The first ones I ever saw on screen were mostly punchlines to jokes about masculinity. There was the sex club Al Pacino visited undercover in Cruising, then the Blue Oyster Bar in Police Academy. As recently as 2011 in Steve McQueen’s Shame, Michael Fassbender’s sex addict is portrayed as falling to the most irreconcilable depths of bodily depravity by ending up in a New York gay sex dungeon.
The current evocation of the gay bar is almost comically opposite to its forebears.
