The ritz gay club nyc

It is perhaps cliche to lament the ever-changing — and often failing — state of queer nightlife across America. That decline is, after all, hard to ignore: Greggor Mattson, professor and chair of sociology at Oberlin College and Conservatory, released a inform in 2023 outlining a whopping 45% decrease in lgbtq+ bars from 2002 to 2023. This trend has multiple causes, including the growing use of dating apps love Grindr and Sniffies, increased social acceptance of LGBTQ people, and financial challenges businesses faced after the COVID-19 pandemic.

But New York, as it often does, has managed to avoid this trend — or, at least, the urban area has held it off. Mattson’s assessment of bar listings found that while gays bars were disappearing across the country, the capital actually saw an uptick from 1997 to 2017 — including now-famed haunts like Metropolitan in Williamsburg (2002), The Ritz in Hell’s Kitchen (2006), and Icon in Astoria (2014), according to Bloomberg, which noted in 2022 that in recent years, more than a quarter of the city’s queer bars closed — a steady shrinking of the scene both before and after the height of the pa