As long as she lived Stephen never forgot her first impressions of the bar known as Alec’s - that miserable meeting place of the most miserable of all those who comprised the miserable army. That merciless, drug-dealing, death-dealing haunt to which flocked the battered remnants of men whom their fellow-men had at last stamped under; who, despised of the world, must despise themselves beyond all hope, it seemed, of salvation. There they sat, closely herded together at the tables, creatures shabby yet tawdry, timid yet defiant - and their eyes, Stephen never forgot their eyes, those haunted, tormented eyes of the invert.
From: Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness