Gay Clubs: No
Bachelorettes Allowed

Gay bar patrons in Chicago -- and across the country -- have decided they don't want the fact that they can't marry rubbed in their faces on a Friday night.

In her column in the Chicago Tribune, writer Dawn Turner Trice says that she's been to a handful of bachelorette parties in Chicago that take place in gay bars so that creepy straight men won't try to flirt with the bride and her posse. By the end of the night and a few drinks, however, the demure bridesmaids turn into "pelvis-trusting vamps."

Add that to the fact that gay bar patrons in 48 states can't get legally married and some bars -- including Chicago's Cocktails and Sidetrack bars -- have decided to close off their facilities to bachelorette parties.

"The women are a hoot, and some can be just delightful," Cocktail's owner Geno Zaharakis said in the column. "But because not everybody can get married, watching them celebrate, it's such a slap in the face. Prop. 8 just reopened the wound."

Trice said she also noticed that the women became so rowdy, they often became emblematic of the very straight men they try to avoid.

"As the show got under way at Circuit with a theatrical mist floating over the audience," Trice wrote, "I asked reveler Blythe Thomas whether, in general, she believed holding bachelorette parties in gay bars was 'heterosexist,' or insensitive."

"I never would have thought about it like that watching a curtainlike screen rise on four soon-to-be-nearly-naked dancers," Thomas replied. "I could see how this could be frustrating to gay men. Maybe it's something I'll think about next time."