Introduction

Abstract

Gay bars provide the stages for queer world-making and are the venues through and against which queer people explore their identities, sexual fantasies, and social relationships. Bars have operated as the medium for the historical emergence of gay male public life in the US. Bars present the venues through and in which public gay male life could be imagined and expressed, and via which gay male identities became recognizable in ways that were generative, normative, emulable, constraining, and exclusionary. This introduction offers a historical overview of the emergence of gay male bars as an institution, the significance of the Stonewall riots, and changes in gay bar cultures and politics during the gay liberation era and beyond. This introduction challenges more recent claims of the gay bar's decline and offers an overview of the chapters that follow.