They are the only physical places where LGBTQ people gather in public, and they serve multi-county regions of multiple states.
Gay bars are a marker of cosmopolitanism for small cities. At some point the bar stopped using its original name, “Somewhere in Time When Even the Moon is Not Enuff,” before it was fictionalized in the Fox sitcom Glee, which introduced the world to a shinier, more musical Lima. I’d driven to this small city of under 40,000 souls for the express purpose of interviewing the manager of Somewhere, Lima’s LGBT bar and club since 1982. I was in town for the book project that had taken my research assistant Tory and me through 27 states, interviewing gay bar professionals. I hadn’t even told her that I already knew. “We have a gay bar here,” the waitress informed me after I told her how impressed I was with the offerings in downtown Lima, Ohio.
