This article was published on April 3rd, 2018

Have you got a str8 mate that has never been to a gay bar? Taking your straight friend to a gay bar is a rite of passage and a great way for you to introduce your friend to the historical significance of gay culture and how queer bars were for the longest time the only refuge for the LGBT community, while having fun letting them see how the other half lives. If you haven’t begun the initiation process already of taking your hetero homies to a gay bar, now is the time to start.

For starters, bars and underground clubs were some of the first public gathering spaces for gay people, so there is a historical significance to visiting your first. Straight people need to understand that there used to be a time when gay people weren’t fortunate enough to be public about their true selves. That’s why nearly the décor in a gay bar is often so lively: gay bars have historically been a place where the LGBT community could celebrate living their true lives.

Stepping into a gay bar for the first time lets them see some of the similarities and differences between the straight and queer community, too.  Fashion, sex, art, culture, pop culture, and queer identity are all put on display in a gay bar. Can your straight friend handle so much ferocity in one setting? A gay bar is a good place to dip into a bit of information about our culture without having to get their feet wet.

Much like a gay church, gay bars (not including some stuffy clubs in bigger cities) tend to be an ‘everyone is invited’ type of place to visit. Sure, all bars want your business, but only at a gay bar is everyone immediately welcomed and treated as if they should be respected upon walking through the door. Even straight people!

Gay bars just have much better music than their straight bar counterparts. Any event planner out there will tell you that the most important component to any get together is la musica. You can’t exactly dance or more to death metal or country ballads. In a gay bar, you’re guaranteed to be blessed with some kind of beat to shake your booty.

A very real but superficial reason for bringing your (hopefully single, in this case) str8 friend to a gay bar? Cuter peops. Bring your straight friends to a gay bar for the first time and one comment that is often heard: “There are so many attractive people here.” Most likely someone else dragged their ride-or-die straight friend to the bar, too, for your str8 mate to chat with.

Need one last good reason? Take your straight friend to a gay bar before it is possibly too late. Hole-in-the-wall gay bars that have been several decade-long establishments cannot keep up with today’s trend of rent increases and a desire for a large, club-like atmosphere and are disappearing every year. More and more gay bars are becoming mixed. In the ever-evolving millennial era, will the gay bar have a need to exist while society grows more accepting?

Only time will tell. So, the sooner you pop their cherry and take your straight friend to their first gay bar, the better.