Although it is disturbing that women are increasingly excluded from participation in an important if diminished dimension of gay commercial and social life, women's bars have by no means disappeared from urban queer life. The institution of the lesbian bar is far from obsolete. Indeed, gay and lesbian bars continue to display an impressive vitality.

Since the 1980s, bars have continued to undergo a process of specialization, with different establishments catering to different ethnic subpopulations and communities of interest, such as leathermen or Bears or country music aficionados or transgendered individuals. Some bars especially cater to a younger crowd, while others cater to a predominantly older group; some attract a mixed clientele of men and women, while others cater to a single sex.

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While nearly all the "back room bars" have been closed, bars that feature dancers or strippers abound, especially in resort areas, and many other bars are oriented around cruising and the pursuit of sex. Other bars, however, are neighborhood institutions that serve a core clientele who come principally to socialize with friends. Many bars perform more than one of these functions simultaneously or alternately.

Despite the decline in the centrality of bars to gay culture, in many places across the country, gay and lesbian bars remain the most (and sometimes only) visible manifestation of glbtq life. In such circumstances, the role bars continue to play in building community should not be underestimated.

Bars of all varieties fill an important role in glbtq communities by providing sponsorship and hosting space for dozens of community organizations, such as sports teams and choirs, and special events, such as Pride celebrations and contests. They also provide much needed advertising revenue and distribution points for the gay press. They are also a locus of efforts to combat the spread of HIV and STDs.

While bars no longer retain a monopoly on gay socialization, their financial wherewithal and symbolic power allow them to retain important functions in contemporary community life.

Queer Bars as Targets

Because gay and lesbian bars are among the most visible manifestations of gay life, they are, sadly, also frequent targets of rage against the gay and lesbian community.

Examples of such rage include numerous cases of (often unsolved) vandalism, arson, and bombings of gay and lesbian bars all over the world. In 1973, for instance, 32 people burned to death in the Upstairs Lounge, a New Orleans gay bar, in a fire set by an arsonist who has never been identified. In 1979, during Anita Bryant's anti-gay "Save Our Children" campaign, a lesbian bar in St. Louis, Mor or Les, was firebombed.

Other examples include such incidents as occurred in 1980 when a deranged man, Ronald Crumpley, claiming that he was acting under God's orders, walked into a gay bar in New York with a submachine gun and proceeded to kill two men and injure six others. In a similar incident in 2001, Ronald Edward Gay, a Vietnam-era veteran who described himself as a "Christian soldier," went on a shooting rampage in a Roanoke, Virginia gay bar, killing one person and injuring six others.

Another religiously-motivated attack on a gay bar is that committed by right-wing extremist Eric Rudolph, who, in addition to bombing Olympic Park in Atlanta in 1996 and an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama in 1997, also bombed an Atlanta gay bar, injuring five people, in 1997.

Gay bashers, including serial killers and sexual predators, often target gay bars, selecting their victims from patrons who leave establishments catering to gay men and lesbians.

The frequency of attacks on gay and lesbian bars and their patrons is a measure of the vulnerability of glbtq people in a homophobic society. As symbols of gay and lesbian openness, and often of gay and lesbian pride, bars that cater to the glbtq community are regarded as particularly galling by those who hate and fear homosexuals.

Precisely because gay and lesbian bars remain the most visible manifestations of a gay and lesbian presence, attacks on these institutions are intended to intimidate and frighten the entire glbtq community. Conversely, the homophobia that the attacks represent makes the need for gay and lesbian bars all the more obvious. In such venues, gay men and lesbians find respite from the larger society's incessant assaults on our self-esteem.

The Bear Movement has inspired a number of organizations, events, publications, and resources dedicated to affirming and eroticizing large-bodied, hirsute gay men, known as Bears.

Notable in the twentieth century both for its pioneering efforts in homosexual emancipation and for the subsequent Nazi persecution of homosexuals, Berlin is now a major participant in the struggle to gain legal recognition of gay relationships.

