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Chances was an anomaly in the gay bar community.
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5) was the last vestige of a lesbian bar (although not lesbian-owned), left standing after the slow trickle of a death for Austin's lesbian bar scene after the popular Chances closed in 1994. Sister's Edge, which closed in December and is now Country Edge at 113 San Jacinto (which officially opened January 23, having been in its "soft opening" period since Dec. The remark reflects a widely held perception that recently has had the force of an edict in Austin's gay bar scene, since there are currently no lesbian bars in Austin at all. As one experienced bar owner says, "We don't actively try to keep lesbians out of our bar, but the two just don't mix all that well."
GAY BARS AUSTIN DOWNTOWN PROFESSIONAL
When asked to describe the crowd that assembles at Oilcan Harry's, another club with three bar areas, a dance floor, and a large patio, general manager Freeman Hart replies tersely: "Young professionals." What either professional discretion or just plain reticence halts him from saying is that Oilcan's has been known almost from its inception in December 1991 for garnering attractive gay men, the "jeans and starched white shirt" type, and as a place where cruising is a popular activity and the emphasis is on men, not women. The bars on the whole actively pursue a specific crowd in the attempt to build loyalty, a sense of community, and steady profit. "It's where the bulk of the gay community goes when they go out," he says. Nonetheless, when he chose the site for The Forum, whose elongated two interior rooms, a dance floor, and second bar area in the back, are topped off by yet a third bar on the rooftop, he didn't think of anywhere but downtown as a possible location.
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He laments that the area along Fourth Street from Lavaca to Congress, which is alternately called the Fourth Street District, the Warehouse District, or Guytown, is not more similar to Houston's Montrose area or Dallas' Cedar Springs - neighborhoods where not just gay bars but other gay-owned or gay-friendly businesses choose to locate. "Austin unfortunately does not have a gay village," Haworth says. Mark Haworth, who opened The Forum at 408 Congress in November 1996, would doubt that "transformation" is the most accurate term to describe the clustered nature of Austin's gay bars. The arrival of gay people as a coherent social presence and political force owes everything to the transformations of modern urban geography." John Howard, Duke University professor and author of The Library, the Park, and the Pervert: Public Space and Homosexual Encounter in Post-World War II Atlanta, writes that "The public sphere, for gay male urbanites in particular, was (and is) an institution in and of itself dynamic, vibrant, evolving, and profoundly impacted in its evolution during and after World War II, as gay male cultures emerged." Frank Browning, author of A Queer Geography and an NPR commentator, remarks in that book that "More than any genuine ethnic group, gay people owe their existence as a separate people to geography. If academic theory holds much authority when the topic is bars and bar life, then Gabaree is correct, though more succinctly correct than the academics. "Well, isn't it because that's where the fags have always been?" responds Richard Gabaree - who should know since he's spent two years as a bartender at two of Austin's gay bars - when asked why he thinks most of Austin's gay bars (eight out of nine) are located downtown.