The 'Last Call': Why losing our bars guts gayborhoods and mutes queer nights

I still remember my first night out on Hurst Street, the heart of Birmingham's queer district in the U.K. I was seventeen, thrilled and slightly terrified by the prospect of entering my first gay bar. Escorted by a group of queer friends a few years older than me, I felt transported: the music, the energy, and the fact that men were casually, freely kissing other men without fear of reprisal, all under a cascade of lights in a room redolent of Jean-Paul Gaultier and poppers. It felt like coming home.

Twenty years later, I have spent a significant portion of my life frequenting establishments in Birmingham's Hurst Street, Manchester's Canal Street, and London's Soho. There is nothing quite like a good—or even a slightly naff—gay bar. They were once the only places where LGBTQ+ people could find fellowship. Now, at a time when queer culture seems to be simultaneously mainstreamed and marginalized depending on where you live, these spaces remain preciously, imperfectly ours.

My favorite of them all was the Village Inn. However, in March 2025, news broke that the developers had won, and shortly after, the Village closed its doors for good. But the story isn't quite over: while the original building has been closed down, the bar owners have relocated the business to a "shiny, brand new cabaret venue in the heart of Brum:" it now occupies a floor in the Nightingale club, just up the street. On the one hand, this is a happy ending, showing the resilience and adaptability of a community that will always find places to gather and ways to thrive. But it's also bittersweet. Hurst Street, as I and countless others remember it, will never be the same.

While the acquisition of real estate to convert into luxury flats (read: soulless, overpriced white boxes) is merely a symptom of capitalism's indifferent sprawl, it's hard not to be concerned by its side effects. The folding of the Village Inn into Nightingale's super-venue leaves the rest of the street looking stripped bare, with remaining holdout venues more vulnerable to the same creeping developers, not to mention noise complaints from the people moving into these brand-new apartment complexes. Birmingham's gay quarter was already limited to a street and a half. Still, it was a street and a half where same-sex couples could kiss and hold hands publicly and where trans and nonbinary people could enjoy a night out without fear of harassment. Where we could be loudly, visibly ourselves. I fear that confining queer revelry to vanishingly fewer buildings will shrink the city's queer scene even further. There'll come a time when even that slight stretch of road no longer feels safe.

And it's not just Birmingham; this is happening all over the country. In January, it was announced that the iconic G-A-Y Bar in London was going up for sale. In December 2024, Bar Plus, the only LGBTQ+ bar in Chelmsford, closed down. Further afield, New York City's iconic Barracuda Lounge closed its doors earlier this year. On their podcast, RuPaul's Drag Race stars Trixie and Katya recently mourned the closure of This Is It!, the oldest gay bar in Trixie's home state of Wisconsin, with Katya aptly stating: "Gay bars can be sanctuaries."

In the era of social media and dating apps, you might say that the need for queer nightlife has abated. These spaces are no longer the only avenues the LGBTQ+ community has to meet people, form friendships, and initiate romantic relationships. But that would fail to acknowledge the joy of being in a room filled entirely with people like yourself, the feeling of coming home that I treasured when I was 17 and that future generations of baby gays also deserve.

I just hope we're not left in a state where those things can only be found in the pages of fiction.

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