“If you’re there on a Wednesday night, there won’t be any gay bars to go to”, a friend who lives in Sydney, but who grew up in Adelaide, recently told me. He was bemoaning the lack of a gay scene in his hometown, and so I did an online check for him late in the afternoon. Yep, he was right.
“Mars Bar is still the only real Gay bar and only open Fri/Sat nights, The Mary’s Poppin one seems to be for trendoids of both sexes and also only on certain nights.”, he wrote back in response.
Such a contrast, I thought, to the late 1980s when I lived in Renmark and would travel regularly to Adelaide for a bit of “gay life”. There were at least two or three bars operating most nights of the week as I recall.
Twenty five years later I was in Adelaide for work, and after a long hard day, I was more interested in grabbing a bite to eat, and then heading back to my hotel room to watch television, and get a good night’s sleep. Adelaide has changed. Or maybe it’s me?
4 responses to “Ever Lovin’ Adelaide”
I met my first gay aborigine in a bar in Adelaide. It was somewhere off Colonel Light Square. We tried to go to Mars Bar, but it was very hidden and we could not find it. Circa 1983.
As I recall there was a bar, Andrew, called the Colonel Light, or maybe I’m confused? :)
Its both, of course, James. The city and ourselves.
We’ve aged and we’ve changed and out cities are different too. Sydney’s gay ‘scene’ is so different from the 1980s; just look around and remember Oxford Street.
Yes indeed Victor. I was being a little obtuse. Really significant changes. Not just being nostalgic, I have a fondness for the time when you could go to a bar, and not everyone was looking at their phone. Phones are the new cigarettes, I guess, where you have “something to do”, but even so…