On the town in Budapest: Gays hit the straight bar for hetero men

Earlier this month when I was in Budapest, I accidentally found an after-party place called Coronita.

Among locals, it is casually known as “the bar where gay men go to pick up heterosexual men.”

Apparently, this concept isn’t at all unusual.

“It’s a straight club,” says Akos, a local gay man. “But the gays go there around 5 a.m. to pick the men who haven’t managed to pick up any women all night, but don’t want to go home alone.”

It’s not the first time I was confronted with this kind of “situational sexuality,” which is fairly widespread in Eastern Europe.

I have previously researched the phenomenon of straight men who are “gay for pay” or lesbians prostitutes, who make a living by having sex with men. Both instances were heavily aided by drugs, as is — quite clearly — “the bar where gay men go to pick up straight men.”

Still, drugs or no drugs, one can’t help but wonder: who are these men who “haven’t managed to pick up any women all night, but don’t want to go home alone?"

And who exactly are these gay men who prey on the “straight scraps?” Doesn't the stereotype have it that gay men are much pickier than heterosexual men and women about who they have sex with? 

It was the late Christopher Hitchens, who put it best in his memoir, Hitch 22, when he described his 30s this way: 

“My looks by then had in any case declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me.”

London in the 1980s had nothing on Budapest in 2012.