Bonding at Senior Bar

Senior bar at Grafton means the same old cocktail routines with a few more familiar faces. Senior bar at Club Café, a popular Boston gay bar, means the same old techno gyrations with a lot fewer familiar faces.

On the last Wednesday in April, the class of 2003 inaugurated “gay senior bar,” an event co-sponsored by the senior class committee and BOND, a social group for, according to the group’s website, the non-exclusively-heterosexual members of the Harvard community.

BOND co-chair Justin Ocean ’03 came up with the idea and worked with senior bar coordinator Brian J. Hayes ’03 to organize the evening. Hayes says that the senior class committee thought Ocean’s suggestion would help diversify the traditional senior bar lineup. “The senior class committee is very receptive to what people in the class want to see,” he says. “Club Café seemed like a good choice.”

Despite this support from the senior class committee, the crowd at Club Café was perhaps a little too exclusively non-exclusive. Though the event was advertised through the senior bar and BOND e-mail lists, relatively few people made the trek into Boston. “It was a pretty low turnout, maybe 10 to 15 people,” says Lee-Sean Huang ’03, who attended the event. “But for the people that went, I think it was a chill time. I had fun.”

“The turnout was a little disappointing, though I think those that were there liked it,” Ocean writes in an e-mail. “Not too many people came outside of the usual queer crowd that goes out. I would have hoped for more straight people to be there as I thought it to be an event for people who had never been to a gay bar to go and see what it was like.” The event was advertised as “gay senior bar” to the e-mail lists, which Ocean believes may be the reason for the low heterosexual turnout. “I think people misunderstood and thought of it as a gay-only event,” he speculates.

New BOND co-chairs Michael J. Chiappa ’05 and Patrick S. Kelley ’05 hope to co-sponsor an event with senior bar next year, but want to change the way it is advertised.

“We would like to see senior bar happen again at Club Café next year,” Chiappa says. “But with less emphasis on the fact that it’s a gay bar. We wouldn’t call it gay senior bar, which is what it was called this year. It would just be a bar where gay people happen to be.”