It’s a trend mirrored across the globe, with gay meccas such as London, New York and Tel Aviv all reporting a diminished gay scene. Illustration: Illustrations © Tom Of Finland Foundation “Gay business has stopped being inventive and new and fashionable … There’s a lot where you go in and they’re still playing Eurovision … I don’t think we’re giving people what they want.”Ī typical artwork by by Touko Laaksonen, aka Tom of Finland, who once drank at the Spijker. Cruising patterns have since changed and the sector has failed to adapt. “Now we’re down to, I think, eight or seven.”Īmsterdam’s cruise bars never really recovered from the Aids epidemic, he says, which knocked out a whole generation of business people and tainted the sex industry. “We had 34 venues with dark rooms when I came here ,” he says. Just one gay sauna remains, NZ, co-owned by New Zealander Richard Keldoulis, also the manager of Church cruise club. They have empowerment now Paul Tarrant, owner The younger gay people don’t need gay bars any more. Now touristy bars, restaurants and karaoke joints serving a mixed crowd have taken their place. Bankruptcy is the biggest cause, but drugs busts and rent arrears have also forced closures. Since 2010, gay bars such as Argos, Bar Arc, Bump, Café April, Café Soho, Cockring and Havana – to name a few – have all shut up shop despite an action programme launched by the municipality in 2009 to re-establish Amsterdam as the gay capital of Europe. Today, the gay heartlands of the Kerkstraat, the Reguliersdwarsstraat and the red light district are struggling to survive. Photograph: Courtesy: Deborah Nicholls-Lee “In those days, people needed people to confide in.”ĭidi Licious hosting Saturday night bingo at the Spijker. “We were a family and it was a support system,” says Mancunian Paul Tarrant, 57, the Spijker’s current owner, who started at the bar as a cleaner and condom distributor in 1995. Under a new owner, New Yorker Tony Derosa, the Spijker responded to the Aids crisis and re-engaged a reeling community by organising safe-sex parties during which marshals would circulate carrying trays of condoms and making sure the house rules were observed. The epidemic demonstrated the importance of the Spijker community and brought its customers closer together. “There were times when there were five people in the bar, standing there like skeletons in their leather pants.” Then a GP in the red light district, he estimates that between 19 his practice lost around 150 patients to the disease. “One by one, they dropped dead like dominoes,” remembers Pim. Photograph: Deborah Nicholls-Leeīut the Spijker was hit hard by the advent of Aids in Amsterdam. Gay tourism is now more concentrated on festivals and events.
When the Spijker bar opened on Kerkstraat in 1978, the area was bursting with gay bars and hotels. In 1983, when the bar came under the ownership of theatre enthusiast Raphael Brandow, it even opened its own 65-seat repertory theatre, staging experimental pieces as well as jolly musicals. Spijker was known for its most beautiful butt competition, in which the winner received a 100-guilder note between their bum cheeks. When the Spijker opened on Amsterdam’s Kerkstraat in 1978, the area was bursting with gay bars and hotels, and the Leidsestraat – cutting through it and book-ended with gay discos – was nicknamed the “Rue de Vaseline”. “Many gay people bring their sisters, their brothers and even their mothers! Even with the videos, they don’t mind – they see actually what it is to be gay.” Today, it is the open friendliness of the bar that makes it special.
This was very safe, very private,” she says. “In the beginning, people came here and they did not tell the outside that they were gay. Ted Scheele, 67, and her husband Pim, 78, have been coming to the bar since the 70s, when Spijker catered mainly to the leather crowd. In the beginning, people came here and did not tell the outside they were gay.
Since the late 90s, budget air travel has attracted stag parties and other young weekenders, drawn to the red light district and coffee shops, creating a lucrative market for property investors and squeezing the gay bars out. The city beyond the bar echoes this change, with mass tourism now engulfing Amsterdam’s gay scene, and gay and straight visitors partying side by side. The decor has not changed in years, although the bar’s primary function has shifted from cruising to a place to meet friends.