The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America,1960 and After

by Lucas Hilderbrand

Gay bars have operated as the most visible institutions of the LGBTQ+ community in the United States for the better part of a century, from before gay liberation until after their assumed obsolescence. In The Bars Are Ours Lucas Hilderbrand offers a panoramic history of gay bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures. Hilderbrand cruises from leather in Chicago and drag in Kansas City to activism against gentrification in Boston and racial discrimination in Atlanta; from New York City’s bathhouses, sex clubs, and discos and Houston’s legendary bar Mary’s to the alternative scenes that reimagined queer nightlife in San Francisco and Latinx venues in Los Angeles. The Bars Are Ours explores these local sites (with additional stops in Denver, Detroit, Seattle, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Orlando as well as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Texas) to demonstrate the intoxicating---even world-making---roles that bars have played in queer public life across the country.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Queer, LGBT, Gender and Sexuality

464 pages, Paperback

Published November 21, 2023

About the author

Lucas Hilderbrand lives in Los Angeles and teaches film and media, visual, and queer studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has written on the pleasures and politics of video bootlegging, the mediations of queer memory, and the ambiguities of experimental documentary.

Reviews

[Maxie Krane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating topic and wonderful writing. I felt so connected when the author mentioned places I’ve been. Highly recommend to anyone interested in queer history! The epilogue was so touching and made me tear up.

[OGEE Substack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Advanced Faggotry 201 - The Barsss

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilderbrand looks at the history of gay bars in the United States placing them in a larger historical context. While some of the book is subjective in tone, about Hilderbrand's own experiences the historical information he provides is an important contribution to scholarship on queer spaces as they changed over time.

Around 2008, I realize that no academic book had synthesize the cultures and politics of gay bars during the arrow when they have been most visible, so I set out to write one before they disappeared. xiii

Bars function as queer forms, as Ramzi Fawaz theorizes the concept, ‘enabling structures’ that gift shaped to queer identities, experiences, and politics. Such forms ‘establish the conditions for something new to appear in the world, including previously unfathomable expressions and interpretations of gender and sexual being.’ [5] Bars constitute physical venues and cultural expressions-forms in both senses of the word. xv

These have been the preconditions for liveable gay lives, communities, and political consciousness. In this book, I contend that bars have functioned as the medium for the historical emergence of gay public life in the United States. 44

For young queers, going out to gay bars and dance clubs can be revelatory, even giving them the feeling that they are inventing queer nightlife itself when they're actually inventing themselves. For aging queens, bars’ familiarity can feel tedious, comforting, or just novel enough to be reinvigorating. 4

Today the White House Inn in Oakland Café Lafitte in Exile in new Orleans each claim to be the longest continuously operating gay bar in the United States; each has been running since at least 1933, the date of prohibitions repeal. 5

Scholars argue that the developments of gay identity and spaces as they exist in the United States have been uniquely the products of the private market, from bars and bath houses to newsstands, movie theatres, and male order catalogues. [18] Gay liberation developed as ‘the co-emergence of the gay consumer and the gay constituent,’ which was conceived of as a whole new lifestyle. [19] In a foundational essay of gay history, John D’Emilio makes an even bigger claim: that capitalism, urbanization, and the rise of the wage labour system change the fundamental economic structure of the family unit and created the structural possibilities for modern gay identities and communities to emerge. 5-6

In the mid 20th century, liquor control boards became the primary force regulating venue serving alcohol, at times explicitly for bidding venues from catering to so-called sexual deviants. 6-7

As demonstrated by the 1957 book, Gay Bar, written by a staunch sympathetic heterosexual female gay bar owner, these venues also enforce strict coats of conduct and gender presentation for the men who went there. [28. Branson, Gay Bar.] 8

Then, in 1964, the San Francisco based homophile group Society for Individual Rights distributed a “Pocket Lawyer,” a small booklet with information about citizens’ legal right in the event of an arrest during a raid or entrapment. 9

In the 1960s and beyond, journalist wrote about bars in exposés of gay life; psychologist and social scientist likewise went to bars looking for evidence to explain the ‘pathology’ and ‘social problem’ of homosexuality. [37. See Achilles, “Homosexual Bar” and “Development of the Homosexual Bar,” Hoffman, Gay World; Hooker, “Homosexual Community” and “Male Homosexuals and Their ‘Worlds’; Harris and Crocker, “Fish Tales”]… gay bars were often perceived as dens of maladjustment and social deviance; their marginality also made them right for developing political descent and organizing. 11

