A Gay Bar. Really?

First off, there’s money to be made selling overpriced alcoholic drinks to gay men looking to socialize in Manhattan.  And in fact I’ve no doubt there are a lot of gay Muslim men in Manhattan.  So Greg Gutfeld’s proposal to set up a gay bar catering to Muslims in close proximity to the proposed “Park51” mosque may actually be a not-out-of-this-world business proposition — although I don’t take him seriously when he insists that the idea is anything other than sour joke made in questionable taste.

And the principle is sound — assuming that the bar would meet pre-existing zoning restrictions, which I assume it does.  Granted, there are restrictions on these sorts of establishments being located near houses of worship but given that there is already a gentleman’s club called Babeland within a few blocks of this location (how do I know that?  The internet told me!) and the mosque isn’t established yet, there would be time to get in the plans for the club now.  More importantly, living in a free society means having to tolerate people near you who say and do things that you find distasteful as long as they aren’t harming you directly.  If Gutfeld is upset by a mosque on Park Place but has to tolerate it anyway, then the Imam may well also have to tolerate the gay bar.

In any event, even though I find Gutfeld’s proposal to be a joke made in questionable taste, hey, I’m not always opposed to jokes made in questionable taste.  I’ve got a lot of good mileage recently out of recycling the “rattlesnake” joke and the “Seamus the bridge-builder” joke and both of those are in questionable taste too.  I put a poll up on the front page of the blog, using the names picked by readers of Andrew Sullivan’s blog — if anyone would know the name of a good gay bar in Manhattan, it would be Sully — because I think that Readers here could make a better choice from the list of options given to them.