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Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-srd-10.1177_23780231231181902 for The Changing Mix of Gay Bar Subtypes after COVID-19 Restrictions in the United States, 2017 to 2023 by Greggor Mattson in Socius

This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 pandemic public closure orders on business listings for gay bars. Recent studies have shown gay bars to be quite vulnerable, with listings showing a 36.6% decline between 2007 and 2019. To supplement historic data from comprehensive printed listings, the Damron Guide, we conducted a census of online business listings. We verified each listing in the 2019 edition, also searching for new bars that were not included in that version. Results show that gay bar listings declined by 15.2% between 2019 and Spring 2021. This compares, however, to a 14.4% decline for 2017 and 2019, indicating a surprisingly stable rate of decline. This stability may be a methodological artifact, but may also reflect the relative resources of surviving gay bars going into pandemic, and/or their continuing vulnerability and precarity.

The growth of the food and beverage service industry in the 2010s obscured the decline of one of its sectors: bars and drinking establishments with limited food offerings. This research notepresents 2006-2016 data from the U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns, a time periodthat captures industry peaks on either side of the Great Recession of 2008. Data show that whilethe food and beverage service sector as a whole grew by 17.7%, the bar sector decreased by10.5%. City-level data from the 30-largest municipalities show much internal variation in both sectors, but the bar sector’s share of the food and beverage service industry declined in 28 of 30 municipalities under study. Restaurant industry growth in this decade ranged from 5.0% to 48.4%, while bar sector change ranged from -37.7% to an increase of 56.5%. The implications of this changing industry mix and its municipal variation are discussed for future research into the changing food and drink service industry, its role in urban revitalization, strategies for publichealth and safety, and the likely acceleration of these trends due to COVID-19.

Widespread alarm over gay bar and lesbian bar closures has occurred in a vacuum of national data to assess trends. This visualization depicts changes in gay bar listings in the United States at five-year intervals by bar subtype for the years 1977-2017. Trends in gay bar listings support perceptions of recent gay bar decline. Gay bar listings declined by 20.6% between 2012 (N=1356) and 2017 (N=1077), their largest 5-year decline. Lesbian bar listings showed a similar 19.2% decline from much smaller numbers (31 to 21 between 2007 and 2017). The largest change in bar types is a phenomenon that has received little attention, the rise of gay bars serving men and women together; they became the largest single category of gay bar from 1997 onwards. Bars most at risk of closure receive the least popular attention, including bars for women, people of color, and men into radical sexualities.

This paper presents a discourse analysis of metaphor emergence from coinage to conventionality, responding to calls for metaphor analysis that take social context and chronology into account. It does this through a case study of the career of the metaphor of weaponization that became ubiquitous around the United States’ 2016 presidential election. As a concept, the word originated in the Cold War defense industry as a literal description of the logistical deployment of weapons systems. As its use mutated into a metaphor between 1999-2003, it took on its contemporary moral meaning of over-politicizing things that had been, and should remain, neutral or peaceful. By 2017 “the weaponization of everything” implied that all aspects of social life were newly embroiled in illegitimate politics, making the metaphor a profound act of nostalgia that erased even recent conflicts. Weaponization demonstrates that a metaphor can retain its meaningfulness when it becomes ubiquitous by marshalling a temporal narrative tension against widely shared perceptions of recent social change. This is surprising because contemporary metaphor theory implies that ubiquitous metaphors become mere descriptions or concepts if they are not used in different ways that are embedded in competing discursive communities. Because metaphors derive their meaningfulness through tension, weaponiz- shows how temporality, or social time, can be marshalled to attempt to create a shared public that understands itself as deeply divided. Weaponization is thus instructive as an act of folk sociology that exposes as social and conflicted, things that were previously natural or innocuous. Weaponization indicates a yearning for a shared polity in divided times, and shows that political metaphors can create broad publics that share the same meaning for all sides among competing political groups, even if that meaning is a naïve or utopian rejection of politics altogether.

This article explores the origin and trajectory of the metaphor of weaponization that became ubiquitous around the 2016 presidential election. As a concept, the word originated in the Cold War defense industry as a description of the logistical deployment of weapons systems. As its use mutated into a metaphor between 1999-2003, it took on its contemporary meaning of making something into a weapon that had been, and should remain, neutral or peaceful. By 2017 “the weaponization of everything” implied that all aspects of social life were newly embroiled in illegitimate politics, making the metaphor a profound act of nostalgic forgetting. Weaponization demonstrates that a metaphor can become more powerful, not less, when it becomes ubiquitous. This is surprising because contemporary metaphor theory implies that ubiquitous metaphors become mere descriptions or concepts if they are not embedded in competing discursive communities. Weaponization shows that metaphors can create publics that share the same meaning for all sides among competing political groups, even if that meaning is the rejection of politics altogether.