The article “Gay Bars Have Been Closing En masse. Maybe That’s a Good Thing,” by Ian Kumamoto, was published by MIC. The link to the articles is the following:
https://www.mic.com/identity/gay-bars-closing-queer-people-of-color
This article shows the hostility of the LGBTQXYZ to Gays because they refuse to behave by the social norms of the Alphabet Soup Scolds. It also shows how their ideology is driven by jealousy and an anti-sex ideology that is given a cover of supposedly being progressive. Basically, they aren’t able to pick up someone at the bar and so it is some type of oppression.
This is why a lot of Gays don’t get involved with organizations, because they places filled with persons hostile to them.
It isn’t a Gay publication but has the temerity to be gleeful over the destruction of institutions of the Gay community. This is because they don’t expect any retribution or push back from the LGBTQXYZ which has as one of its interests attacking the Gay community.
Kumamoto just pulls things out of the air to attack the Gay bars. People go to Gay bars to socialize, have fun, and forget about their cares, and step out of the heterosexual worlds. However, Kumamoto feels that is wrong, at the Gay bar he thinks they should be sitting around thinking about the violence against “Black trans and non-binary people.” It doesn’t occur to Kumamoto that during the rest of the week people might be thinking of this and other weighty problems, but they go to the bar to escape.
What Kumamoto is trying to do is slander Gay people as being frivolous and uncaring because when they go out to the club, they go there to have fun.
He anti-sex attitude is very upfront because he contrasts being concerned over violence with “the main concern among patrons seems to be who looks fuckable enough to take home.”
Gays live in the straight world. It isn’t impossible, but it is very unlikely that they will be able to meet someone for their sexual needs outside of the hook up apps and Gay bars or other Gay spaces where Gays concentrate to meet Gays. So, the few hours that a Gay person is at the cruisy Gay bar can be critical to finding a sex partner. Gays have sexual needs and acting to satisfy them isn’t a bad thing as Kumamoto tries to imply.
Kumamoto is also setting up a false opposite, just because a Gay person is at the bar to satisfy his sexual needs doesn’t preclude that he doesn’t have concerns regarding society. There is the rest of the week when the Gay person isn’t in the Gay bar, and even in the Gay bar he might be socializing and cruising at the same time and they might be discussing social issues or just fun things, because a Gay bar is a place to escape straight society.
As we will see Kumamoto is angry because he isn’t seen as “fuckable” as much as he would hope to be and hates Gay men because a lot don’t want to fuck him. Of course, we don’t really know why Kumamoto doesn’t do well at bars, his article leaves it to us to assume that he is unpopular because he is Asian and not something else.
Desire for sex doesn’t preclude having a concern for social issues and they aren’t opposites. Gays don’t go to the bars 24 hours a day, seven days of the week. They have the whole week to think about social issues outside the bar, but if they are going to meet someone, their opportunity is going to be best in the few hours that they are at the bar.
This is basic Gay life, to meet people face to face you need to go to Gay spaces. Also, Gays deserve to have social recreation like anyone else.
Again, Kumamoto is angry and just slandering Gay people.
Kumamoto wants to show that Gay bars are horrible by describing the experiences of a Lisa Guraya at Gay bars. Guraya claims that “Every time,” she is at a Gay bar she is bumped into and she thinks that it happens because she is “invisible” to Gay men because she isn’t sexually desired by Gays. Someone needs to tell Guraya that getting bumped into is something that happens at Gay bars, and stop feeling persecuted. A least now they didn’t bump into you with a cigarette and burn a hole in a garment.
Then we find out the cause of Guraya’s ire at Gay bars. It turns out that there are straight women in Gay bars and they don’t want to date Lesbians. Further, Guraya states:
This wouldn’t be quite so tragic if not for the fact that there are currently only 15 or so Lesbian bars in the entire United States.
