Straight Night at Crush

[September 17th, 2003] Heard the one about the gay bar going straight?

It's true. The tables are turning.

Queer wine bar Crush has recently given heteros their own weekly party: Straight Night. According to the bar's promotional materials, it's an evening for all the straights feeling left out of Portland's Queer Night phenomenon.

Throughout the past year, queers, all of them dressed in their Sunday best, would head to the now-defunct Blackbird in droves for its monthly (sometimes semimonthly!) Tuesday-night fiesta. They would pack the place, dance all night and arrive the next time with four more friends.

Remember Skervy? That lesbo-centric, pirate-friendly dance party was so popular, it was forced to move from its original Billy Ray's Thursday night home to the Cobalt Lounge on Fridays.

Ideally, Wednesday's Straight Night should be fun. Think of the party games! The matching outfits! The appetizers! The bar's even crafted a menu filled with discounted, snarkily named "Straight Friendly Shots" like the "Chuck Heston" (bourbon, coffee liqueur, milk), the "Married, Filing Jointly" (vodka, juice, wild berry pucker)--even the "Frat Boy" (Jägermeister, of course).

Sounds like a blast, right?

Not so much. Thing is, straight people at Straight Night are pretty boring. Attendance at Crush on a recent Wednesday evening was dismal. There was no dancing on tables, no make-out sessions in the corners. Not even one matching girl-boy outfit.

The bar also seemed equally filled with both gays and straights. Even then, the heteros were the ones leaving at 11 o'clock, and the only ones slamming shots were the boys who didn't arrive with a girl on their arm. Could Straight Night's low numbers be the fault of the night on which it falls? Are straight people really more boring than gays? Well, Hump Night is a school night.

Maybe it has nothing to do with a day of the week. Maybe the current experiment by Crush will highlight the silliness of deeming a night--or, dare I say, even a bar--gay or straight in the first place.

Even Skervy, arguably the first and most popular queer night of the current phenomenon, has faded into the less flamboyant Breakdown.

Maybe we're just getting back to the business of going out without giving a club night a sexual orientation.