The Most Important Gay Bars in History
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Photograph by Joseph Ambrosini of the CREDIT: New York Daily News via Wikimedia Commons.
Bars have played a crucial role in gay culture and politics, because they are one of the few places where gay men and lesbians gather. This slide show looks at 10 of the most significant gay bars in American history.
The Stonewall Inn, New York City: The Bar That Launched the Gay Rights Movement
The Stonewall Inn must sit atop any list of the most influential gay bars in history. The raid on the Stonewall in the early hours of June 28, 1969 (pictured), is the before-and-after marker in gay history. Before Stonewall, gays were compliant and victimized; after Stonewall, they were strong and defiant. That’s a myth, of course. Gays and lesbians had stood up for themselves before Stonewall, but their rebellions were short-lived and largely ignored.
When the pissed-off patrons of this Mafia-run gay bar refused to comply with police orders, they did so on the first hot weekend of summer, at the biggest club in the area, and in a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood that had recently become home to a growing number of homeless gay youths with little to lose if they faced off against the cops. Two writers from the Village Voice were among the hundreds of New Yorkers who stumbled upon the riots, so the story of the riots that followed the raid spread far and wide.
The Stonewall closed a few months after the riots, and the building housed restaurants and shops until 1990, when it once again became a gay bar. When the New York State Senate voted to approve same-sex marriage on June 24, 2011, hundreds headed to the Stonewall to celebrate.
Related Story: The Gay Bar: Why the gay rights movement was born in one.
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Photograph by Robert Giard © Jonathan G. Silin.
Julius’, New York City: Site of the Sip-In
Julius’, located just one block from the Stonewall in Greenwich Village, helped to establish gay people’s right to gather in bars. In the 1960s, the New York State Liquor Authority appeared to believe that the presence of one known homosexual in a tavern made the place “disorderly,” which meant potential owners had little incentive to start a legitimate bar, leaving the field to the Mafia.In April 1966, members of the Mattachine Society, a pioneering gay rights group, organized a “sip-in,” in which they entered a bar, announced that they were homosexual, and ordered drinks. They expected to be refused service, after which they would complain to the SLA, which would be forced to spell out its policies. Unfortunately, as the New York Times reported in a story headlined “3 Deviates Invite Exclusion by Bars,” they “met with some difficulty … in finding a bar that would deny them service.” The fourth bar they visited was Julius’, which played along and refused their order. The SLA wasn’t so helpful however—it claimed that it was up to each bar’s management to decide whom to serve, and it announced that it would take no action on the Mattachine complaint. The bar, pictured here in 2000, continues to thrive as a gay bar.
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Photograph courtesy San Francisco Public Library Photo Collection.
Black Cat, San Francisco: “The Best Gay Bar in America”
In the 1950s, Allen Ginsberg called the Black Cat “the best gay bar in America,” though at the time it drew a mixed crowd, heavy on the beatniks. (A section of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is set there.) At the end of that decade, owner Sol Stoumen denounced police demands for payoffs, which drew attention to the bar. Stoumen eventually took the state to court, and in Stoumen v. Reilly the California Supreme Court held that patronage by gay customers was not sufficient reason to revoke a bar’s license.One of the Black Cat’s singing waiters, Jose Sarria, was an early promoter of gay pride. At the end of his performances, he would urge the bar’s patrons to hold hands and sing "God Save Us Nelly Queens" to the tune of “God Save the Queen.” In the movie Word Is Out, George Mendenall recalls: “To be able to put your arms around other gay men and to be able to stand up and sing 'God Save Us Nelly Queens.' ... We were saying 'We have our rights, too.’ ” In 1961, Sarria ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as an openly gay man and won 6,000 votes.
The Black Cat closed in 1964.
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Photograph courtesy Le Barcito.