Guraya states this to forestall people from suggesting the obvious, why doesn’t she go to a Lesbian bar which would have Lesbian patrons. If there are only a few Lesbian bars left, perhaps it is because most of the Lesbians are no longer interested in going to Lesbian bars and Guraya hasn’t kept up with the Lesbian community. Perhaps Guraya might find out what the Lesbian community is doing to meet its needs and do that, rather than visit Gay bars and gripe that they are Gay bars.
Also, what does Guraya propose? Does she want to ban straight women from the Gay bars? Maybe she wants them to wear a badge with a big red “S.” Also, is it the responsibility of a Gay bar to be a substitute for a Lesbian bar?
Also, why does Kumamoto think the complaints of a Lesbian that a Gay bar doesn’t function for her like a Lesbian bar are valid criticisms of a Gay bar? The answer is that he wants to compile an indictment of Gay bars and somehow Guraya’s complaint makes Gay bars anti-Lesbian.
It is interesting that this article which is gleeful over the closing of the Gay bars mourns the closing of Lesbian bars. The reason is that this article is motivated by hostility towards the Gay bars.
I would be interested to know if there was a Lesbian bar in the city where Guraya was a resident at the time when she was going to a Gay bar, but she doesn’t say.
Then we find out the source of Kumamoto’s ire. When he goes to a Gay bar not many people are sexually interested in him. The sexual interest that some Gay men have in him he labels a “weird Asian fetish.”
As a person has been fairly familiar with Asian men dating there is a couple things that need to be understood.
Most Asian Gay guys don’t date Asian guys. They will say they do, but it is like an occasional hookup to convince themselves and others that they don’t exclusively desire white guys. In the community of interracial dating this occasional dating of an Asian guy by an Asian guy to be able to claim they also like Asian guys is a well-known as a method of denial and is routinely joked about. No one is being fooled.
Most Asian Gay guys are very much interested in white guys. Asians who date Asians, find it very frustrating and hope that stigmatizing Asian white interracial dating will shame Asian guys attracted to white guys to date them.
Most Asian Gay guys flat out won’t date African American guys. If you are an African American guy wanting to date an Asian guy, it isn’t impossible, but your situation is very adverse.
I remember once being at a club where there were a lot of Asian Gays and watching this one person on the dance floor dancing with African American guys. He would dance with an African American guy for one song, and then another for the next song. He was very polite and thanked each guy. I began to notice that it was about six or seven guys in a row when I asked an Asian guy next to me if he knew who that Asian guy was. He did, he said, “That’s Franklin, he likes Black guys.” And there was Franklin being sought after by about a dozen African American men who were in shape and good looking. The Asian guy next to me then sighed and said, “I wish I could be like Franklin.” I knew that he would never be like Franklin, and would very likely be going home alone that night. Franklin would be likely only going home with one of the African American guys and had this lonely Asian guy decided that he would be willing to be like Franklin for that night a dozen hot looking African American guys would be wanting to talk to him in a minute. But that would mean sexually touching an African American body and that would be impossible for him.
Kumamoto’s complaint about guy’s who are into Asians is that it reminds him that he is Asian. Asian activists point out that there type of Asian guy who doesn’t hang out with other Asian guys, but wants to be the one lone Asian in a group of white guys and if another Asian guy becomes part of the social group, he keeps a social distance from the new Asian guy. Of course, this is a speculation, it could be that Kumamoto has some other problem with a guy who is attracted to the body he is in, a guy who recognizes the nature of his attraction to Kumamoto’s body.
With Kumamoto’s restrictions against those who find him physically attractive it is no wonder that the Gay bars don’t work well for him. Rather than reflect on what he does, he dreams of the Gay bars’ destruction.
Notice that Kumamoto uses the term “fetish.” A fetish is an object used in West African religion. It was used by Europeans to refer to sexual variations in the early 20th century when white people were nearly always racist. The adoption of the term is obviously the employment of racism and white supremacist attitudes to stigmatize variant sexual practices. That this obvious racist term is still used by the so-called LGBTQXYZ progressives is appalling.
