This story originally appeared in our June 10-23 print edition. Check out the edition online here and find where you can get a print edition near you here.
Talk to any queer individual and they’ll start listing them off. The Birdcage. Shooters. Below Zero. E19. The Flock. Good Judy’s. On Broadway. Main Event. Adonis. Simon Says. The Dock.
While Cincinnati was once something of a gay mecca — homosexual marriage was legalized in the U.S. thanks to Jim Obergefell, a Cincinnati citizen — in the past few years, the streets of the Queen City have been overrun with the structural corpses of former LGBTQ+ safe havens.
Terry Bond, who has co-owned the Crazy Fox Saloon in Covington with his husband, Carl Fox, for almost three decades, said the gradual decline of LGBTQ+ spaces is “partially because we’ve become victims of our own success.”
“Back then, gay bars were a necessity to avoid discrimination,” Bond said. “But things have gotten better for us. Generally, a gay couple can now go out together in public and be treated decently, and that’s a good thing! But that also takes away a little bit of the need for these exclusive locations.”
Fox was the original co-owner of popular queer hangout Rosie’s Tavern with his late husband, Greg Landrum, in 1990. The day Fox cashed out his retirement and signed the lease, Landrum was diagnosed with AIDS. He died two years later.
The first day Fox walked into Rosie’s, there were “16 dead rats and 125 rat holes in the basement,” and he never made a profit off the bar in its first seven years of business. In 1996, he met Bond, and later sold Rosie’s to Diane Gamble, its current owner. The couple then opened the Crazy Fox Saloon in 1999.
“At the risk of sounding silly, we’ve survived a lot,” Fox said.
Fox labeled neither Rosie’s nor Crazy Fox exclusively a “gay bar,” instead preferring to say they run an “everybody bar” that welcomes people from all walks of life. But that doesn’t mean the two aren’t involved in their local community.
“If we have less spaces, it’s because we have less ownership by people who care, and more corporate ownership who don’t give a f***, which is even worse than if you hate us,” Fox said.
It’s not for a lack of trying, of course.
“Queer culture in Cincinnati is booming,” said local queer icon DJ Boywife. “There are people that want a reason to go out, dress up and party.”
But, he said, there just aren’t as many places to go these days.
“You used to be able to walk around OTR and hop from gay bar to gay bar to gay bar just in one neighborhood,” Boywife said. “Now it’s like, ‘Which of the two places in the city are we going to?’”
Part of the squeeze on queer spaces is, of course, the economy and the younger generation’s hesitance to consume alcohol. A 2023 Gallup poll showed that young adults drink less than ever, and that spending on alcohol has reached 40-year lows.
“Everything’s more expensive, obviously. Drinks are pricey, and half the time, you have to buy admission just to get into where you want to go,” Boywife said. “Plus, the people who actually run these businesses care about dollar signs more than they care about serving the community. If the drag show isn’t going to make money, but line dancing is, they’re going to do line dancing.”
Tom Funke, a queer event promoter who recently purchased the Over-the-Rhine concert venue The Mockbee, shared similar opinions. He said many of the people involved in Cincinnati’s queer community are only in it for “rainbow capitalism.”
“They’re trying to cash in on our community because no one in our community is taking up the mantle,” he said. “Nervously, I feel a responsibility to create spaces that allow us to feel safe and allow us to define our own rules and have fun on our terms, and I guess I’m OK at producing events, and I just felt like I wasn’t seeing other people do it, so I thought I’d give it a shot.”
Previously, Funke hosted events for local institutions like museums. But he became frustrated with how much the local LGBTQ+ scene had dwindled, and even more frustrated with how queer spaces were being invaded by straight people in search of cheap drinks and a better, safer nightlife experience.
“I got into producing queer events because there just aren’t many. Even in 2015, we had way more,” he said. “The catalyst for me was during Pride one year when we were trying to get into Below Zero, and the regulars were in line all the way down to Coffee Emporium because the line was filled with straights excited to dance with the gays. A few of my friends in front of me said, ‘Tom, you produce all these events, why don’t you do something for us?’”
And so he did. These days, Funke hosts several burlesque, drag and music-focused events targeted solely at the queer community.
He’s currently in the process of converting the second floor of The Mockbee into a multi-purpose queer space, with a nightclub in one area and a smaller room in another that can be used for all sorts of events like “book clubs, or listening parties, or smaller breakout events, or burlesque, or drag, or whatever. Bottom line: this is an LGBTQ+ owned space, and I’m going to make sure everybody knows that coming in.”
It’s a rarity in town these days, as many gay bars openly court bachelorette parties and the like to bolster their profits, according to local queer historian Jake Hogue.
