Raise your hand if you’ve never been to a gay bar.
How many times have we heard these bars being defined as ghettos? How many?
There are even social sciences essays that describe the self-ghettoization of the gay population. These specialized reports hypothesise, and I assume it can be proven, that homosexuals lock themselves up in these glass bells and isolate themselves from the world in which they live.
Some people don’t agree: some people believe that they are simply places where the LGBT community is free to do whatever it wants. We can say that it feels a little like home. These are “normal” places, created voluntarily or otherwise, because at least there (although it is a myth to debunk) they are not beaten for an innocent kiss.
For this reason there has been controversy over a popular Roman bar that, perhaps because of the lack of selection (or maybe not, I don’t know), has seen a rise to homophobic customers.
But how – he was being told – are we in a gay bar and even here we have to defend ourselves from the taunts of these guys?
A question, nonetheless, that isn’t completely illegitimate: in the creative logic of these places is the desire to live one’s sexual orientation peacefully and, if this does not happen, one hopes for the removal of the most conservative fringes –noblesse oblige – of the population through a subjective and discretionary mechanism, sometimes similar to a lottery: selection.
Heterophobia? “Never!” They say.
Do we risk discriminating against those who discriminate? “Well, that maybe yes. So they learn. If someone hits you with “ugly faggot!” and then the Saturday after you find this gentleman in line to buy a ticket, how would you feel?”
To be honest…
The supporters of coupling “gay bar symbol of progress and freedom” are certainly many. Many of them are regular customers of these bars, who may be gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans or hetero gay-friendly. There are in fact many heterosexuals who frequent these places: people who not only don’t fear the stigma but also challenge it, that love pleasure, that have fun. Many end up hooking up as well. And that in the face of such great freedom cannot even imagine that their beloved gay clubs are ghettos.
Ghettos of what?
To understand, it’s essential to see if and how these places really are ghettos. It would be best to start from an encyclopaedic definition of a historical and sociological nature, in which the segregational or marginal dimension of these neighbourhoods is highlighted. Ariel Toaff reminds us that in 1516 the Senate of Venice chose to isolate Jews to a separate area, called ‘ghetto‘ or ‘geto‘ (from ‘gettare‘, which translated from Italian means ‘to throw away’), because it had previously been the site of the city’s foundries, where the bombards and cannons of the Republic were thrown away. Although the origin of the term ghetto is undoubtedly Venetian and not Hebrew, it is important to note, for its psychological implications, that since the beginning Jews generally preferred giving it a transparent Hebrew etymology, making it derive from the word ghet, ‘divorce‘.
In a nutshell, these are places for the reclusion of individuals or groups characterized by peculiar “subjective” conditions, often impervious to the outside, where fundamentally the captives find themselves in a state of oppression or semi-freedom. Strictly from a definitional standpoint, then, the basis for defining gay bars as “ghettos” is missing: they are permeable – everyone is welcome, the customers don’t find themselves in an oppressive condition – on the contrary, they are far from it.
For a similar reason we cannot even define them as the reservations in which Native Americans were segregated, at least those who were not killed or weren’t decimated by hunger, to not accept the agricultural customs of the settlers.
There is certainly a subjective condition of the gay population that unites them to the populations of ghettos and reservations: namely, the peculiar characteristic – of the natural/biological or cultural/ethnic type – of the “recluse”. But this characteristic, in a democratic society, cannot legitimize discrimination. Furthermore, assuming that homosexuals are discriminated against, the varied clientele of these places (and therefore the possibility that everyone, without the distinction of one’s sexual orientation, is welcomed) makes sure that the LGBT community is not separated from the rest of society. So: there is no real wall between “us” and “them.”
Let’s go back to the view of gay bars as reservations, which I believe is the one that comes closest to seeing them as jail: that is, places where the symbolic dominion imposed by society on certain elements of society, makes sure that homosexuals are unconsciously forced to live, believing (and only believing) of being free. Places where you do what you want just because they are created for that: outlets for instincts, of controlled blasphemy, of supervised vices. There it is: Sodomy. Discipline and punishment.
The latter is, of course, an interesting view because it combines self and hetero-discrimination, making everyone happy. However, it can’t proven right, although it is inappropriate to make a definitive verdict: gay bars continue to exist and thrive even in those extremely liberal nations where not only are the rights of gay people almost identical to those of heterosexuals (a necessary but not sufficient condition), but where the LGBT community is an essential element, clearly, not latent and masked (a necessary and sufficient condition). Countries where the percentage of liberal/institutional homophobia is low or equal to zero, and where the society does not need to symbolically subjugate – and if it does, it does so in undetectable ways – those segments of the population that in other places are considered to be “different”.
How do we explain it?
We should, analyzing the cases, go and see if these bars have reached a stage of “evolution”, in line with legal and social progress, and have developed new characteristics that make them no longer “only gay bars” but more generally “open-minded“,” progressive“,” gay-friendly“(the opposite would be bad).
On the other hand, if you want to see everything as black or white, we can think of these places as the only possible alternative with the risk of making them all encompassing. Seen from the opposite side, they will be seen – sometimes without ever having set foot in one – as “squalid dens where gays go”: they do their things there, and that’s fine.
No, it’s not fine.
