In times past, if you wanted to get laid you had to spend money on drinks and a coat check – money that might have been better spent on rent. Business just dropped, and it wasn’t a gradual thing.
![theory chicago gay bar theory chicago gay bar](https://www.gayout.com/images/com_hotspots.hotspot/2705/thumbs/a9d286d1af1600d10051d5203fa9e2bc551b9f34_1230090_3UBYbnGNBOHpqJmx4qlnk_uJtUvk1cISrtpxmkcRb2w_600x600.jpg)
But the smartphone changed that, and it was an all-of-a-sudden thing. ‘When I first came out, you went to a gay bar to meet gay people. It takes a few paragraphs to get there, but the Trib finally gets to the fundamental reason that gay bars are disappearing: “‘It all changed with smartphones,’ LaFary said, referring to the widely held theory that mobile dating apps like Grindr, by facilitating meetups online, helped render bars unnecessary. In London the Queen’s Head, a gay bar since the 1920s, closed in September, going the way of other prominent gay bars in that European capital.” “The 501’s closing ‘comes just weeks after the Barracks closed in Louisville,’ reported the gay news website Great Lakes Den, lamenting that ‘most of Indiana will no longer have easy access to a leather bar.’ San Francisco was down to just a few dozen gay bars compared with more than 100 in the 1970s, according to a 2011 report in Slate, and Manhattan had but 44, half as many as it did at its gay-bar peak in 1978. “It’s the same elsewhere,” the Trib continues. ‘Guys my age stopped going out to bars all the time,’ said LaFary, 48, ‘and the new generation never did catch on.’” One wonders if LaFary is the name he was born with. The Trib quotes a bartender who offers one theory of gay bars’ demise: “Jack LaFary poured the last of the drinks at the 501 in October but had seen the end coming well before then. Indianapolis! This goes a long way toward explaining Indiana Governor and soon-to-be-Vice President Mike Pence’s pronounced homophobia – his state’s capital featured a gay bar on practically every block! He couldn’t take a step outside the capitol without being forced to see gay people drinking, laughing, and enjoying the company of other gay people. What shocks me most about this is the revelation that until very recently Indianapolis sported 10 gay bars. In the past six months Talbott Street, long-known for its drag shows, closed, as did the 501 Eagle, a bar favored by leather enthusiasts since 1986.” “Among the casualties: the venerable Varsity, the city’s oldest gay bar, dating back to the 1940s. “Since 2015 at least five have closed their doors in Indianapolis, about half the city’s total,” the Trib writes.