Vester is 73, and he and his wife, Margie, wanted to retire. Other factors besides tolerance and Grindr led to 501's closing. View Gallery: Indy's gay bars of bygone yearsīusinesses go under for a variety of reasons, some unique and unrelated to larger cultural forces. The new tolerance is "a good thing for the gays," Vester said, "because they should be accepted anywhere.
"Now gays can go into a straight bar and it's no big deal," said Coby Palmer, a gay civic leader old enough to remember the early 1970s, when Indianapolis had more than a dozen gay bars and police every now and then raided them and arrested patrons for "visiting a dive." Tini is a trendy bar on Massachusetts Avenue where gays and straights party side by side. Right now, I think a lot of them are over at Tini."
We're working on social media, Facebook and Twitter. "If I could get the 20s and 30s gay men in here, I'd do it," said English Ivy's Scotten. And their numbers started skewing smaller for the simple and obvious reason older people don't go out to bars as often as young people.
"In the last 10 years our age group did start skewing older," said Tom Vester, 501's longtime owner. The problem at 501 and at other gay bars is that young gays don't patronize them, say people in the business. In its September 2007 issue Entrepreneur noted the increased acceptance of gays and predicted of gay bars that by 2017 "the very best of them will endure the rest won't." Now you can go to a straight bar and be gay and not feel like you're going to be beat up or thrown out."Įntrepreneur magazine saw the end of gay bars coming a decade ago. Now you can go anywhere and not feel uncomfortable. When I was young, gay bars were our social outlet. There are "as many or more" gay people as there used to be, said Steve Warman, 69, a longtime bartender at Greg's Our Place, a gay bar on 16th Street, "but they just have many more options than they used to have. Same-sex couples hold hands on sidewalks, in shopping malls and in bars - and not just in gay bars but in boy-meets-girl bars, too. Ellen DeGeneres just got a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Gay marriage is now legal in all 50 states and many foreign countries. Part two of the double whammy: A growing tolerance toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Business just dropped, and it wasn't a gradual thing. 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 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. "You going to turn this into a sports bar?" one snarled at one of the new owners, Danny Scotten. Only one is open, English Ivy's, and earlier this year it sold to a partnership of straight people, causing some regulars to worry about the place's future. In a 17-year bartending career, LaFary has worked at six Indianapolis gay bars. "Guys my age stopped going out to bars all the time," said LaFary, 48, "and the new generation never did catch on." Jack LaFary poured the last of the drinks at the 501 in October but had seen the end coming well before then. In the past six months Talbott Street, long-known for its drag shows, closed, as did the 501 Eagle, a bar favored by leather enthusiasts since 1986. Among the casualties: the venerable Varsity, the city's oldest gay bar, dating back to the 1940s. Since 2015 at least five have closed their doors in Indianapolis, about half the city's total. View Gallery: Last dance at Talbott Street nightclub