The Week In Review: It’s Fair

Not many would consider a hole-in-the-wall shopfront in the middle of Chinatown, with missing letters on the sign out front and decades of grime pounded into the floor, as “welcoming.” But it is.

This week Kotaku’s Aulistar Mark visited Chinatown Fair in New York, which holds two distinctions. The first, it’s the oldest arcade in the city, a notoriety that sometimes brings tourist groups to inspect its hard-bitten interior, which is anything but the clean, corporate token-and-ticket playland that’s the only kind of arcade making money in America.

The second is that it’s a gay-positive hangout in a culture that elsewhere in the world – online, forums, comment threads – is incessantly hostile to who they are. The hate’s polished up with the usual nonsense: we don’t care who you are, just don’t make us aware of it – which means, in essence, don’t live your life if I find it offensive.

If the lives lived at Chinatown Fair are sometimes offensive to others, it’s not because of sexual orientation. “Sometimes there’s drunk people [or an]occasional homeless person,” says the arcade’s Derrick Rodder. “Sometimes kids, you know, are kids. They get into fights, and you have to break it up – just life.”

Here’s the week in life, on Kotaku.

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