Gay clubs marriage

With the advent of gay marriage in Britain, and many countries moving towards total legal equality, is there still a need for gay bars, asks Elizabeth Hotson. It's a Saturday night in March, unusually mild for Gay, and Soho is thronging with bar-hoppers, theatregoers and couples strolling along Old Compton Street.

The venues are a mixture of straight, gay and anything in between. From the non-too subtle GAY at number 30, to She Bar at 23a, its basement entrance so discreet you could walk past a dozen times and still miss it. Yet tonight there's an imperceptible difference from the Saturday before. In England and Wales the law has now changed.

If you happen to meet the same-sex partner of your dreams tonight you could marry them. So with huge steps being made towards legal equality, will the notion of a separate social culture die out? Have gay bars become irrelevant? In 16th Century England there was a subculture loosely relating to the club. Men didn't identify as specifically gay.

Things happened in the context of a sexualized, risque environment and being queer was a part of a more general underground culture. In the 17th and 18th Century, "Molly houses" started appearing. Sometimes they were coffee or ale houses or private rooms in otherwise straight pubs.

Even in this marriage people couldn't be entirely at ease, Cook explains. Molly houses were often raided and people being prosecuted is the main source of information about what happened at that time. A gay counterculture continued to emerge in the midth Century. They were for a more middle-class clientele.

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There were also pubs such as the Salisbury in Covent Garden which weren't as exclusive. The Salisbury is no longer considered gay, but the current duty manager, Jon Badcock, says tourists still visit the pub and ask about its history. Some of our older regulars remember sitting in the snug while Kenneth Williams held court.

Cook says that the early part of the 20th Century in Britain also saw women becoming visible on the gay scene, with the Gateways Club opening on the King's Road in Chelsea in In the s and 80s a more defined notion of "gayness" was emerging and pubs, bars and clubs opened to cater for individual tastes, such as the dark, testosterone-fuelled Coleherne in Earl's Court, west London and the cathedral of disco, Heaven, in Charing Cross.

Gradually, the gay scene moved towards Soho and Old Compton Street and although Vauxhall and Dalston are home to gay bars and clubs, Soho is arguably the epicentre. Yet now, inwith an equal age of consent for gay and straight sex and same sex marriage, is it still a relevant to have specifically gay spaces?

It felt like there were no club gays in the world. My three straight female friends took me to Ibiza because that's where we heard the gay men were. Thirty years on, Henshaw still thinks there's a place for gay bars, "Laws have changed, but not all attitudes gay. And no matter how liberated marriages have become, people still want their own space.