Sexual desire is for an existing physical body, a body of specific features that are seen as sexually desirable or which incite sexual desire and not for some generic abstract body. Gays aren’t attracted to women. In the anti-sex culture of LGBTQXYZ there is a policing of desire and what is permitted and what is permitted is some pansexual romantic ideology where you desire based on some spiritual thing but not physical desires for a specific corporeal body.
Kumamoto’s gripe with Gay bars is that he isn’t as sexually popular as he would like to be and he isn’t able to socially navigate them.
There shouldn’t be a severe judgement of Kumamoto. Most of us haven’t experienced an environment where we were the undesired. However, if you travel to East Asia, you will find on Grindr a very high percentage of people having “NO FOREIGNERS,” in capitals in their profile. If you go to one of the Black Gay bars, you will be wall paper, and even the guys who you see and you know who also date white guys, won’t acknowledge you. It isn’t that bad since you are there out of curiosity to see it, but you know you can go to another mixed bar where you aren’t wall paper. It would be a really difficult situation if there wasn’t another place to go to. I had Asian friends who moved to other places besides the East and West Coast and they would have a really hard time meeting people. Though it should be understood that they had a hard time meeting white Gay guys.
Gay bars remain Gay spaces which exist to serve the needs and wants of Gay men as Gay men and not controlled by the LGBTQXYZ agenda. The owners of Gay bars compete for Gay customers and to successfully do this they run their bars oriented to what Gay men want.
The LGBTQXYZ haven’t gain controlled over the Gay bars. Whereas the LGBTQXYZ have been able to dominate media, hookup apps, Pride events, and organizations, they haven’t been able to shame or bully Gay men in the Gay bars. Gay men are still using the Gay bars to meet their needs and wants regardless of what Alphabet Soup scolds might say in the Alphabet Soup media. They still are wanting to date guys that they find attractive on their terms and not the Alphabet Soup media’s terms.
The queer LGBTQXYZ seethe with hostility towards the Gay bar because it is the location of those rogue Gays who still hold heretical ideas such that they won’t date transmen or that they are homosexual and not homogender. They are the Gays that want to date hot guys, and have other assorted thought crimes. There are endless essays fuming over the supposed “toxic” Gay culture. The queer establishment has been able to bully the hookup apps, but they haven’t been able to bully the owners of Gay bars.
There isn’t just one type of Gay bar. There are neighborhood bars which are more oriented to being sociable. There are cruisy bars oriented to obtaining sex. There are clubs oriented toward dancing. Some clubs serve multiple needs. In some places clubs have back rooms to directly serve the needs for sex.
To represent Gay bars as being just one type is misleading and that is what Kamamoto does.
When Kumamoto starts describing what a Gay bar should be, we realize that he isn’t really wanting changes in a Gay bar, but wants the extermination of Gay bars and have them replaced with something else.
Kumamoto is upfront about this, he states, “the gay bar as we know it probably has to die.”
In his concluding statement in conjunction with an earlier statement in his article we clearly see his agenda. Kumamoto wants to have Gay spaces colonized and appropriated by other sexual minorities for their own ends.
Earlier he states,
Don’t just take it from me: Many queer people know that if you are not a specific “type” of attractive (cis, male, and white), you’re basically irrelevant …
Kumamoto wants the end of Gay spaces which are oriented towards Gay needs. A Gay bar which seeks to meet the needs of Gay men, (cis male) are to be abolished because he isn’t able to make it work for him.
From the concluding statement:
Its survival will be contingent on its ability to reinvent itself as a space for queer and trans people of all races and body types. It’s time we reimagined gay bars not only as spaces where we can find our next hookup, but also as places conducive to meaningful connections that aren’t solely tied to our fuckability.
The anti-sex agenda is repeated in the conclusion where meaningful connections is made a false opposite to getting sex, as if you couldn’t at a Gay bar meet interesting people and also hook up. Since one reason that the Gay bar exists is that it is difficult outside the Gay bar and the hook up apps to meet other Gays for sex, Kumamoto is talking about partially shutting down the sex life of Gay men. If he can’t have one, no one can.
This conclusion explicitly states that he wants to have the Gay bar abolished and replaced by “a space for queer and trans people of all races and body type.” That is, he wants a space that isn’t designed tailored to meet the needs of Gays.
