ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to Bounce, the space where the subjects of this ethnography performed to expand upon the role of the small-town gay bar in the digital age. In the years after I completed my primary fieldwork, the bar came under new management and became increasingly hostile to the drag kings, whom management viewed as insufficiently profitable. The Cleveland Kings and Girls moved to a new bar in 2012, and over the course of the next five years, Bounce closed, changed hands, and reopened several times, finally closing for good in November 2017. Drawing on performer interviews conducted in the wake of its closure and on autoethnographic reflections on my experiences as a member of the community, I think through the possibilities and limits of creating interperformative solidarities centered in (and in the absence of) specific physical spaces like drag bars.
