But the smartphone changed that, and it was an all-of-a-sudden thing. “When I first came out, you went to a gay bar to meet gay people.
“It all changed with smartphones,” LaFary said, referring to the widely held theory that mobile dating apps like Grindr, by facilitating meetups online, helped render bars unnecessary. Gay bars are up against two major cultural shifts. In London the Queen’s Head, a gay bar since the 1920s, closed in September, going the way of other prominent gay bars in that European capital. The 501’s closing “comes just weeks after the Barracks closed in Louisville,” reported the gay news website Great Lakes Den, lamenting that “most of Indiana will no longer have easy access to a leather bar.” San Francisco was down to just a few dozen gay bars compared with more than 100 in the 1970s, according to a 2011 report in Slate, and Manhattan had but 44, half as many as it did at its gay-bar peak in 1978. Scotten is not going to squeeze out gays, he said, but it’s hard to make a living these days catering solely to gays, and so he would like to broaden his clientele.
