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The clubs sheer size means it is a spectacle to witness when full, and clubbers are allowed access to the stage, where on other nights of the week there are gigs and concerts. It’s all in good spirits though, obvs.įriday’s is Camp Attack, and Saturday has a similar vibe of weekend partiers who come out for a varied playlist of pop classics mixed with house tunes. Thursday night’s Porn Idol is the most sheer fun night to go, when clubbers are pulled up on stage by drag queens and asked to strip naked to be judged on their nakedness. Popcorn on Monday is the student night, but the sheer size of the club (and the fact the night is on a Monday) means crowds are extremely diverse. HEAVEN – perhaps the world’s most famous gay club – has reliable themed club nights every week. Nowadays, you’re as likely to see twinks in there as you are bears and otters, and entry is kept at a fairly accessible £10. XXL on Saturdays runs right through until 7am in the morning. Head to a chill out area, where there are ad-hoc drag and cabaret performances, or out the back into the dark room where…well, you can probably imagine. The main room is where the party’s at, with smoke cannons and lasers and house music, but step next door and there’s a more light atmosphere in the pop room. Their motto, “one club fits all” sits proudly at the top of their website.Įvery Saturday and Wednesday at their South Bank home at a club called Pulse, XXL has four areas with completely different vibes. What began in 2000 as a bear night has grown and grown to become a proudly inclusive gay night for all. Drag has hit the mainstream, and that’s partially thanks to events like Sink the Pink, which have bought live drag shows to a wider and more diverse audience of clubbers in and out of the LGBTQ+ scene. Dozens of drag queens also perform at the parties, and the success of the club nights has more or less run in parallel to a growth in interest in the drag scene. Sink the Pink’s parties heavily feature live performance, with singers like Will Young and Mel C as alumni of past events. Related: London’s best gay bars and clubs: New and classic drinking spots from Vauxhall to Soho and further afield The high-energy events have gone a long way from their humble origins at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s club, and now fill places like The Troxy, with thousands of revellers. Along the way, he invites us to go beyond the simplified gay bar liberation mythology of Stonewall and enter the many other battlefields in the war to carve out space in which to exist, express, and love as a gay man.Įlegiac, sexy, and sparkling with wry wit, Gay Bar is at once a serious critical inquiry into how we construct ourselves through the spaces we inhabit and an epic night out to remember.Perhaps the most famous of all London LGBTQ+ nights, Sink the Pink has developed a fierce reputation for throwing some of London’s wildest parties. In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and as dazzling as a disco ball, Atherton Lin conjures the strobing lights and the throbbing music, the smell and taste of tangles of male bodies, the rough and tender anonymous encounters, the costumes and categories-twink, top, masc, queen, tweaker, tourist, voyeur, exhibitionist-all the while tracking the protean aesthetics of masculinity and gayness.
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What, then, was the gay bar? Set between Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London, Gay Bar takes us on a time-traveling, transatlantic bar hop through pulsing nightclubs, after-work dives, hardcore leather bars, gay cafes, and saunas, asking what these places meant to their original clientele, what they meant to the author as a younger man, and what they mean now.
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In the era of Grindr and same-sex marriage, gay bars are closing down at an alarming rate. As gay bars continue to close at an alarming rate, a writer looks back to find out what’s being lost in this indispensable, intimate, and stylish celebration of history.