In this statement we see the other reason that Guraya’s complaint is mentioned in the essay earlier. Kumamoto is implying that a Gay bar for Gays isn’t acceptable, it needs to serve all the letters of the never ending LGBTQIAP2SA+++ starting with the idea that a Gay bar needs to be also a functioning Lesbian bar.
Currently you generally can go to a Gay bar regardless of your sexual orientation, sex, gender, body type and race. Drag queens and trans and Gays of all body types and races do go to Gay bars now.
The Gay neighborhood bars are oriented towards social interaction and less towards cruising. They already exist and they do attract a variety of people who don’t find the cruisy bars meeting their needs.
However, at a cruisy bar your chances of getting a sexual partner will vary widely depending on how popular you are as an object of desire to the variety of people there. At the cruisy bar everyone isn’t attracted to one type of person, and there often is quite a diversity of desire, but it is possible that you aren’t any of these desired types. For those who aren’t popular as an object of sexual desire these aren’t places for them.
If Kumamoto wants a place for social interaction the typical Gay neighborhood bar is the place to go and not the cruisy bar.
Kumamoto proposes this general LGBTQXYZ queer bar, but how it is supposed to exist as a viable enterprise isn’t mentioned. The complaint about Gay bars is that the other letters find that Gays don’t want to have sexual or romantic relationships with them. Transmen complain that Gay men have the idea that they are homosexual and not homogender.
Kumamoto’s idea of a queer bar is also based on an assimilationist idea that the sexuality of the different letters in the initialism, (LGBTQXYZ), are just something they carry around in a bag and that all these letters are basically similar enough to be lumped together since sexuality is a private practice. The idea that there some of these letters are functioning communities with their norms, practices, institutions, places and not minor variations from being straight is precluded by his idea. What is the underlying assumption that a single place could or should serve these diverse communities’ needs? The idea is that these identities aren’t really significantly different and can be slopped together as queer. Maybe a queer bar wouldn’t serve any one specific community well since it would be trying to meet all needs rather than specifically the needs of one community. Maybe one size doesn’t fit all.
In really large metropolitan areas, there are the differentiation of spaces to meet specific needs of different sexual minorities which tends to indicate one size doesn’t fit all.
The decline of Gay bars and the near disappearance of Lesbian bars is an indication that their intended population is finding other means of meeting their needs.
Though Kumamoto mentions being nostalgic about the Gay bars, the reality was that they could be fun, but they weren’t all that great. You went there because that was where you could meet other Gays and there wasn’t an alternative. It was the Gay bar or nothing. The bar owners knew that and often acted as monopolists in having poor service and a dismissive attitude towards Gays. In SF I led a campaign that successfully integrated the Gay bars, but in Dallas, I found it hopeless to get Gays to act against racial discrimination and gave up after one picket line.
The attractiveness of a city was on how many Gay bars they had and so how many choices you had, because you did have limited choices.
A lot of Gays would go to these clubs not because they had an interest in night life, but because if you wanted to meet another Gay person for dating or just getting laid, that and the bath houses were the only choices you had.
The Gay bars weren’t very efficient in helping you meet your object of desire either. You would have to hope that a guy you wanted to meet and who would want to meet you would be at the club the night you were there. Sometimes the guy wanting you would be afraid to ask, so it would be on you to be fearless. On the apps the efficiency of meeting people is hugely greater.
Also, the idea that you have to go to a Gay bar to meet someone is lessening. In many alternate venues a young person can go there and in a mixed crowd of Gays and straights and others at the night club, you can meet guys for romance or getting laid.
So, it remains to be seen whether Gay bars persist into the future or how they adapt. If they do persist, they will because they will meet the needs of specific groups of Gays, not because they fit the ideological requirements of the LGBTQXYZ.
However, we don’t need people with anti-Gay hostilities and social problems pissing on them as they are perishing.
This is Jesús Ian Kumamoto’s webpage.
https://www.jikumamoto.com/