AFAF: How do I find a gay bar if every bar has a rainbow flag in front?

by philg

Asking for a friend…

Here’s a bar in Portland, Maine:

Note that the largest and most prominently featured signs are a rainbow flag (in a city with 358 gay households) and a Black Lives Matters sign (“Black people — many of them immigrants — make up less than 2 percent of Maine’s population but almost a quarter of its coronavirus cases” (Washington Post)). You have to scan down with your eyes and read a smaller font to see the name of the bar: Portland Hunt & Alpine Club. Maybe these symbols are like the crosses that adorn the top of church facades? Christian believers expect to see a cross that is larger than the text providing the name of the church.

How would a person seeking a gay bar find a gay bar, if every bar signals that its primary mission is serving the LGBTQIA+ community?

Also from Portland, October 15, every other table featured COVID-19 fatalities..

When a break-up requires a trip to the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles…

When you don’t have to lock your car because young people don’t know how to operate the four-speed transmission:

Don’t invite anyone out on your boat, including family members:

While you wait for the next order from the governor and wear the Church of Shutdown’s hijab, never forget that it was some other county in which tyranny prevailed. Fragments of the Berlin Wall:

Fill the door to your shop with color-coordinated Covid-19-related messages, including “Don’t dilly dally”:

(If stopping Covid-19 is our nation’s only goal, why do we still have retail stores?)

Circling back to the bar, what does it mean when the rainbow flag and the BLM sign are larger than anything identifying the business?

8 thoughts on “AFAF: How do I find a gay bar if every bar has a rainbow flag in front?”

    • Correct. Phil has a perfectly functional brain and shows no signs of mental illness. He certainly does not belong to an asylum for the insane every leftist-run city has become.

  2. > How do I find a gay bar if every bar has a rainbow flag in front?

    I used to worry about this myself when I lived in Boystown, Chicago. This was actually an important question to ask at the time, because some of the bars were gay and some were lesbian, and quite distinct about the difference. Names like “The Manhole” and “The Closet” helped you keep it straight.

    I would say to click your heels three times and go back to Kansas?

  3. By the way that Camaro SS 350 Convertible is a beautiful car but it’s not quite “original.” Like many of them, there have been some cosmetic mashups done to it. It’s definitely a 4-speed, but the gauges on the lower center console have been updated. And leaving the keys in it really isn’t that big a deal, because the ignition switch is just….a switch…on the dashboard and the steering column doesn’t lock (it’s designed to go through your chest in a crash, no airbags needed to cushion the impact, you won’t want to live through it). So anyone who gets into the car would take maybe 30 seconds longer than usual to start it, regardless. Might as well just leave the keys in it.

  4. By the way, Boystown was forced to change its nickname at the end of last month:

    “Chicago’s LGBTQ neighborhood ‘Boystown’ changes its nickname after petition alleges exclusion”

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/28/chicago-boystown-lgbtq-neighborhood-changes-nickname/3568445001/

    “The famed LGBTQ neighborhood “Boystown” in Chicago is changing its nickname after an online petition claimed it wasn’t inclusive of women, gender nonbinary individuals and people of color.”

    • Majority Rule:

      Of the 7,890 surveyed, 20% said they felt unwelcomed by the moniker, while 58% favored keeping the “Boystown” name.

      “It definitely felt like we should be doing something about it,” Northalsted Business Alliance spokesperson Jen Gordon told The Tribune.

      Gordon added, “If (the name Boystown) was making even a small percentage of people feel uncomfortable, it’s not something we should be using to promote the neighborhood.”

      So from this we can conclude that if even 1%, or 0.001% of the bars in any neighborhood across the country make people feel uncomfortable, we should be doing something about it.

  5. The question should be: “How do I find a straight ___ if every ___ has a rainbow flag in front?” (fill in the blank).

    I cannot tell any more what those signs mean or server. Has there been proof that having them attracts more business, or are the owners of those business putting them up because s/he freaked out when an employee/customer made a comment/threat?

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