Family values
“There’s so many boys touching my butt. I hate them.”
It’s early morning and Family Bar is heaving. It’s thronging with people, drunk, sweaty, dancing, spilling out onto K’ Rd, unseasonably warm at 2am in early winter. Having fun. Fed up.
A man raises his hands in a kind of faux-apology as a woman whips around on the dancefloor and tells him sharply not to grab her. Doesn’t he know this is a gay bar? “We’re all trying to have a good time,” he bleats, plaintively.
That’s what Family Bar promises, isn’t it? A good time. Spanning three levels and open later than most along the inner-city’s party strip, Family can put on a night out few venues in the city can rival. Come August, its doors will have been open for 14 years; not so much a gay bar in Auckland as the gay bar in Auckland.
A lot has changed in the past 14 years, mostly for the better: the legalisation of same-sex marriage, the historic pardoning of gay men convicted of homosexual acts, the widespread popularity of TV shows like , and the shifting attitudes towards LGBTQI people that both underpin and follow these developments. Many straight men who wouldn’t have been caught dead in a gay bar a decade ago
