You actually answered your own question: Mainstreaming. Expand the scope beyond ABS to bars and nightclubs/discos, and online cruising sites and you complete the picture. In the last 5 years, what us old timers knew as the "gay community" has fractured and all but completely disappeared. Here in DC there is no such thing as a gay bar any longer. Squealing, drunk hetero chicks and cute-but-dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks metrosexual (but not particularly homosexual) dudes are just as commonplace at any of the "mostly gay" bars or clubs. Even the Eagle has become a complete joke...anyone and everyone can get in. Former gay ghettos have residual or incidental gay residents, but can hardly be considered gay. Once we've made a neighborhood "fashionable" to live in, the heteros surge in on our coattails and that's the end of the story. Since there aren't many "frontiers" left in most cities, we just go to the four winds and land wherever we happen to.
In reality, this is largely what we were marching down main streets and shouting we wanted for the last forty years: To be free to come and go where we please, live where we please, be whom we please, out in the fresh air and light of day. Unfortunately, the "gay identity" (whatever the hell that was supposed to be in the first place) has long since evaporated (or more succinctly, been coopted, hijacked, corrupted, and convoluted so many times since the mid-1980s it's amazing the term "gay" even remains in the lexicon).
While there are still lots of "historically gay" establishments, they are largely irrelevant for the purpose of meeting and associating with others of our kind in the Internet era. Those born since the late 1960s don't have the same appreciation for, or even value, personal interaction the way those of us from before the mid-1960s do. They were all children (or still decades unborn) while we were fighting for our rights. They just enjoy the fruits of our sacrifices and labors by simply pressing a few buttons and Voilá! They are connected with whatever they want. To the younger generations, there is little or no concept of having to go out of your way to someplace secluded or shady to connect. That also means there is no motivation to really get off their asses to patronize, much less defend, such places (or, as we have seen in the last few election cycles, anything else that doesn't have a direct and personal bearing on their immediate gratification).
The "need" for ABS and other refuges for hooking up is relegated to rapidly reducing demographics of either nostalgic or technophobic old-timers or deeply closeted individuals of any age. The classic ABS atmosphere lacks the "coolness" and conveniences today's participants expect. And, the rampant sense of selfishness and entitlement makes the notion of paying to play as old-hat as, well, wearing a hat.
(I'm intentionally not including AIDS as a reason, because, in large part, it's like 1977 again in most places. The youngsters largely consider it "just an STD"; they have no first-hand knowledge of what happened between 1981 and 1986. Even many of those who lived through the worst of it have left the bunkers behind.)
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I have a need for seed!
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