Starting in the early 1960s, gay travel guides, such as Guy Strait’s The Lavender Baedeker (from 1963) and Bob Damon’s The Address Book (from 1965), compiled listings of gay bars and cities across the country and ways that not only affirm their primacy but also made distinctions between genres of bars. These publications not only help men find particular watering holes but also demonstrated for their readers that are greater public gay world existed, with multiple ways of being gay. 11

Yet one account suggest that gay bars became even more profitable for the mafia after Gay liberation expanded their numbers. At times, crime syndicate owned bars directly, at times they invested in bars with a gay owner has a front, and at times they use them for money laundering or drug running: they also relied on them for their various vending, distribution, and supply businesses. Such business arrangements lasted into the 1990s, and possibly even later. [60] 16

(At this time, researchers estimated that a city population of 50,000 was generally necessary to sustain a gay bar, although in some regions the minimum threshold could be as high as a combined urban and outlying rural population of 200,000.) [65. Harry. “Urbanization and the Gay Life,”; Harry and DeVall, Social Organization of Gay Males, 140-43] 17

Early 1970s bar activism called attention to financial exploitation and other oppressive conditions at bars. As a 1970 commentary in the Philadelphia newspaper Gay Dealer espoused, ‘the ‘gay bar’ is the tool by which the oppressor and his underworld cohorts perpetuate their hatred of us as an oppressed people and the lifestyle in which we desire to express ourselves.’ [66. “Gay Bars,” Gay Dealer 1 (1970): 3] 17

…1971 film, Some of My Best Friends Are…20

As lesbian feminist Felice Newman pointedly argued, ‘the bars are not a gay community, but a substitute for a gay community. [79. Newman, “Why I’m Not Dancing,” ] 20

The culture and sights of drinking in the United States changed profoundly after World War II. Whereas in the later 1940s Americans consumed ‘about ninety percent’ of their alcoholic beverages at public venues, by the early 1980s that figure had plummeted to ‘about thirty percent.’ The number of drinking establishments correspondingly shrink during this period. 29

Already in 1964, Life magazine featured a two page spread with a photo taken inside the Tool Box bar in San Francisco to introduce its infamous profile on “Homosexuality in America.” In an image that would become emblematic of gay male culture, leather men stood in silhouette in front of the bars massive mural by Chuck Arnett. 38

Though not the first leather bar, the Gold Coast became one of the most legendary and was probably the first to be gay owned and operated when Chuck Renslow it reigns in 1960. 39

The gay leather style was to a large extent modelled on Marlon Brando's costume and the 1953 film The Wild One (see figure 1.2). Although the film created a mainstream sensation, it had particular impact on Gay men and helped codify black leather as the preferred look. 40

John Preston, ‘The original leather bars were places where men could gather and… say: In your face! Leather was gay sexuality stripped of being nice. It offended. It confronted. It took sex as its own ultimate value. It was a reaffirmation of the Revolution, not a dilution of it.’ Preston continues: ‘The whole point of the liberation of our sexuality in past decades was to allow this to exist-so long as no real damage was done-without all the trappings of love, Romance, and other controlling devices. What Preston suggests as leather liberation predates the Stonewell riots and the gay Lib movement, and bars played a central role in this emergent radical turn. 42

The Gold Coast extended and anchored Renslow’s numerous enterprises, including the Kris physique photography studio that proceeded it and Man’s Country bathhouse and the Gay life newspaper later. 44

As the proprietor of the Gold Coast, Renslow had to pay off both the police and the mafia. This was just the cost of doing business in Chicago. From prohibition through the postwar period, the mafia controlled the gay bar scene in many cities, including Chicago.

