’s incredibly harmful to the cause of queer liberation.
The problem, to my eyes, is that queers stopped demanding liberation, and began asking for tolerance. We got what we asked for, but it isn’t what we should want, or what we need.
Bracken's Corner 