Club Icon is in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a bedroom community midway between Chicago and Milwaukee. While big cities boast extensive public transport systems, smaller cities face an obstacle completely unrelated to social attitudes: the drive.
All the decent booze is $40, so you have to charge $4.50 and they can’t really afford it, or they can only afford one.” One of her patrons leaned forward to add, “The economy went to shit 10 years ago.” In post-industrial middle America, going out is an expensive option, and not an easily accessible one, either.
“When we first opened, we were selling 12-ounce drafts three for a dollar, now a keg has gone from $30 to $80, and that’s a lot of money. The cost of doing business was also highlighted by Mary Green, owner of Sneakers in Jamestown, New York, in the far west of the state near Lake Chautauqua. One of them has an outdoor bar in the alley between the buildings and they have block parties in it, and there’s more gays there than here.” Alex Sphon, President of the NW PA Pride Alliance disagreed: “LGBT culture is dying because of integration.” Joe countered that the reason Erie’s gay bars are failing isn’t due to more choices, but fewer patrons: “Everyone isn’t going out as much as they used to.” This he attributes not to social attitudes, but economic realities: “The city’s economy is in the toilet and has been, and when manufacturing left they never made any plans to do something different.” Without money, people can’t afford the $5 cover charge that helps keep the lights on. Sure, LGBT-acceptance has meant that gays and lesbians have more choices in going out, as Joe explained: “These days our biggest competition are the straight bars in town. They are institutional histories of a region, a safer place to meet strangers, escape families, or bump into old friends or new lovers.” Wayne offer more than a night’s entertainment or a place for patrons to be themselves. “Small-city gay bars like those in Lima or Ft. The “world’s smallest gay pride parade” that musters in the club’s parking lot was featured in a popular 2011 podcast and a 2017 magazine article, leading the city’s tourist office to launch a regional campaign advertising Erie as “your off-the-beaten-path gay-cation destination.” A television spot, featuring The Zone, aired on Buffalo, New York-area televisions, promoting Erie’s beaches, art galleries, and nightlife. The Zone Dance Club is the hub of Northwest Pennsylvania’s LGBT community and the last bar standing in Erie, which had three as recently as 20 years ago. And as the fictional depiction of a small-city bar in Glee should remind us, there are 147 small cities with a lone gay bar which, when added together, constitute as many gay bars as in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago combined. They are institutional histories of a region, a safer place to meet strangers, escape families, or bump into old friends or new lovers. Small-city gay bars like those in Lima or Ft. Patrons of Fort Wayne, Indiana’s, Babylon Nightclub, for example, told the drag queen who brought them on stage one evening that they’d driven from hometowns more than an hour away: Muncie, Indiana Coldwater, Michigan and Fort Shawnee, Ohio. They are the only physical places where LGBTQ people gather in public, and they serve multi-county regions of multiple states. Gay bars are a marker of cosmopolitanism for small cities. At some point the bar stopped using its original name, “Somewhere in Time When Even the Moon is Not Enuff,” before it was fictionalized in the Fox sitcom Glee, which introduced the world to a shinier, more musical Lima. I’d driven to this small city of under 40,000 souls for the express purpose of interviewing the manager of Somewhere, Lima’s LGBT bar and club since 1982. I was in town for the book project that had taken my research assistant Tory and me through 27 states, interviewing gay bar professionals. I hadn’t even told her that I already knew. “We have a gay bar here,” the waitress informed me after I told her how impressed I was with the offerings in downtown Lima, Ohio.