On Reguliersdwarsstraat, a man in his sixties leans against a wall, smoking. He watches the street across from him. There used to be Havana there. Now there's a candle shop with forty-euro pillar candles.

"It was packed here every Friday," he says to no one in particular. "Now I walk through and recognize nothing anymore."

It's a scene playing out across Europe. In Berlin, in London, in Paris. The gay bars are shutting down. The darkrooms are gone. The cruising areas in the park have been cleaned up. And hardly anyone seems to mind.

A Silent Exodus

The numbers tell the story. In London, more than half of all gay venues closed between 2006 and 2022. Amsterdam had around forty gay bars in the nineties. Now there are barely a handful left. Berlin watches its legendary clubs disappear one by one, crushed under rising real estate prices.

The reasons are familiar. Gentrification. Skyrocketing rents. Apps like Grindr that have eroded the necessity of meeting in person. And, not insignificantly: broader acceptance. If you can walk hand in hand across the Albert Cuyp, you no longer need to hide in a tucked-away bar.

Progress, then. Yet something nags.

What a Bar Was

A gay bar was never just a bar. It was a refuge. A dating service. A replacement family for those cast out by their own. If you were nineteen and arrived in Amsterdam from a village in Drenthe in 1985, you found a new life there. Not through an app. But through a stranger at the counter who said: come on, you can sleep on my couch.

That function is disappearing. The question is whether the app can fill it. Research from Britain's King's College showed that loneliness among gay men over fifty is significantly higher than among heterosexuals of the same age. Dutch government statistics point in the same direction.

The irony is bitter. We were never more visible. And never have so many aging gay men been so alone.

The Younger Generation Shrugs

A friend in his late twenties recently said: "I don't get the nostalgia. Those bars were just smoky and expensive, right?"

He has a point. Not every darkroom was a safe haven. There was racism. Body-shaming. Drugs that destroyed lives. The gay scene back then was no paradise. Anyone who claims otherwise is either lying or remembering selectively.

And yet. My friend meets his dates on Hinge. He goes to the gym, cooks at home, watches Netflix with his boyfriend. He lives, in short, the way his straight colleagues live. That's exactly what his parents hoped for him.

The question is only: what is still distinctly gay about his life? Apart from who he sleeps with?

Assimilation Has a Price

The American writer Andrew Sullivan, himself a conservative and gay, wrote about this back in the nineties. He predicted that gay marriage and military service would effectively end the gay movement. Not with a bang, but with a yawn.

He was right. Marriage came. Acceptance followed. And the subculture slowly dissolved into the mainstream.

For those who mainly wanted to be the same as their neighbors, that's a victory. For those who believed homosexuality offered its own perspective on the world, its own humor, its own aesthetic, its own resistance to bourgeois convention, it feels like a loss.

Both feelings are legitimate. The problem is that the second one barely gets discussed anymore. Whoever brings it up quickly gets accused of being sentimental. Or worse: not being inclusive.

The Countervoice

Not everyone is mourning. Sasha Velour, drag queen and cultural commentator, said in an interview: "The scene was never safe for everyone. Women, people of color, trans people—they were often excluded. The disappearance of these old structures opens space for new ones."

She's right. The gay scene of the eighties and nineties was often white, male, and focused on a particular body type. Romanticizing it is dangerous.

But the alternative—solving everything through an algorithm that matches us based on photos and preferences—doesn't feel like liberation either. More like a new form of loneliness. Wrapped in the illusion of choice.

What Remains

Back to Reguliersdwarsstraat. The man at the wall stubs out his cigarette. He walks on, toward Rembrandtplein. He still knows two places here where he can go inside. Friday night. He'll probably see the same faces as last week.

Maybe that's what's disappearing: not the bars themselves, but serendipity. The stranger who wandered into your life. The evening that ended differently than you'd planned. The community you didn't curate yourself based on filters.

The younger generation may not need that. Or they'll discover in twenty years that they did after all. That's impossible to say now.

What can be said is this: a culture that tidies up its own frayed edges eventually becomes smoother, but also emptier. That's true for cities. That's true for communities. And it's probably true for us as well.