Real life example. This editor was hired by some gay friends to perform in a burlesque dance at the Propaganda Club in Hong Kong (one of the strongholds of the local gay scene) It was explained to me by these friends that it's fairly hard to get banned from the Propaganda unless you do something really shocking, like having sex in the toilets. They looked genuinely bemused when I tried to explain that a lot of straight guys assume that that sort of thing happens all night every night in gay bars.

Another real-life counterexample: A somewhat homophobic friend of this editor visited a gay bar, ordered a drink, got kicked out (for being underage), and didn't realize it was a gay bar until someone tried to pick him up as he sat on the curb outside. Unless he was amazingly unobservant, gay bars are more a bit subtler than they are normally portrayed as in fiction.

This editor is perhaps unobservant. "Hm... there sure are a lot of older lesbians and groups of strapping young men on this street outside this bar... And that rainbow-colored lighted waterfall sure is interesting... Oh well, time to go in." (True story.)

TruthInTelevision This lipstick lesbian troper stays far away from lesbian bars. They really are often the biker dyke variety.

This straight troper walked into a gay cafe in London's Soho and was mid-way through ordering lunch when he twigged it via the lesbian art on the wall and the gay magazines. He wasn't exactly going to leave before he'd eaten and he wasn't homophobic anyway

A lesbian of this troper's acquaintance estimated that maybe half the patrons at the local gay bar, at any given time, were actually gay or bi.

The leading gay bar in Finland, Lost And Found has lately been abandoned by the GLBT community, as it has just become an increasingly trendy place for straight people to hang around.

Sadly, this happens a lot.

Sadly? Oh no! People are accepting the normality of a non-straight sexual orientation and attempting to integrate: THE HORROR!

It's not always an attempt by non-homophobic individuals to integrate and is sad that we're losing our sacturaries.

Sydney's Oxford St is mixed gay and straight bars, and sometimes this (straight male) troper ducks into a gay bar because there's no cover charge and the bars are nice. The gay bars in Sydney cover the full range of this trope, though.... going to the leather bar for a punk show was interesting

{{Truth In Television}} for the most part with this troper, but once a month at his local is an underwear night, at which the staff dim the lights, set up a cloakroom for clothing and partition off a small area for an orgy. On warm nights a lot of guys just go for it out in the beer garden to the bemusement of bored smokers. God help the poor straight guy who wanders into a bar on that one night, although with a name like the Laird O'Cockpen.. yeah.

When this troper's ''youth group'' was traveling they decided to have lunch at a very nice restaurant that happened to have a bar. It wasn't until they saw the rainbow cake that any of them figured it out. Fortunately, we're a liberal church, so nobody was offended.

This troper's Chemistry teacher told her class a story once of how he missed a bus and figuring he had some time to kill, went into a bar to take a drink. Only when he actually sat down and looked around did he see a lot of gay porn on the walls. Despite it, he finished his drink as quickly as possible and headed for the exit. To bump into one of the ''students from our school who also comes to his church group''. Hilarity ensued.

This troper, with a group of people taking a class in Scottland, once wandered into a Gay South-western Techno bar/club. Yes.

It took me a couple years to convince my brother to go with me to a gay bar. His biggest fear was some guy hitting on him, to which I replied, "Guys hardly ever hit on ''me'' when I go there!"

In Barcelona we have a famous gay Club: Arena. The problem with that place is that it's very "AnythingThatMoves". I'd like to know of another Gay Bar where people behave in a more subtle way...

This troper was taken to a gay bar once. He left shortly afterwards, due to it being crammed full of people and very loud music. The only difference between it and a regular city-center bar was it being full of very obviously gay men.

While traveling through France, I came across a place called "Wolf Bar" in Paris, which (unlike most of these examples as it appears) was very obviously a gay bar from the outside- there were no women anywhere near it, and signs on the outside indicated it catered to some...very specific gay male fetishes. (I didn't go in- 14-year-old girls aren't generally welcome at bars, and definitely not that one)

This troper has been in a gay bar once. It was actually Mexican restaurant (A pretty good one, too) that happened to have a bar to it...and the bar happened to be a hot spot for gay men. Hilarity ensued when one started hitting on my uncle, while my aunt was sitting next to him.

I once went to a gay bar in Tokyo called Dragon Men, where they were playing LadyGaga and... marathon episodes of DragonballZ. It had never occurred to me that the FanYay quotient of that particular show was high enough to warrant a themed bar, but... (The lesbian bar I ended up at later that night was pretty low-key, though, and not immediately recognizable as a lesbian bar aside from the clientele being all female.)

This sounds like the best bar ever.

It's not even a bar, but the Montrose Counseling Center in Houston (Montrose is Houston's local Gayborhood and red light district) definitely counts. The place is full of pride flags, various relics of LGBT history, very gay clothing, and a stench of perfume.

This troper has been to a gay bar, and didn't like it much, mostly for the same reason he dislikes regular bars: Too many people, too loud, and people tend to wander off and leave him lost and alone.

I have a counterpart!