It’s Friday night at the Bell in Hand Tavern and something is amiss. At first glance all appears normal: guys wearing button-ups or T-shirts and ladies decked out in jeans and tight tops, everyone drinking, flirting, and casually nodding to the top-40 music. But by nine o’clock it’s clear that something is a bit off. As more people pour through the front door there’s a disturbance in The Force: an overabundance of men and a growing shortage of women. And many of these men seem to be exhibiting abnormal behavior, standing in circles chatting up each other and not stealing so much as a glance at the behinds or chests of the ladies. Could this be some subversive Marxist plot to sabotage a scene that’s normally one of Quincy Market’s top hetero meat markets? Possibly. A suspicious number of the guys congregating in the man-circles are wearing small white buttons that at first glance seem to be emblazoned with the iconic silhouette of Che Guevara. But on closer inspection the face underneath the beret isn’t Che; it’s Cher.
Welcome to Boston Guerrilla Queer Bar, a monthly event night conceived by Daniel Heller, 24, and Josh Gerber, 28, as an alternative to the staid Boston gay bar scene. Heller and Gerber modeled the event after guerrilla queer bar events hosted in a handful of other cities, a scene Heller first discovered in the Washington, D.C. area. The concept is to stage a massive queer invasion of an unsuspecting straight bar and to watch what happens.
"When I moved here I was shocked Boston didn’t have a guerilla queer bar, especially because there are so few gay bars. ... I didn’t find myself being swept up in a whole smorgasbord of gay life," said Heller. "And guerilla queer bar is something that always struck me as fun and hysterical and a good thing for everyone involved."
The two launched the event last October to an underwhelming response. They hit all of Boston’s gay bars-passing out business cards, promoting the event, and inviting people to join a Google group that would notify them the night before the event of the time and location of that month’s bar raid. But the first two Boston Guerrilla Queer Bars (GQBs), at People’s Republik in Cambridge and Match in Back Bay, turned out less than a hundred people each. Heller said the event seemed to be foundering until, on a whim, he and Gerber created a Facebook page. At the next GQB at Harvard Square’s Hong Kong Heller said hundreds of homos turned out. Heller said Boston GQB now has more than 700 Facebook friends.
More:
http://www.baywindows.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=glbt&sc2=news&sc3=&id=71404
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