“I think there’s an identity issue with the bars right now. The gay bars say everyone’s welcome, but if everyone comes, is it a gay bar anymore?” he said. “You say ‘yeah, come watch the drag show, bring your bachelorette parties in.’ It slowly erodes queer culture, because the space is no longer for us, it’s for making money at the expense of the gay community… If you walk into Bloom on any given Saturday, you might not even see a gay person for a minute. Last time I was there, I saw nothing but straight women, and that’s it.”
CityBeat reached out to Bloom’s ownership for a comment on June 3. The business has not responded as of this posting.
Hogue says he’s glad that society is more accepting of LGBTQ+ individuals and recognizes that exclusively queer spaces were born out of necessity, so “naturally, as we gain acceptance and visibility in mainstream culture, those places dry up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not needed.”
He’s happy that everyone is welcome in queer spaces, but added that if he’s dancing with someone at a club, he doesn’t necessarily want there to be straight people around.
“I don’t know how you create an inclusive space that isn’t exclusive in some way, you know?” he said. “I’ve danced with a guy at Alice many times where it becomes a big deal. One time a guy even tried to fight me over it. Like, is that a safe space if you got to worry about someone fighting you? I’m not saying that straight people shouldn’t be welcome. I just think gay spaces should be incentivized for gay people.”
While Fox disagrees that there should be spaces exclusively for one group of people, he does take issue with organizations profiting from the LGBTQ+ community while offering nothing in return.
“Right now, investment groups are buying up all the existing bars and restaurants,” he said. “What’s more crucial, whether it’s strictly a gay bar or a bar for everybody, is who owns it, and how do they care for the community, since that’s what a ‘safe space’ is anyway.”
Fox and Bond said that younger LGBTQ+ individuals often look at older gay bars with rose-tinted glasses, noting that so-called “safe spaces” were often only safe if you were a white man; “there was racism, there was misogyny. A ‘safe space’ back then was a relative term,” Bond said.
But “that exploitative s*** doesn’t fly anymore” in today’s LGBTQ+ community, according to Hogue. However, the lack of proper spaces has him worried about the future.
“In the current political climate, gay and trans people everywhere are being attacked, and our rights could change on a moment’s notice. I fear a world in which things get worse, and all of our gay bars have dried up, and we have nowhere to go,” he said.
One thing’s clear: the lack of queer spaces is not for lack of desire.
Boywife shared statistics from Sophie Night, an event he co-hosted in March where transgender people got in free, while cis people paid $5. Despite being attended by a majority transgender crowd (he estimated about half to two-thirds), the group raised $3,000 for charity alone just from ticket sales.
“Queer people want something to do that’s only for them, especially now, to get away from daily life and everything in the news. It’s not for a lack of people wanting it, it’s a lack of people giving it,” he said.
Hogue attributes some event failures to mismanagement, noting that bars hosting queer events often neglect to promote the event for fear of scaring off other customers.
“We know nothing about the event unless, like, DJ Boywife posts about it. And then they blame us when the event fails. It makes no f****** sense,” Hogue said.
Boywife pointed out one recent failure in particular as “mismanagement and marginalization.”
“These bar owners think they’re throwing us a bone by letting us perform when we’re actually the ones filling up their space and selling tickets and selling drinks. We’re not people to them, we’re dollar signs. That’s how I felt with Mecca before it closed this year,” he said. “We’d make that place as popping as it was in its prime. For them to close and sell to a construction office when we don’t have a lot of clubs, gay or straight, in the first place is like a slap in the face.”
There’s also a sense of complacency in the community, according to all four individuals.
“A lot of gays in Cincinnati fall into a routine. The same people go to the same bars every weekend. It’s never, ‘oh, I’m gonna go explore another part of town, I’m gonna go to this new bar.’ They go to Alice, they go to Bloom, that’s it,” Hogue said. “Why not patronize the other gay bars that already exist? Go to Bar 901. Go to Tillie’s. Go to the Crazy Fox. Most people don’t even know Home Base Tavern exists.”
Shuttered gay bar The Birdcage is soon to reopen under new ownership, too, and “if people don’t go after complaining this much, I swear to God, I will lose it,” he said.
Boywife mentioned that he often hears people are disappointed with the current offerings — but “a closed mouth doesn’t get fed.”
“If you go to the same club over and over every single weekend, and you’re not happy with them, what message does that send?” he said. “We have to call out these clubs and get our friends together and make s*** shake, because they’re not going to do it for us. And if that’s not what queer people have always done, I don’t know what is.”
Fox encourages young people looking for a space catering to their needs to do the same thing he did: open one, and be “a young gay person who lives out their dream.”
“Make it happen! Is it hard? F*** yeah, it’s hard. Anyone that believes it should be easy… well, it should be, but it’s not,” he said. “You can sit back and say ‘I want this to happen,’ but you have to grab yourself by the balls or the titties or whatever you have that hurts and say ‘Look, this is what it’s going to take, and I’m willing to do it.’ It’s not too late. The game’s not over.”
This article appears in June 10-23, 2026.
