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........

© Macleans