Want Vibrant Cities? Save Gay Bars.
After I graduated from university, I travelled with my boyfriend, best friend and brother to London for a summer of self-discovery—or that’s what we told our parents. What we found was the dance floor.
I can still see 21-year-old me moving my body at G-A-Y (Londoners pronounce each letter), a gay bar based then at the Astoria Theatre on Charing Cross Road. It was well past midnight on a cool summer evening, the bass was booming, and the floors were sticky from the sloshing of sugary drinks. I scream-sang along to “Feel It,” a song by the Italian music group the Tamperer. It was a thin slice of time, a sweet flash of life that has stayed with me all these years. As I remember it now, I feel an intimate connection between my newly out early-twenties self, the more settled version of myself now and everyone else who spent time in that iconic space. G-A-Y closed in 2009 when a railway project tore through it. But I will remember that night as long as I live.
London is a city that loves to dance after dark. These days, though, the music is fading. In the first two decades of the 2000s, the number of gay bars, pubs and nightclubs in the capital fell by a staggering 58 per cent—125 venues dwindled to just 53. The story is much the same in other places. In the United States, an average of 15 gay bars have closed every year since 2008. Today, there are 45 per cent fewer gay bars than in 2002. In 1976, there were 2,500 gay bars in just the U.S. Today, there are fewer than 1,400 worldwide.
We don’t have similar data in Canada, but stories are mounting about the loss of our own beloved gay bars. Club 120, which made a name for itself as one of Toronto’s most inclusive nightclubs, closed in 2020 after 14 years on Church Street. Fredericton’s only gay bar, Boom!, shuttered a year later. And just last year, Calgary’s The Backlot—known as the Cheers of the local queer and trans community—closed after a 28-year run. Vancouver, the city I call home, has experienced its own fair share of gay-bar heartbreak. After nearly 30 years, the Odyssey, a 5,000-square-foot nightclub known for steamy “shower power” stalls that featured strippers, closed for good on June 30, 2018—just before both Vancouver Pride and Canada Day.
When a favourite place closes, it feels like a part of you dies with it. But nightlife is too important to give up. Knowing there is a door you can walk through, a gay bar where you can be entirely yourself, is a source of unending power. Today, though, we live in a time when 2SLGBTQ+ rights are being stripped away—the White House has taken an anti-trans position, and in Saskatchewan, Bill 137 restricts trans kids’ ability to determine their names and pronouns.
As governments slam doors shut, we urgently need more places of our own. Gay bars are sites of respite, refuge and resistance. But nightlife is also good for our cities. The activities that take place between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.—including all the businesses that come alive after sunset, like theatres, art galleries, bars, and concert venues—make up “the night economy.” In London, a city I wrote about in my recent book Long Live Queer Nightlife, the night economy accounts for more than 1.6 million jobs and £26 billion in value.
The nightlife in Canadian cities’ is similarly crucial. Ottawa, for example, is home to 4,600 nightlife-related businesses that employ more than 38,000 workers collectively and generate $1.5 billion in annual spending. Of that amount, 84 per cent is spent by residents and 16 per cent by visitors. It’s no surprise that 88 per cent of Ottawa residents say that a vibrant nightlife is highly important to their city’s quality of life.
Economic figures are persuasive, to be sure, but nightlife bolsters our cities in other ways. When we go out and have fun with our friends, important things are happening. Those moments create a shared emotional energy that promotes group pride and social attachments, reminding us who we are, how far we have come and what it is to feel free and joyous.
While researching my book, I met a 30-year-old queer and nonbinary artist called Brooke who told me, “It’s nice to think of a party or a space as a way of organizing people’s engagement with the past.” That reminded me of my visits to the historic Stonewall Inn in New York. The early-morning police raid in 1969—and riots that ensued—was a watershed moment in modern 2SLGBTQ+ history. But it was being there, in person, that made the past come alive for me and made it feel real to me.
“We’re all walking vessels of history,” Damien, an education officer at the U.K. Houses of Parliament, told me. “Sometimes we don’t realize it unless we meet others, and we talk about it. It’s like a pond: someone chucks in a stone, and you get all these ripples of memory and history, and you’re swimming in that pool together.” I find that such an appealing image. And to feel that sense of community and continuity is powerful.
