INTRODUCTION

Pre-Stonewall gay bars functioned as centers of communities, in the way that churches, as structures, function as the centers of many communities. For while many people do not go to church per se, if they belong to the religion the church symbolizes and houses, the structure of the church will also provide a structure to their own lives—for the occasional visit, for the identification it provides, for the knowledge of a community they could enter into—however they choose to do that, as well as for the list of attributes that we might assume religion provides—identity formation, community involvement, exploration of meaning, and a sense of something bigger than self. Religion is “the desire for depth … the experience … of the world imagined.” In religious studies we often call that “desire for depth,” a sense of the sacred.