Love and Regret in Gay Bars

Even after the first years following Stonewall, Albany’s gay subculture was still distinctly closeted. Chapters of Gay Liberation Front (GLF), Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), and Gay Maoists had started up on campus my freshman year, where a few men were out, but most, like I, were closeted

When I first walked into G.J.’s Gallery, a neighborhood bar in Albany, NY, I found myself in the bohemian underworld I had longed for. Dark, smoky, Rolling Stones on the jukebox, a long bar stretched from the front door halfway through the room—opposite were booths, and the smell of Mary Jane mixed with cigarette smoke lingered above.

I became familiar with the bar’s clientele: writers and painters from the neighborhood, some drug pushers, some gay men, and occasional college students like me, who could frequent bars when New York state’s legal drinking age was eighteen. The crowd was almost exclusively men, some smoking joints in the bathroom, as dealers peddled acid, speed, Quaaludes, and grass.

Les K. Wright is an author, gay activist, bear historian, and literary scholar. He is a founding member of the GLBT Historical Society San Francisco, founder of the Bear History Project, and co-author and editor of The Bear Book and The Beer Book II. He is currently working on an anthology Children of Lazarus: Voices of the “Forgotten Generation” of Long-Term AIDS Survivors. He is the publisher of Bearskin Lodge Press and lives with his cat Schuyler in Syracuse, New York.