It’s not lost on anyone that the disappearance of vibrant spaces like these is, well, a major loss. As gay bars closed through the 2010s, Amsterdam decided to flip the script on how we think about nightlife and appoint a night mayor. It was the first city in the world to do so. London soon followed suit, as did New York City. When I met Amy Lamé, London’s “night czar,” at City Hall, she emphasized the importance of gay bars to cities: “These venues build resilient communities. They create safe spaces. We need spaces where people can be themselves without question.”
Mathieu Grondin, who calls himself an “old punk,” became the first night mayor in Ottawa—and in Canada—earlier this year. That doesn’t mean he’s organizing parties or opening new clubs, though. Instead, Grondin’s job focuses on revitalizing nightlife by removing red tape. “I’m making sure the soil is fertile so other people can plant seeds,” he explained in an interview with Maclean’s.
What each of these cities recognizes—and what others are also beginning to see—is that nightlife is more than a refuge, more than a historical site, more than a platform for protest, more than a money-maker and more than a party. I see nightlife as a cultural asset, contributing uniquely to the identity, history and traditions of our cities.
To understand what that means, travel with me to Berlin, a city that people visit from around the world for its nightlife. In the past decade, nearly 100 clubs have closed in this world-famous music mecca. Locals call the phenomenon “clubsterben,” a word that translates grimly to “the club that dies.” The Berlin Club Commission—a collective of venue owners, business managers, and nightlife supporters—has been campaigning to draw attention to the problem. In parliament, the BCC called nightlife “the pulse of the city,” drawing an estimated three million tourists and generating $2.35 billion for the local economy. At the time, nightlife venues were considered entertainment sites. The commission recommended that the government reclassify them as formal cultural institutions.
In 2021, the German parliament voted almost unanimously in favour of the reclassification, a change that is anything but small or semantic. As entertainment venues, gay bars fell into the same category as arcades, brothels and casinos. But as cultural assets, they are recognized as places that preserve the highest achievements in art, history, and human expression.
Germany’s reclassification of music clubs with demonstrable cultural relevance—places that focus on artists, program curation and innovation, like Berlin’s legendary Berghain nightclub—offers them the same legal status as concert halls, theatres, museums, and opera houses. They’re eligible for financial aid during future pandemics, operating permits in wider areas of the city, exemptions from noise limits, and, critically, tax breaks. Check it out: as cultural institutions, the tax rate for German gay bars dropped from 19 to 7 per cent, making them more financially viable and protecting them from future development pressures.
Closer to home, I find myself asking: if Berlin protects its nightlife as a cultural asset, what can Canadian cities do to preserve ours?
The answer is for us to recognize our nightlife as part of a cultural ecosystem. Only then can we support the vitality and longevity of the gay bars that contribute so much to our cities. We can create independent coalitions, like Berlin’s Club Commission, and more Canadian cities can follow Ottawa’s lead and appoint night mayors. (Vancouver considered a “night advocate” for a brief moment in 2022, but the idea sadly fizzled.) These initiatives recognize gay bars as cultural assets and motivate our cities to manage them as public goods by rethinking land use regulations, zoning codes, building permits, and tax rates that expand expressions of arts and culture.
We also need to quantify Canada’s night economy. Only with such data can we systematically track the health of cultural assets like gay bars, compare trends at home with those abroad, and ensure we don’t allow crucial cultural hubs to go extinct.
My last bit of advice, inspired by lessons drawn from the COVID-19 pandemic, is to create targeted funds to buoy these cultural assets in times of need. For public safety, gay bars in London were forced to close from March of 2020 to July of 2021—16 gruelling months of total income loss. During this time, the city invited bar owners to apply to its new £2.3-billion Culture Recovery Fund, of which 225,000 pounds was earmarked exclusively for gay bars. A new study of the program confirms that London bar owners were able to use these grants to cover operating costs and wages—and, ultimately, to survive the pandemic’s economic wrath.
Canadian cities must take note. Amsterdam, Berlin and London offer models we can use to meet the moment. Just as we fight to preserve heritage buildings and museums, we need to protect the places that light up the night.
Amin Ghaziani is professor of sociology and Canada Research Chair in Urban Sexualities at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Long Live Queer Nightlife, published by Princeton University Press.
