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I'm Stephen Metcath, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Hornivores of the Savannah Edition.

It's Wednesday, June 29th on today's program, Hello Marriage, Goodbye Gay Bars, with June Thomas,

the new tort reform documentary Hot Coffee from HBO, and The New Yorker's Take on Internet Dating.

Joining me today are Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner.

Hello, Julia.

Hi, Julia.

And, of course, I film critic Dana Stevens.

Hey, Dana.

Hey, Steve.

All right.

Well, away we go.

June Thomas, Slate's foreign editor, joins us for a segment on her series, which has just gone live, called The Gay Bar, its riotous past and uncertain future. June, in your piece you quote, is it Edmund White? The wonderful Edmund White quote about gay bars, they were a place where gays can feed and mate without fear of predators. Your own take on the gay bars that it's a place that represents your patrimony and your political heritage.

Tell us what you mean by that, what Edmund White meant by that, and talk about how that history may be changing.

Well, I suppose like a lot of people my age, I don't really go to bars anymore. I don't go to gay bars or straight bars. It's just not something on my

schedule anymore. But I don't feel bad about other things that I don't do. I don't feel bad about

not going to laundromats anymore. But there's something special about gay bars because when

you need them and they're there, you feel so grateful to them.

You can have such wonderful times that you can't have in other places that the possibility that

they might disappear seems much more tragic than other normal cultural passings.

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