Guerrilla Gay Bar York: Watch what happens when LGBTQ crowd crashes the neighborhood bar

On most weekends, Javier Aguayo is down in Washington, D.C., where he and his husband have an apartment.

But about a month ago, two of his D.C. friends were coming to visit York. He needed to find something to do.

Searching around online, Aguayo landed on a Facebook group called Guerrilla Gay Bar York.

It seemed like a novel idea, and with no gay bar in York County the 50-year-old York College politics professor decided to check it out.

"They came along and were really impressed," Aguayo said. "They thought York was some sort of gay haven."

There used to be established gay bars in York County but one of the last, Altland's Ranch, closed in 2016.

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Guerrilla Gay Bar York aims to change that.

Its concept is simple. 

On the second Saturday of each month, the group posts on its Facebook page which bar in downtown York its followers will go to. It makes the announcement usually in the afternoon and tells people to get there at 9 p.m.

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Organizers spend time during the week scouting out locations and choose a place that it feels will accommodate the amount of people that week who say they are going.

Since October, Guerrilla Gay Bar York has gone to Revival Social Club, Handsome Cab and Holy Hound.

Proponents of the group say they are hoping to introduce York County's LGBTQ community to the downtown scene.

"It's no longer about a space of our own," said Ralph Serpe, a core member of Guerrilla Gay Bar York along with his husband, Bryan Tate. "It is about a wonderful reunion every month and an opportunity for a lot of people who are new to the gay and lesbian community to realize that they're not alone."

The group all arrives at the same time "to hold a mirror up to the straight people at the bar," said Serpe, who's the CEO of the Adams County Community Foundation.

On the night that Aguayo went with his husband and their friends, they went to Collusion Tap Works, the brewpub in York's Royal Square District. There were about 120 people who showed up for Guerrilla Gay Bar.

The next month, he was in the middle of a crowd of about 60 people at Crystal Ball Brewing Co.

Overlooking the crowd early in the night, Serpe recognized lawyers, teachers, small business owners, nurses and hairdressers, young and old.

Of the nearly 700 Facebook members, there's a cross-section of gay, bisexual and transgender people, of all different races and ages, Serpe says.

He put Guerrilla Gay Bar York this way: "Ultimately, we're the gay Welcome Wagon. We're the gay Downtown Inc."

Some people at the gathering said they would like to see an established gay bar again in York but question if it's really needed anymore.

"It's 2018," Serpe said. "We are part of this community. We're so much a part of this community that our own spaces have gone by the wayside."

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Guerrilla Gay Bars are not unique to York. 

The concept started in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1990s when the queer community wanted to experience new clubs that aren't gay venues, said Serpe.

Searching quickly online, Serpe found similar pages in Indiana, Reno and Nashville.

For Ric Rackett, a nurse at Memorial Hospital, the Guerrilla Gay Bar brought him for the first time to Crystal Ball Brewing Co.

The night also brought the 46-year-old Florida native some initial anxieties. "You have a whole bunch of gay people who walk into a bar at the same time," he said. You don't know what might happen.

He worried about people shouting out hateful words or causing trouble.

But that hasn't been the case.

Instead, Rackett said, "it's really nice to be able to expose the heterosexual culture to the gay culture."