A Gay Neighborhood or Merely a Temporary Cluster of “Strange” Bars? Gay Bar Culture in Antwerp

Abstract

This chapter investigates the historical permutations of those areas that come closest to qualifying as lesbian and gay neighborhoods in Antwerp, the largest city in Flanders (the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). Although Antwerp has come to be represented as the “gay capital” of Flanders, it never developed a full-fledged gay neighborhood in the Anglo-American tradition of the concept. The clustering of sexual minorities in the city has been limited largely to the economic, social, and cultural business of (nightlife) entertainment, with lesbian and gay meeting places historically concentrating in particular neighborhoods that, moreover, have shifted over time and dissipated again. The chapter’s fine-grained analysis intends to reveal geographic, social, and cultural specificities for which a more detailed understanding of both the Antwerp and the Belgian contexts is necessary. Its tripartite structure is shaped by the specific heuristic conditions set by it. Because the larger historical context for the investigated subject remains to be written, the chapter first undertakes a substantial and panoramic survey of the emergence of gay nightlife in Antwerp during the early half of the twentieth century. This provides the framework needed for a more detailed analysis in the second part, which zooms in on an area in the immediate vicinity of the Central Station and takes as its emblematic focus one sufficiently long-term and iconic gay bar, called Café Strange. Finally, the chapter zooms out again to sketch how even such a limited gay nightlife cluster in Antwerp has evaporated again in the course of the twenty-first century, leaving a landscape that is hard to map and largely virtual.