“You see familiar faces and get to have that camaraderie with everyone. He’s the general manager of Metropolitan, a gay bar located in Brooklyn, New York.
“Some people treat them just as a bar, but to so many others it’s a community,” Steven McEnrue says. “It’s rather a dirty version, where people can feel a different kind of ease and be true to themselves.” “I wanted to let the reader know that I wasn’t going to start with a sanitized version of what these bars could be,” Atherton Lin, a writer and editor based in London, told me when we spoke earlier this year. In the first words of Chapter 1, there it is: “It’s starting to smell like penis here.” William Faulkner couldn’t have conjured up a better opening. It’s even referred to in the very first line of Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, the recently released book written by Jeremy Atherton Lin that aims to capture the intricacies, complications, and fabulousness of this culture.
It turns out that Gay Bar Smell (a free cologne idea one of the Queer Eye guys should cash in on) was an auspicious introduction for me, and an iconic one at that.
The neuroticism of being closeted is like that stress of seeing a cop while you’re stoned, but 24/7, and also, you like gay sex. Not only that, but they'd also run and gossip to all my friends and family. Surely if some passerby saw me even casually glance in, they’d figure out I was gay. I’d walk through that smell almost every day while still in the closet, holding a steadfast, soldierly resolve to stare straight ahead. A mixture of cologne and BO, it’d waft out of the open doors of the cavernous establishment down the street from where I lived, like man cake emanating from a queer bakery. Even before I ever went inside a gay bar, I was aware of the smell. Please be aware of changing local rules, and check individual restaurant websites for any additional restrictions such as mask requirements. The latest CDC guidance for vaccinated diners during the COVID-19 outbreak is here dining out still carries risks for unvaccinated diners and workers. Note the points on this map, like all Eater PDX maps, are not ranked rather, they are organized geographically. For more specific Pride events in Portland, check out this guide. The bars may not be as packed and the party may end much earlier nonetheless, these gay bars are still kicking, even after yet another brutal year. June is normally a period of time when queer Portlanders cram themselves into bars for drag shows and dancing, and as restrictions begin to loosen, some bars are bringing back their drag brunches, scantily-clad performers, and long-awaited festivities. Still, not all is lost - there are still a slew of spaces that offer adult beverages, food, and great company, as this map to Portland’s best LBGTQ-friendly bars and restaurants attests. In 2020, Pride was a much milder affair - a necessity, given the circumstances - and the city’s few gay bars held on, in attempt to make it to the other side of the pandemic. Even before COVID-19 decimated much of the restaurant and bar industry, gay nightlife spots in Portland, Oregon were an endangered species - In fact, bars catering to local lesbians are nearly extinct, and in recent years, Portland’s queer community has said goodbye to holdouts like Fox & Hounds, Sullivan’s Gulch, and Embers.