Privately, I asked what role I had to play in this assimilation narrative. We were forced to ask ourselves whether we had let queer culture – and with it, our bars – finally be subsumed by the mainstream. 2014 was the year The Joiners shut, but it was also the year we got same-sex marriage and Barclay's Bank became a sponsor of Pride. It can be a way of thinking, one that champions the private over the public, the individual over the community, sameness over difference. As Sarah Schulman points out in her book The Gentrification of the Mind, gentrification doesn't just happen to cities, but to people. While gentrification was the main reason for the closures, many people wondered if there was another one at play: the idea of assimilation, the idea that, if being LGBT no longer has to define you or your lifestyle as 'different' or 'alternative', gay spaces might not be as necessary as they once were.
