On a rainy Tuesday evening in November, a note appeared on the door of a brown café on Amsterdam's Kerkstraat. Thank you for 34 wonderful years. Nothing more. The next morning, the place was empty. The stools gone, the disco ball gone, the smell of beer and poppers gone.

The owner, in his early seventies, had had enough. Too few customers. Too high rent. And, he said later in an interview, “the boys just don't come anymore.”

A quiet exodus

It's not a new story. In ten years, half of the gay bars in the Netherlands disappeared. In London, the decline was even steeper: researchers at University College London counted 125 gay venues in 2006. By 2022, only 50 remained. Berlin, long a beacon, is heading the same way.

The causes are well known. Grindr and other apps made the bar as a meeting place less necessary. Rents rose. Younger gay men felt welcome in regular cafés too. And corona finished off many businesses.

So much for the facts. But the question that lingers is a different one. What do we actually lose when a leather bar closes?

The church of the outsiders

For those who never went there: such a bar was more than just a place to drink. It was a kind of church for people who didn't fit anywhere else. Men in their sixties next to boys in their twenties. A construction worker next to a professor. Everyone on equal footing, everyone with the same secret that no longer had to be a secret.

Writer Edmund White once called these places “the only real democracy I've ever known.” That sounds romantic. And in some ways, it was. But there was a kernel of truth to it.

In the eighties and nineties, you'd walk into such a bar and know immediately: I belong here. No explanation needed. No careful probing to see if that guy at the bar was also … You could just be who you were. For many men, it was literally the first place where that was possible.

The gym as the new temple

And now? The young gay man of 2026 gathers somewhere else. At the gym. On the beach at Zandvoort. At festivals like Milkshake. On Instagram. And yes, on Grindr, though nobody calls that a community.

That's not necessarily worse. It's different. A friend in his late twenties put it perfectly recently: “I don't need a bar to be myself. I'm myself in the supermarket.” That's progress. Exactly what earlier generations fought for.

But there's a price to that freedom. If you're welcome everywhere, you're not really at home anywhere. The shared place becomes a shared app. And an app is not a neighborhood.

A dissenting voice

Not everyone mourns this loss. Journalist Maarten Keulemans once wrote that the old gay scene could also be narrow-minded. A world with its own rules, its own hierarchy, its own exclusions. Those who weren't muscular enough, or too old, or too feminine, or too dark, noticed that quickly.

He has a point. Nostalgia distorts. The leather bar wasn't paradise. There was loneliness, there was a lot of alcohol, there was sometimes pettiness. Not every vanished bar is a loss to civilization.

And yet. There's something you only get when different generations and types sit in one room together. An older man telling what it was like during the AIDS crisis. A young guy holding hands in public for the first time, and seeing someone who's been doing it for forty years. That exchange doesn't happen on Grindr.

What community really is

The word community is thrown around carelessly these days. The LGBTQ+ community this, the rainbow community that. As if it's a club you automatically join the moment you come out.

But a community is something you do, not something you are. You build it by encountering each other. By experiencing things together. By having disagreements and making up. By having a bar where you can walk in on a Tuesday evening without an appointment.

When those places disappear, it's not just a café that vanishes. The infrastructure on which a community can exist disappears. You're left with a label. But a label is not a home.

The alternative

Some self-criticism is in order here. Because who misses these places most? Men in their forties and older. People who grew up going there themselves. The younger generation cares less, and they have every right to. Maybe they're building something new that we haven't yet recognized.

In cities like Rotterdam and Utrecht, you see something cautiously emerging: queer book clubs, sports teams, dinner nights. Smaller in scale than a bar, but with the same principle. Regular, physical, mixed.

Whether that's enough to compensate for the loss is the question. A book club of ten people doesn't replace a bar of a hundred. But maybe that's no longer necessary. Maybe a smaller, quieter form of togetherness fits better with a time when being gay is no longer an act of rebellion.

In closing

The bar on Kerkstraat has since been converted into a café. Light wooden tables, plants, oat milk. A nice place, nothing wrong with it. The people sitting there now probably don't know what stood there before.

That's how it goes. A city changes, a scene changes, a generation takes over. That's the way it should be. The only thing that remains is the question: where do we meet now? Not digitally, not at a one-night event, but simply, on a Tuesday, when it rains.

The answer hasn't come yet. And maybe that's the real challenge for the next ten years.