Black Cat, Los Angeles: Site of “Lewd” Long Kisses
On Dec. 31, 1966—18 months before the Stonewall riots—the police stormed into the Black Cat in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood as the clock struck midnight. Six of the patrons were charged with lewd conduct when their New Year’s kisses lasted longer than 10 seconds, and all were found guilty. When police chased two men into New Faces, another gay bar nearby, they beat the female owner and three employees who defended her. One of the bartenders suffered a ruptured spleen; he was charged with assaulting an officer when he recovered several days later. Angry community members organized protests, but perhaps because of Los Angeles’ sprawling geography, the episode received little attention. Though no longer called the Black Cat, the site is now home to Le Barcito, which is also a gay bar.
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Photograph by Jack Robinson , courtesy the Jack Robinson Archive.
Dixie’s Bar of Music, New Orleans: Live Music and Daisy Chains
If you were gay in the South in the 1950s, New Orleans was the place to be. And if you were in New Orleans, Dixie’s Bar of Music was considered one of the prime spots to party. (Mardi Gras revelers are pictured here in the early 1950s.) One of the first gay bars in New Orleans, Dixie’s drew artists and writers such as Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal among its regulars. According to William A. Percy, in 1957, “Mardi Gras crowds in Dixie's developed small groping circles that suddenly became daisy-chains, the idea of which, despite Dixie's and other bar owners' efforts to stop it, rapidly spread. Before 1960 such ‘public’ sex was a commonplace in New Orleans gay bars, precursors by over a decade of the orgy rooms that became a national fad in the 1970s.”
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Courtesy Queer Music Heritage Archive.
Club 82, New York City: Who’s No Lady?
Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Club 82, at 82 E. 4th St., was home to New York’s premier drag revue, which used the slogan “Who’s no lady?” on postcards and ads in various New York City publications. According to a program from 1965, the “talented femme impersonators present an unbelievable illusion of well studied femininity.” By the 1970s, post-Stonewall attitudes had rendered it an odd curiosity, until glam-rockers the New York Dolls became the house band and drew a new crowd. Today the club is renowned as an early venue for New York punk bands like Television and Blondie. -
Ad in CREDIT: San Francisco Life, December 1942/The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco.
Mona’s 440 Club, San Francisco: The First Lesbian Bar
Mona’s 440 Club, often cited as the first lesbian bar, was a West Coast mirror image of Club 82. In the early 1940s, Mona’s attracted a lesbian—or at least an almost exclusively female—audience to watch male impersonators, the early foremothers of today’s drag kings. Performers included Gladys Bentley and “Butch” Minton, “singing gay songs.”
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Ad for the Eagle.
The Eagle, New York City: Redefining the Leather Scene
In 1970, with the help of a few coats of black paint and a beat-up motorcycle for decoration, Jack Modica transformed a longshoreman’s pub known as the Eagle Open Kitchen into a gay leather bar called the Eagle’s Nest.
There were hundreds of leather bars around the world, but the Eagle became a byword for the hypermasculine aesthetic. As many as 50 bars around the world took the name, though there was no formal connection between them. Their numbers have decreased in recent years. In May, the San Francisco Eagle Tavern shuttered its doors after 30 years in business.
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Photograph from the CREDIT: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection via Library of Congress.
Atlantic House, Provincetown, Mass.: The Oldest Gay Bar in America?
The Atlantic House, or “the A House,” as it is universally known, is one of the contenders for the title of America’s oldest gay bar. The building has housed a tavern since 1798. In the early 20th century, it was popular with writers such as Eugene O’Neill, who wrote sections of The Iceman Cometh during his stay at the hotel, and Tennessee Williams. A picture of Williams marching around the dunes in his birthday suit hangs in the bar. Here Williams is pictured with Andy Warhol around the time that he reportedly frequented the A House. Unfortunately, few photos exist of Williams in the bar.
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Photograph by jiff89 via Flickr.
The Double Header, Seattle: The West Coast’s Oldest Gay Bar?
In the 1930s, drag queens started to patronize the Casino, the after-hours club in the basement of the Double Header tavern, a former merchant marine bar in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. According to a 2007 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, they eventually drifted upstairs, transforming the Double Header into one of the West Coast’s first gay bars. As the Seattle scene shifted from Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill, the Double Header gradually ceased to be a gay bar. Now the only traces of its former life are some framed black-and-white photos near the front door.Related Story: The Gay Bar: Why the gay rights movement was born in one.