Do We Need Gay Bars? Do We Need Black Churches?
By Michael Boyajian
I had written recently about an LGBT get together at Bethel Woods and in that article I quoted Stephen Hengst of Big Gay Hudson Valley who postulated whether we need gay bars anymore.
Kathy Friend of the LGBTQ community out of New Paltz responded strongly that indeed we do need gay bars. In her own words: Of course we do until every LGBTQ person feels and is completely safe to be themselves in every bar in the nation. As long as we are called faggot or dyke by other patrons, as long as we are beaten up, as long as we are mocked when we slow dance with partners, as long as we are afraid to come onto someone lest they don’t like queers we need places where we can be as we are, who we are and with whom we wish to be.
Not being gay, and even though a straight ally, I could not argue the point. After all as a straight man I don’t experience the discrimination that gays do to this day. My only response therefore to Kathy was simply “I defer to you.”
Thinking further on the matter I wondered do we need black churches anymore. Though I am white I easily answered this in the affirmative perhaps because blacks are no longer as invisible as they once were in the days of Ralph Ellison who used the term invisible to describe the plight of blacks at that time. Yet gays are still for the most part invisible in this day of don’t ask don’t tell so the answer to whether we need gay bars came with more difficulty. After all we have seen the work of Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in great detail over the years while but a few know the work of the great Harvey Milk or of the revolution at the Stonewall bar in New York City.
So maybe we will always need gay bars as we will need black churches although in our ideal dream world we are all together as one and maybe that is the key to this riddle. Perhaps straights can visit gay bars more frequently and whites to black churches. The bars and churches are still there serving their respective communities but the demographics are slightly altered making for a true rainbow mosaic for all to share, feel and experience.
End