Small-City Gay Bars, Big-City Urbanism

Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know about them in the U.S. comes from outliers: gay neighborhoods in four big cities. This essay explores the similarities of 52 small-city gay bars to each other, and their differences from big-city gayborhood bars. Small-city gay bars are surprisingly integrated with straight people in their often red-state communities and are as racially diverse than the counties in which they reside. They are subcultural amenities not just for LGBT people but for straights as well, fostering cosmopolitan lifestyles for large geographical regions. I conclude with an argument for the importance of small cities to understand urbanism generally. Small cities are a key analytic object to disentangle urban effects from modern life generally. They reveal the way in which contemporary urban scholars often implicitly define urbanism in terms of commercial diversity at the expense of the reasons why many people prefer to live in small cities: proximity to kin or nature, and the fact that most big-city pleasures can be found everywhere. Studying small cities provides one way of integrating studies along the urban-rural interface and developing a more holistic, empirically rich, and theoretically sound sociology of place.