Hawkins recalls that gay bars often existed on the fringes of mainstream culture: Beyond that, there were very few openly gay organizations - if they did exist, they were relatively clandestine.” “There were public restrooms and bars and pretty much that was the extent of it. “Gay bars were almost sacred institutions for a lot of people because it was the only place you could go to see other people like yourself,” he says. I recently connected with ONE’s director, Joseph Hawkins, who shared his perspective on the gay bar’s changing role today. Since 1994, the organization has focused exclusively on its archives. In October 1952, they began publishing ONE Magazine, the first widely distributed gay magazine in the U.S., and also served as a kind of media watchdog, duties which they later relinquished as other LGBTQ organizations developed and took over.
ONE Archives at the University of Southern California is the largest LGBTQ archive in the world, as well as the longest continually running LGBTQ organization in the United States. They provided a safe space for people to come out and meet others without fear of persecution, discrimination, or violence.
They were often the only places where LGBTQ people could meet each other.
IT’S HARD TO OVERSTATE HOW CRUCIAL GAY BARS WERE TO THE COMMUNITY in the later decades of the 20th century. Photo by Lee Mason/ ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. That it isn’t suggests the possibility that what a gay bar means to the community may be fundamentally different today than what it did in decades past.Īnd, as such, defending the value of the gay bar is a little more difficult today.ĭemonstration at the West Hollywood bar The Farm to rescind the no-touching rule prevalent at gay bars at the time. Indeed, as LGBTQ visibility and acceptance has gone mainstream, one would think that the number of gay bars would be increasing. Still, if the gay bar held the same importance to the gay community as it did in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we probably wouldn’t be seeing the general decline in numbers that we are seeing now. There’s no doubt that many of these bars have been closing because higher rents and opportunistic developers are forcing them out. It’s also about the community grappling to hold onto notions of queerness in an era where the mainstream has grown to embrace and co-opt it. It is a story about how the function and purpose of gay bars have evolved over time, and how that evolution is a part of a larger narrative about the dangers of historical erasure as the LGBTQ community continues to assimilate into the general population. A walk through the West Village, Chelsea, or the Castro only serves to reinforce just how much has changed: Neighborhoods that were once thought of as gay “ghettos” have gotten complete makeovers, complete with expensive bistros, real estate offices, outposts of large corporate chains, bank branches, and probably a Whole Foods.īUT THE STORY OF THE DEATH OF THE GAY BAR IS NOT JUST ONE OF GENTRIFICATION. The condos go up and the gays move away, off to find more affordable digs that they can then spruce up and claim as their own. A city that housed dozens of gay bars has been left with only a handful. Watching “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” on FX these past few months, I’m reminded of all the places I hung out in during my frequent visits to South Beach in the mid-‘90s: Warsaw. We need look only to Miami Beach to see just how extreme this trend can become. While we celebrate the meteoric expansion of LGBTQ rights, we still need places where we can celebrate our otherness. (Race also, obviously, is an enormous factor in this.) We all know the drill, that familiar story of gentrification once again running its course: Gays move in to downtrodden neighborhoods, open and other establishments, turn them into hip enclaves that quickly attract the developers and the upwardly-mobile straight families who then price them out of the very places they were at the forefront of revitalizing. In Los Angeles, The Palms, one of the city’s last remaining lesbian bars, WeHo’s diverse mega-club Circus Disco, and Silver Lake’s The Other Side have all gone - and the list seems to keep growing. In New York, legendary leather bar The Rawhide, open since 1979, ‘90s power club Splash, and Chelsea’s G Lounge, have all shuttered, not to mention Urge Lounge, Escuelita, and once-throbbing parties such as Westgay, Pretty Ugly, and JB Saturday’s. In recent years, San Francisco has lost The Gangway, the city’s oldest continuously running gay establishment and Latino staple Esta Noche in the Mission, as well as Lion Pub, The Lexington Club and Marlena’s.