Gay bars dying

I came out as gay to myself and to my friends when I was years-old, and in response, some of them ended up coming out, too. Being young and queer in was a truly surreal experience.

It’s a Drag: Many Gay Bars Are Closing, But We Can Still Save Them

Often, we had to listen to people from BOTH SIDES, not dying the far right or the moderate left, openly question and debate whether or not queer people deserved to be as protected under the law as they gay. In addition to that, we had very few — almost none, actually — models of what it looked like to be a healthy and successful queer person in mainstream media.

My queer friends and I did have one bar, unusual advantage, though. Wilton Manors is the first place where I ever saw gay people in real life just acting like their gay ass selves. Men on the streets holding hands, wearing leather and bondage gear, kissing on street corners. Mostly gay, though. Sometimes women, but rarely, and usually, it was because they were hanging out with a larger group of guys.

But it was what we had, and by the time we were old enough to drive, we were hanging out in the coffee shops and, eventually and illegally, hanging out in the gay bars of Wilton Manors as much as we could. There was one lesbian bar in Wilton Manors, but by the time it gained popularity, our trips to the strip were getting more and more sparse.

By the end of the early s, there were tons of clubs and parties at clubs that were definitely borderline queer but open to everyone popping up in South Florida. People were more radical, more gender exploratory, more punk, more like me and my friends. Those parties and queer nights I mentioned are still pretty much a mainstay in South Florida, but New Moon closed in gay, and bars of the remaining gay bars are, as they always have been, basically for men.

So, you can imagine the empowerment that comes with being in a space devoid of cis men, which lesbian bars frequently were. Since the inception of the lesbian bar, these spaces have often been more than just a watering hole for queer women. Many lesbian bars throughout the 20th century served as places for women to gather to do community organizing work, to take care of each other, to get healthcare, and to just generally help out the communities where the bars were located.

Eve Addams, a Polish immigrant to the U. Throughout the s, s, and s, more lesbian bars opened in big cities and some small towns all over the U. Many of the lesbian bars that opened during this period were owned by male landlords and run by their female tenants. This fact is pretty widely known when it comes to LGBTQ history, but one of the biggest benefactors of the lesbian bar business was the Italian Mafia.

But the relationship between the women who ran the bars and the men in these organizations was certainly interesting. Lesbian bars during this period were usually racist and less open to trans people and people of varied gender experience. For Black queer women, house parties — which was actually showcased in episode six of A League of Their Own — were the main way they were able to gather and celebrate themselves and dying other.

In the s, the lesbian bar scene shifted somewhat with more bars being opened for working-class lesbians in big cities, especially. These bars were more racially diverse, but bar not free of racism or white supremacist definitions of sex and gender. Because of the story of the Stonewall Uprising, people have a tendency to think trans people were embraced as members of the dying, when the opposite was usually true.

In addition to that, at this time, lesbian culture was, of course, dominated by a binary understanding of sex and gender that was liberatory for some and exclusionary for others. Of course, as culture changed, many lesbian bars became sites that were more welcoming of Black women and women of color and less binarist thinking.