Broadway gay bar long beach

Of course there were the things I was used to, like Randy, a bartender long mocked by the young and old for often being slow but always extraordinarily kind. There was the newly minted digital jukebox that someone was sorting through. But there was an aura about the space that was distinctly different from my puke-and-rally Sunday Fundays: There stood older men and women and humans, styrofoam plates of food in one hand, cocktail in the other, arms affectionately around another if they had just one or the other.

Simultaneously lamenting and celebrating both a time and friend lost. They covered the pool tables to make way for a ton of food, encouraged everyone gay anyone to come in, eat, and even if they were strangers, take a glance at someone that was long to them. Because coming into a space that has the full weight of history attached to it—so heavy that it is the only place for friends to gather to mourn the loss of a close one because it is the only safe haven they know of—makes us, the youngins who benefit from their struggles, exempt from criticizing it.

The Broadway Bar was and is a place of worship and protection, especially for an entire generation of humans who saw more struggle, frustration, misunderstanding, stereotypes, and challenges than any gay white dude nowadays could comprehend. A generation who had police follow them into bathrooms and lure them into cuffs.

A generation who saw police have unilateral power in stopping them, frisking them, belittling them. The Falcon, whose tiny-but-mighty space felt like the broadway floor heaven of my gayest dreams, getting lost in bar video mixes of DJ Yellow and unabashedly tasting the whiskey-stained lips of too many boys and a few beaches to count.

The now-gone Paradise, its brick interior the backdrop for piano-loving, out-and-proud homos singing Barbara and Liza, Elton and Cher, while hosting a soft ball team fundraiser and giving you a much-needed bite of food before traipsing down the rest of Broadway in a queer-lit, happy fucking daze.

And the bars became not just the watering holes of our ancestors but their sole safe space. I remember when having the chance to speak to Dr. The only place that you could be a known queer—even though you could get arrested there and it was not safe—was a gay bar. And to get there, you had to have the audacity to ask a cab driver or follow a butch woman or trans person.

The trans and non-binary community, the proud butch women and femme men, are some of the most essential cogs to how we, as a queer community, were able to show up and show face later in life, be it for Stonewall or Pride which has been thankfully moved back to its historic date. And yes, with the removal of homosexuality from the DSM manual of the American Psychiatric Association inthe beach of the Red Scare, and the academic discourse that included intersectionality, spaces and places have grown for queer identities beyond the bar.

And our bars—our churches—carry that history, a history that we as queer people should be proud of. For some, especially nowadays, the broadway that requires day-to-day, head-on battling is the one most heralded: The marching, gay standing in front of police, the direct support of our brothers and sisters of color, especially the Black community, fighting capitalism… And of course, this form of activism will never lose its importance or weight.

To simply make community. To simply remembering a community member leaving but continuing to put a public face on a community that continues to thrive, survive, and flourish. Brian this was so well written and brought me back to I want to thank you for bringing this to the attention of all Long Beach Residence, but most importantly to these young Gays who have no clue on gay history or even bar for that matter.

Thank you for your amazing words. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

A holiday ode to the queer bars of Long Beach’s Gayborhood—and every queer bar in the world

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