Boycotts, the refusal to patronize companies or institutions, have in recent decades been organized by glbtq rights advocates to protest discriminatory practices and policies.

Butch-femme identities are controversial and difficult to define with precision, but both roles subvert prescribed gender and sexual expectations; ultimately, the butch-femme dynamic is a unique way of living and loving.

Historically, cabarets and revues have been much more likely to mention or imply same-sex desire than the "legitimate" theater; and same-sex desire has been less frequently condemned in cabarets and revues than in mainstream plays.

Circuit Parties refer to an ongoing series of gay-themed events that take place in major metropolitan areas throughout the year.

Since the advent of the Internet, lesbians, gay men, and sexual and gender nonconformists of all kinds have been able to use a variety of computer-mediated communications to meet and network both on- and offline.

No popular art form is more closely identified with gay culture than disco and dance music.

A recent arrival in the drag arena, drag kings are part of an international drag movement that emerged in London and San Francisco in the mid 1980s.

Female impersonation need say nothing about sexual identity, but it has for a long time been almost an institutionalized aspect of gay male culture.

Violence perpetrated against people thought by their attackers to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered occurs with disturbing frequency in the United States and other countries.

Glbtq people have been in the vanguard of gentrification, a process of renewing neighborhoods that has both positive and negative effects.

Hate Crimes are crimes towards persons or groups motivated by the victim's race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

"Leather" is a blanket term for a large array of sexual preferences, identities, relationship structures, and social organizations loosely tied together by the thread of what is conventionally understood as sadomasochistic sex.

McCarthyism, which attempted in the late 1940s and early 1950s to expunge Communists and fellow travelers from American public life, made homosexuals the chief scapegoats of the Cold War.

As part of its agenda to preserve an "Aryan master race," Nazism persecuted homosexuals as "asocial parasites"; more than 100,000 men were arrested on homosexual charges during the Nazi years, with 5,000-15,000 gay men incarcerated in concentration camps.

Off and on over two centuries, New York City has also reigned as the capital of homosexual, transgender, and queer life in America.

San Francisco has enjoyed a reputation as a "gay mecca" since World War II.

Sex workers range from well-organized professionals who work for escorting agencies, perform in pornographic films, or manage independent escort businesses to those who engage in unpremeditated and sporadic cash transactions resulting from casual encounters.

James Baldwin, a pioneering figure in twentieth-century literature, wrote sustained and articulate challenges to American racism and mandatory heterosexuality.

In a series of five interlinked pulp novels set in Greenwich Village and its homosexual bars in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bannon provides an important record of lesbian life in a period when few women dared speak openly about homosexuality.

Lesbian poet and novelist Rita Mae Brown, best known for the highly successful Rubyfruit Jungle, resists neat categorization.

Margaret Clap, also known as "Mother Clap," operated one of the more popular "molly houses" in London; after it was raided in 1726, she was pilloried and imprisoned.

Formed soon after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the short-lived but influential Gay Liberation Front brought a new militancy to the movement that became known as gay liberation.

Radclyffe Hall, who lived her lesbianism openly and proudly, is best known for The Well of Loneliness, arguably the most important lesbian novel ever written.

In early eighteenth-century London, molly houses provided men who were interested in other men sexually a space in which to act on same-sex sexual desires and to develop a sense of community.

Designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978, the rainbow flag has become a popular (and sometimes controversial), internationally recognized symbol of gay and lesbian pride.

José Sarria, a San Francisco singer, drag performer, and activist, exemplified gay pride before the phrase was invented.

The confrontations between police and demonstrators at the Stonewall Inn in New York City the weekend of June 27-29, 1969 mark the beginning of the modern glbtq movement for equal rights.

The multifaceted Gore Vidal is important in the gay literary heritage because of the straightforwardness with which he has pursued gay themes and included gay characters in his work.