Support Your Local Gay? Bar

There is a cliche that no one can go home again. I've come to realize that this applies to one's home away from home as well. Tonight I went to a drag show at Fort Wayne's premier (of two) gay bar, After Dark. Now through my early twenties, After Dark was a great place to go and mingle. A true center of the gay community in this town, and I still have friends who I met there, just hanging out. Now I never engaged in anything untoward in any back room or in the parking lot, but I liked going somewhere that I felt welcome.

Now I'm 35 and have been in a relationship for a very very long time. The Drag Shows on Thursday nights at After Dark just ain't what they used to be. I used to have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to a drag show, and it was worth it, but nowadays, it's just utterly terrible.

I think that in the intervening years, there has been a tectonic shift in the gay community. People no longer feel the oppression of the straight world like they used to. Gays are everywhere, at PTA meetings, country clubs, watching their kids play soccer, or just picking up the latest project materials at Lowe's and Home Depot.

I was with some friends who were in from out of town, and the idea was to see if and or how drag has changed. The short answer is yes, drag shows have changed and not for the better. Now Fort Wayne drag was never auspicious or highbrow, but it was never brutally tortuous as it was tonight.

The "revue" consisted of exactly two performers, one semi-decent and one terrible. My friends and I stayed for four numbers from each performer, but that was all we could take. I was prepared with singles to tip the performers, but I was not about to encourage such bad behavior.

My friends lamented that the last gay bar in their town closed. That got me thinking, what's the rest of the story?

The tragedy seems to be that the gay bar as a business model is built on the perpetually unsustainable social construct of self-segregation. As progress marches on, the clientele for a gay bar typically dries up. People are assimilating into their neighborhoods, having book clubs and wine tasting parties with their suburban neighbors, and trading recipes with the other parents on the sidelines of the soccer field.

So-called "singles" bars are built on the same principle, but there are always more and more people turning 21 and heading to mainstream bars and clubs as the older patrons typically pair up and quit going. And now with a more tolerant and accepting society, gay young people want to spend time in the limelight of the dancefloor at the popular club.

Younger gays seem like they don't want to risk getting cruised and hit on by the much older gay patrons still languishing in the faded glory of the old gay bar.

Part of it may also be the economy, but I think After Dark is taking care of the increasing liquor prices by watering down not just the vodka, but the tonic as well.

So what's to be done with gay bars? I must say that I don't have any answers, but I see some encouraging signs. Babylon, the sister club of After Dark is starting to shake off its image as mostly a gay bar and trying to attract a more mainstream crowd.

And really, isn't that what we've been fighting for over the past 40 some odd years? We want society to accept us, and that in all fairness must be a two-way street. We have to share our spaces with our straight friends, just as they have welcomed us into theirs.

So to the drag queens of After Dark, I say, do what makes you happy. You don't have to panhandle in high heels anymore. This is the twenty-first century. If your dream is to perform, head down to the civic theatre, take voice lessons, whatever. There will probably still be drag queens in twenty years, but there may not be any gay bars in which to sing.

You've got to find your voice, and that's really hard to do when you don't even know how to lip synch to other people's songs.

The Long Grift

Now, I must tell you, I do not support fraud, but I find that criminals can be very interesting and compelling characters.

That leads me to a critique of "Other People's Money," the latest true life scandal from Radar magazine.

Elliot Castro was a working class gypsy/scot from Aberdeen who found his way into the fast-paced life of international credit card, identity, and wire fraud. Sounds kind of dull, right? Wrong.

Elliot Castro amassed an estimated $1 million in a Swiss bank account from his exploits, which included jetting around the world, from Glasgow, to Aberdeen, to London, Dubai, Dublin, Ibiza, Toronto, New York and LA.

He was a loner type of kid who loved looking at maps and atlases and was a geography whiz, and he was gay. He sounds very similar to me. This guy was living the kind of posh life I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams.

The most amazing part of the story is that Elliot had accomplished all of his international crimes by the age of 21. This guy has more chutzpah than I could ever dream of having.

I can't find the story online yet, but Radar is notoriously badly managed. They have gone under twice and come back bigger and badder than before. If you can find the magazine in stores, buy it and save these poor people from themselves.