Island to get its first bar for gays

MEMBERS-ONLY bars seem to be the trend in the Lan Kwai Fong area, with Club 97 and the new Le Bar Bat soon to be joined by an addition to the 97 stable.

The new club - still without a name - is to be located in one of the alleys off Hollywood Road, and is scheduled to be the first mainly gay bar on the island.

''There's the Yin Yang club and Propaganda, but those are nightclubs, not bars. At the moment gay people have to go to Kowloon to find a bar where they can easily meet gay friends,'' a 97 Group spokesman said.

''We want to make it a comfortable place for people to go, drink and hang out - we expect most members to be gays and lesbians, but people won't be excluded if they're not gay.'' ''It'll have a sort of underground feel to it - near Lan Kwai Fong but not in it - and we want to attract the creative, arty, colourful crowd that we see in our other bars,'' the spokesman said, adding that the decor of the club would be ''theatrical''.

The new place is scheduled to open at the end of September, although the exact date depends on our friends at the Urban Council's Liquor Licensing Board giving its bar staff the nod to serve alcohol.

Meanwhile, even before New 97 opens, gay men and women (and others) have a new place to go in Lan Kwai Fong, albeit only every other Sunday.