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Local gay-club impresario Nestor Romero opened the Music Box in 1993, three years after he introduced his across-the-way favorite Friend’s Tavern. Because the layout is identical and the congenial bartenders are similarly inclined to greet you with a handshake and a smile, patrons freely amble between one bar and the other, interrupting their chatter only for the looming rumble of the elevated train overhead. Such is gay life in the well-traversed southwest pocket of Jackson Heights. Like all doppelgangers, the bars do have minute differences: The marginally younger sibling sports a pool table and five TV screens and assumes the character of a backstage drama as performers in the brazen Thursday drag show alternately fight their nervousness or ham up their showgirl charisma. — Adam H. Graham