If You Called A Gay Bar “The Grundle,” Would It Still Be Just South Of The Bundle?

So we noticed a very familiar sign in the window of a bar only one avenue block away from our house last week. Even though The Cock moved into The Hole on 2nd Avenue last year, it looks as though it will at least spiritually maintain a presence on northern Avenue A. COCKtail appears to be the name of the new joint, and according to reports it is smaller and cleaner than its ancestor. We can’t wait to, um, test it out.

But it really makes you wonder: Is there a limit to the amount of graphically named gay bars one neighborhood can handle? With COCKtail, Dick’s Bar, and The Cock (in the Hole), the East Village is pretty much full up. And is that kind of thinly veiled explicitness really necessary, anyway? If we wanted to get the point across, we might as well call them: “A Place Where They Sell Stella Artois And You Can Check Out Other Men,” or “We Have Plenty Of Lingering Eye Contact, But You’ll Be At Home In Two Hours, Drunk, Looking At Internet Porn,” or maybe just “Sticky Floors, Sticky Faces.”

Or, as Margaret Cho pointed out when thinking of renaming Edinburgh’s “CeCe Bloom’s” tavern, why not just call it, “Fuck Me in the Ass, Bar and Grill?”