The Town Square Is a Piano

Why queer men keep gathering around songs, stages, and one another

By: Ricky Anderson

There are few things more New York than walking into a bar on a random Monday and finding a room full of grown folks screaming the bridge of “Defying Gravity” like their rent depends on it.

And yet, somehow, it still feels miraculous.

In a city where everything is expensive, overstimulating, and increasingly designed to move you along, there remains a particular kind of sanctuary: a piano in the corner, a microphone with questionable wiring, a bartender who has seen too much, and a crowd of people who know every lyric to Chess. The room is alive. Someone who works in finance is suddenly giving a heartbreaking rendition of “She Used to Be Mine.” A Broadway ensemble member is casually harmonizing from barstool three. A man built like a CrossFit instructor is weeping to “Memory.” The muscle memory of the music reminds us of a time when those lyrics gave voice to what lived inside us, back when we were still too afraid to say it aloud.

We often talk about “third spaces,” those places outside home and work where community gets to happen. Coffee shops. Parks. Libraries. The places where people become people again. For generations of queer folks, especially in New York, that third space has often looked less like a park bench and more like a piano bench.

Because the town square, for many of us, is a piano. And the music is the language we all speak. 

David DeParolesa, owner of VERS in Hell’s Kitchen, understands this instinctively. When the pandemic shuttered so many longstanding queer spaces, he saw not just businesses disappearing, but community evaporating. He described wanting to build a place to congregate, a second home, something that had gone missing. 

VERS now hosts a wildly beloved Monday piano night, where aspiring singers, Broadway professionals, off-Broadway talent, and people who simply have courage after two cocktails all share the same stage. It has become one of the venue’s most consistent successes. Why? Because it answers a need people still have not outgrown: to be witnessed while singing something they mean.

David put it simply: “We’re a safe space for your voice.” 

That phrase says more than it first appears to.

For the LGBTQ community, voice has never just meant singing. It means expression. Permission. Taking up space. Being loud after years of learning to be quiet. It means trying on confidence through a chorus line. It means saying something true while hiding behind someone else’s lyrics until you’re brave enough to use your own.

Bubbles, longtime steward of Fire Island’s legendary Show Tune Sundays, spoke to that lineage. Musical theater and gay culture, he noted, grew in tandem. For generations of men forced to mute themselves elsewhere, performance became an acceptable place to feel fully alive. 

He’s right. Before many queer men could say what they wanted plainly, they could sing it in eight bars.

That history still lives on in these rooms. As Bubbles puts it, “you see it when the “masc” guy who swore he hates musicals somehow knows every word of “And I Am Telling You.”” You see it when strangers lock eyes during a key change like they survived battle together. You see it when a room collectively decides to support a nervous first-timer who may or may not be attacking a Sondheim patter song that no civilian should attempt.

No one is mocked. Everyone is held.

Jarvis Derrell, host of Drama Club and one of the city’s most joyful curators of musical mayhem, reveals the real mission of these nights is intention. Anyone who gets on his stage should feel respected, seen, loved, and admired. 

Imagine that as a nightlife philosophy.

Not hottest. Not richest. Not coolest. Seen.

They also described these spaces as a great equalizer. In New York, where everyone arrives wearing some version of armor, the person belting the house down may turn out to work in tech, medicine, retail, or nowhere you’d expect. The hierarchy dissolves. For four minutes and twelve seconds, talent and vulnerability outrank status.

That may be the real magic of the piano bar.

It is not just about theater kids finding each other. It is about people, especially men, being allowed softness. It is about camp without apology. It is about excellence mixed with absurdity. It is about the deeply human thrill of hearing a room choose joy in harmony.

And in a moment where loneliness is rampant, where many people feel digitally connected but spiritually stranded, these spaces offer something algorithms cannot: spontaneous belonging.

No app can recreate the sound of forty people shouting “Mister Mistoffelees” in unison.

No feed can replicate the courage it takes to stand up, miss the note, laugh, and keep going.

No notification can replace a stranger handing you a mic and saying, “Your turn.”

The queer community has always built cathedrals out of whatever materials were available. A dance floor. A diner booth. A stoop. A back room. A beach. A bar.

Sometimes, if we are lucky, it is built around a piano.

And when it is, everybody knows where to gather.

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@versnyc @daviddinhk @jarvisderrell @bubblesdboob