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They are institutional histories of a region, a safer place to meet strangers, escape families, or bump into old friends or new lovers.” Wayne offer more than a night’s entertainment or a place for patrons to be themselves. “Small-city gay bars like those in Lima or Ft. The “world’s smallest gay pride parade” that musters in the club’s parking lot was featured in a popular 2011 podcast and a 2017 magazine article, leading the city’s tourist office to launch a regional campaign advertising Erie as “your off-the-beaten-path gay-cation destination.” A television spot, featuring The Zone, aired on Buffalo, New York-area televisions, promoting Erie’s beaches, art galleries, and nightlife. The Zone Dance Club is the hub of Northwest Pennsylvania’s LGBT community and the last bar standing in Erie, which had three as recently as 20 years ago.
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And as the fictional depiction of a small-city bar in Glee should remind us, there are 147 small cities with a lone gay bar which, when added together, constitute as many gay bars as in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago combined.
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They are institutional histories of a region, a safer place to meet strangers, escape families, or bump into old friends or new lovers. Small-city gay bars like those in Lima or Ft. Patrons of Fort Wayne, Indiana’s, Babylon Nightclub, for example, told the drag queen who brought them on stage one evening that they’d driven from hometowns more than an hour away: Muncie, Indiana Coldwater, Michigan and Fort Shawnee, Ohio. They are the only physical places where LGBTQ people gather in public, and they serve multi-county regions of multiple states. Gay bars are a marker of cosmopolitanism for small cities. At some point the bar stopped using its original name, “Somewhere in Time When Even the Moon is Not Enuff,” before it was fictionalized in the Fox sitcom Glee, which introduced the world to a shinier, more musical Lima. I’d driven to this small city of under 40,000 souls for the express purpose of interviewing the manager of Somewhere, Lima’s LGBT bar and club since 1982. I was in town for the book project that had taken my research assistant Tory and me through 27 states, interviewing gay bar professionals.
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I hadn’t even told her that I already knew. “We have a gay bar here,” the waitress informed me after I told her how impressed I was with the offerings in downtown Lima, Ohio.