Gay Bars Quotes & Sayings

It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars ... The upside was that the city was inexpensive ... — Edmund White

Everything is made up of shapes and spaces. — Joey Lawsin

Few bars in New York, even gay bars, permitted same-sex dancing. — Ann Bausum

Drag shows are one of my favorite things in the world. As a straight man I love going to gay bars. People at gay bars just love to dance. — Steve Kazee

I am so very proud of you - your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom. Part of that wisdom is understanding what you were given - a city where gay bars are unremarkable, a soccer team on which half the players speak some other language. What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

My experience of coming out was very much centered around the bar scene. And what happened for me is that when I turned 18 and was old enough to get into certain gay bars in the French Quarter, I became a regular customer. — Christopher Rice

All roads lead past shooting ranges, liquor stores, and gay bars. Wanderlust is part of the American Spirit. — Andrew Smith

Only gay bars were full; the heterosexual joints were empty - the heteros massively committed to watching television with their falsely monogamous spouses. — Aleksandar Hemon

I can't help its being gay. I have been a full-time fag for the past five years, I realized the other day. Everyone I know is gay, everything I do is gay, all my fantasies are gay, I am what Gus called those people we used to see in the discos, bars, baths, all the time - remember? Those people we used to see EVERYWHERE, every time we went out, so that you wanted to call the police and have them arrested? - I am a doomed queen.
I would LIKE to be a happily married attorney with a house in the suburbs, 2.6 kids, and a station wagon, in which we would drive every summer to see the Grand Canyon, but I'm not! I am completely, hopelessly gay! — Andrew Holleran

But in the midst of this decaying, burning city, there are pockets of hope. It can be found in the tiny dark rooms in underground bars, where women with short hair cheer on men in dresses. It can be felt in abandoned cinemas where anonymous strangers fall in love if only for a few moments, and in the living rooms where families crowd around, drinking sweet black tea and Skyping their homesick relatives so that together they can watch the long, rambling talk shows that go on all night. — Saleem Haddad

I enjoyed the side bars with fun facts and notable sources for where to get more help. Merrin's such a fun writer; I'd love to see her invite kids into her kitchen for cooking classes. She'd be perfect in the classroom and would entice children to try new foods. It's the adults that might need fooling. — Cindy Gay

Today we have gay people whose relationships, until just recently, have been branded by society as extraordinarily shameful, as uniquely perverse - worse than incest. The cultural heritage of this view had the effect of driving them all underground, where sex is practiced surreptitiously, secretively, for fear of social ostracism, not to mention physical harm. And now, tired of the highway rest stops, tired of the back rooms in gay bars, many in that community have a longing to attempt what can only be regarded as modern marvel regardless of gender: two people willing to attempt lifelong fidelity to each other, come what may. This doesn't seem to me to be a "slippery slope." It seems to me that it might actually be instead, a redemptive trajectory. — Ken Wilson

After the Stonewall riots the gay activists had their idealistic hearts in the right place but it turned out they had underestimated the realpolitik of organized crime. Indeed, as gay liberation blossomed in the wild 1970s the bars and bathhouses became increasingly lucrative enterprises, and the Mafia had no intention of abandoning a racket it had controlled for decades. The Mafia families maintained their control by exercising the proverbial carrot and stick. The wise guys seemingly embraced the gay rights movement and cut more so-called Auntie Gays into the action as their fronts, and resorted to violent threats and sometimes murder against others who refused to play ball with the crime families. There were few legitimate businessmen in gay nightlife of the 1970s. — Phillip Crawford Jr.

Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence. — Larry Kramer

I think, any politician, you have to hold them to their word. And conservatives run on fiscal conservatism. — Chris Matthews

Well, from 1969 to 1984, until he died of AIDS, a teacher and I were very good friends. He even attended celebrations at my home, and I have to admit I even went with him to gay bars once in a while. So I know a homophobe when I see one. Pat Buchanan ain't no homophobe, believe me. — Ezola B. Foster

A wise man once said that human beings were programmed to like boundary conditions - places like tree houses, mountain cabins, or transgressive gay bars. Boundary conditions exist in places where you can stay in one element and look at another different and fascinating element for as long as you wanted. That's why people like beach towns like Cape May; you can sit and look at the ocean, or go in the ocean and look back at the land, whatever's more fun. If that's true, then maybe that's why people go to funerals. Funerals are the boundary condition between life and afterlife. Sheldon Berkman had crossed the boundary between — Curtis Edmonds

I say to my colleagues that I sit alongside them in committee, in the bars and in the tea room, and I queue alongside them in the division lobby. But when it comes to marriage, they are asking me to stand apart and to join a separate queue. I ask my colleagues, if I am equal in this house, to give me every opportunity to be equal. — Mike Freer

To my relief, Laura laughs. "It's the same everywhere. Most lesbian bars in Chicago closed years ago. And that's in a city of almost three million. Gay bars aplenty, though I hear their number is dwindling as well, but lesbian bars just can't seem to stay afloat." "It's because we're cheap dates." "And there's too much on television." "And the cat isn't going to feed itself," I add, enjoying this moment so much because it tells me we are still friends. The awkwardness of having asked Laura on a date has passed. — Harper Bliss

The Mafia's involvement with gay bars is ironic on so many levels. Macho guys ruled gangland but supported a subculture for nelly queens. Most mobsters were evil sociopaths motivated only by financial self-interest but nevertheless were doing a good thing in providing social spaces for the gay community. The mob was on the wrong side of the liquor laws by serving gay folk but on the right side of the 14th Amendment in arguing for equal protection. The Mafia exploited an oppressed community but advanced the gay cause. — Phillip Crawford Jr.

When I was going to gay bars in my 20s and 30s, the older guys there explained to me that the police would occasionally raid these places and march the clients out, load them onto paddy wagons, drive them down to the station, photograph them, fingerprint them and put their names on a list. They were doing nothing wrong, and it was criminalized. — George Takei

If the polls are right, our Judeo-Christian heritage is no longer the foundation of our values. We have become a post-Christian society. — Charles Colson

The dancing and the faggotry of the Bon Soir is 'kiss my ass if you don't like it. I've got nothing to hide or lose' style. Much like what you see uptown and with a strong Spanerican flavor. This can be a make-out bar, but in truth this place belongs to the people who are already making it. This is where they come to have a good time, to 'go out.' It's yeastier. It's lower-class. It's a fun bar. It's the kind of place where on the slow ones you can belly-rub and grind your interforked aching bodies together and know that since it's your own thing, you can damn well do it without interference or apology. — Angelo D'Arcangelo

The most important thing one can do for children is not accept the limitations they are so willing to impose on themselves. — Ruth Simmons

The sidewalks were jammed and the crowds drifted slowly past bars from which disco music blared and where men sat on barstools looking out the windows. The air smelled of beer and sweat and amyl nitrate. At bus benches and on strips of grass in front of buildings, men sat, stripped of their shirts, sunbathing and watching the flow of pedestrians through mirrored sunglasses. Approaching the bar where I was meeting Hugh, I smelled marijuana, turned my head and saw a couple of kids sharing a joint as they manned a voter registration table for one of the gay political clubs. I stepped into the bar expecting to find more of the carnival but it was nearly empty. The solitary bartender wiped the counter pensively. — Michael Nava

Mr Darcy is my severest critic. — Elizabeth Bennett

I've never dated anyone because they were vegetarian, just like I'm gay but don't only go to gay bars. I hang out with people because they are fun, smart, and kind, and if they happen to be veg I'm thrilled. — Dan Mathews

We don't want sympathetic liberals, we want gays to represent gays ... I represent the gay street people-the 14-year-old runaway from San Antonio. We have to make up for hundreds of years of persecution. We have to give hope to that poor runaway kid from San Antonio. They go to the bars because churches are hostile. They need hope! They need a piece of the pie! — Harvey Milk