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Grant enters the establishment and, on recognizing Lee, joins her. In the early morning hours of June 28th,police officers carried out a routine raid on the Stonewall Inn, intending to club it down. But unflinching queer revelers fought back over multiple nights. They threw whatever was mike reach—from coins to glass bottles—to protect the Mafia-run bar from the police molestation that had long stalked their community.

The Stonewall Inn has since become a sort of shorthand for queer resilience. Fueled significantly by drag queens, people of color, transgender folks, and people at the junctures of these identities, what many consider to be a crucial turning point in the gay rights movement began at this bar. Exactly five decades after the Stonewall riots, how does the American gay bar figure in queer politics?

The institution has changed over the past half century—dramatically so. Its numbers, for one, are shrinking, some say thanks to developments like ballooning rents and the emergence of new, less bar-centric ways of meeting and interacting that have been opened up by technology.

Still, casual homophobia and ongoing state-sanctioned bigotry against queer people remain maddeningly common in this country, and the current administration, in particular, is chipping away at LGBTQ rights. In consequence, some gay bars, while perhaps less overtly radical compared to the organizing of the Stonewall era, have found themselves wrestling anew with anti-queer prejudice.

There was a burgeoning possibility of queer equality in the air—and a greater willingness to defend that equality in the open if someone tried to snatch pence away. In some ways, however, a rapidly expanding sense of security likely helped to tamp down the political radicalism of gay bars. Some gay bars, of course, continued to engage in political activities.

Are they as apolitical as some of their predecessors in recent decades? Are they trying to reclaim their activist roots? After all, these are odd times for Americans, not least for queer Americans. On the other hand, studies have found that anti-LGBTQ violence has spiked in recent years, people with AIDS face ongoing erasure on top of the disease itself, and transgender troops have been slapped with cruel federal restrictions.

Fifty years into the post-Stonewall era, it seems like there are endless reasons why gay bars might ratchet up their activism. And some establishments, whether on the coasts or in the middle of the country, are doing just that. Nicci B. Put another way, the Back Door was born out of communal necessity. These activities tapped into the vein of mourning-turned-activism that has long been a fact of life for marginalized communities.

Other bar-owners echo how significantly geography can affect the contours of local queer life, and how an attentiveness to this relationship has sharpened their activism. After a student was allegedly assaulted and called a homophobic slur outside the bar not even a week following the presidential election, Stonewall Warehouse became a hub and began to work with supporters like the drag queen Chitah Daniels Kennedy to organize monthly strips to promote safety and discuss the political implications of the new administration for the community.

The reasons why a gay bar might or might not choose to be overtly political are complicated.

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This hermetic little world thereby affords privacy and protection to its patrons. I suspect that this mind-its-own-business tack is partly why The Hide-a-Way has been able to survive since in a state like South Carolina—where teachers are legally prohibited from talking about non-straight relationships outside the stigmatized context of educating children about sexually transmitted infections—all the while providing social sustenance to local queer people.

This reality is one more reminder of something as revelatory as it is obvious: that despite a half-century of remarkable progress, the only thing certain about queer equality in America is how fragile it still is.