Best gay bar

Club Café clobbers the competition year after year, winning all sorts of best-gay-bar awards. There's a jubilant afterwork atmosphere, a lively bar, a great menu, a video lounge with VJ Tom Yazbek's "Non-Stop Video Show," and a classy, relaxed air. By all accounts, Thursday night at Club Café has become an institution. And while there's certainly a flirtatious atmosphere -- a glance around the room reveals that everyone spent some quality time with their mirrors before heading out -- Club Café avoids feeling like a meat market.

Only one night a week is officially designated gay at ManRay (that's "Campus" on Thursdays), but because the Cambridge club dominates all things alternative, there's nothing particularly straight about the rest of the week. Bond with S&M enthusiasts and get tarted up in your tightest vinyl. It's an underground lair, a place of vamp and vice, of fetish and fantasy. ManRay's one of the only establishments in Boston where your by-night persona won't turn any heads. In other words, anything goes. Or, as a the motto for one of its nights goes, "Why stop at temptation?"

Club Café, 209 Columbus Avenue, Boston, (617) 536-0966; ManRay, 21 Brookline Street, Cambridge, (617) 864-0400.