As Vito Russo suggested at the time, camp operates as both a ‘secret code’ for gay men and produces bonds between them with the spirit of generosity, it's frequent embrace of bitchiness not withstanding. 52-53

Allan Berube….Because sex acts between men were….illegal… gay men were forced to become sexual outlaws… experts are stealing moments of privacy and finding the crack and society where they could meet and not get caught. 54-54

The proliferation of gay venues happen concurrently with the waning popularity of female impersonator reviews and show lounges marketed to straight audiences. Belated changes in local enforcement or repeal of cross dressing laws likewise made drag shows a more viable endeavour across the country. Finally, a shift emerged in the craft itself 1960s and ‘70s, with a transition from female impersonators and impressionist who sang live to a new generation of queens who lip synced to records, change that made drag much more accessible as a performance form and logistically easier to integrate into bars and dance clubs. 71

Nonetheless, queens take their camp texts seriously, with both emotional attachment and humour: as ‘passion with irony,’ as Richard Dyer described gay male fandom for Judy Garland. 88

In contrast to most cities I visited, [Detroit] the urban gay bars are far-flung and isolated from one another-an extreme example of dispersal zoning-whereas the regions middle-class gaybourhoods nest in suburban Ferndale and Royal Oak. 94

The Woodward Open north of the city’s centre in 1954: it was already commemorated as the oldest gay bar in the city by 1979 and transition to serving a primarily Black gay clientele had an undetermined date. 95

In Boston, Jacque’s (with a maddeningly misspelled apostrophe) and the Other Side resembled what Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis have called ‘Street bars,’ which in the mid 20th century ‘where a meeting ground for diverse elements of the sexual fringe,’ with a mixed clientele of working class gay men, lesbians, straights, and trans and gender nonconforming people, as well as sex workers and pimps, across races and ethnicities. 102

The 1970s development of ever expanding gay venues-such as multifloor bathhouses, Super bars, and discos-coincided with broader deindustrialization, population migration from central cities to suburbs, and urban renewal efforts. Because queer people found anonymity, Independence, and social ties in cities, they were far less likely to move to the suburbs then they're straight peers. Gay venues reclaimed the abandoned territories of cities, such as downtowns, red light districts, skid rows, and warehouse districts that offer cheap real estate far from residential tracks where people might complain about noise and public cruising. These spaces could be queered because zoning their tended to be lax and they were off the radar of the so-called general public. But zones were also viewed as undesirable-disposable, even-by city planners, developers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and other citizens. 103

During the 1970s the city was also the site of charged political controversies, such as busing to desegregate schools (starting in 1974 after several years of organizing), and scandals, such as the late 1970s child ‘sex-ring’ scandal (which led to the formation of the Boston-Boise Committee and debate about man boy love). [19] 105

Scholars have posed conceptual shifts to thinking in terms of archipelagos or constellations rather than fixed neighbourhoods in order to understand how LGBTQ+ people navigate and manifest alternative, often personal urban spaces. 120

The intracommunity riffs documented in this chapter anticipated Gayle S. Rubin’s argument that the acceptance of some sexualities (such as middle-class gay males) typically operates via the demonization of others (such as trans people, queers of colour, working class people, and sex workers). Leftist queers have critiqued what they view as assimilationist gay-right agendas for selling out and marginalizing radical sexual practises, queers of colour, and trans people. Economic gentrification, in turn, breeds social and political assimilation: what Sarah Schulman has called ‘gentrification of the mind.’ 121

In account after account, institutionalized racism at gay bars in the 1970s and 1980s most commonly happened at the door when a bouncer demanded three-even up to five-forms of ID (referred to as carding) or refused entry, charged arbitrarily inflated covers, and enforced implicitly racialized dress codes. Some bars instituted quotas to limit the number of men of colour admitted or admitted men of colour only if they were comforted by white men. At membership clubs, men of colour experience delays or denial for their applications. Such patterns were conspicuous for the disparities and how men of colour were treated…128

The Gay Switchboard [Philadelphia] thus functioned as a medium for callers who didn't know where to find gay bars. In an earlier area, men might ask a taxi driver to take them to a gay bar; drivers often knew where these venues were, even if they're passengers didn’t. Lesbians were advised to find bars by hanging out at ballfields and then following softball players to see where they went drinking after games. [5. Before Stonewall (dir. Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg, 1984)] The very existence of the Gay Switchboard attested to a new era, but the question remained for callers about how to navigate the new gay world. In effect the switchboard replicated the bar directories that were routinely included in national travel guides and local gay newspapers. 152

This lifestyle was unsustainable for most and almost immediately inspired such cautionary novels as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and Larry Kramer’s Faggots (both 1978). 159

Gay bathhouses emerged as a parallel and sometimes symbiotic phenomenon with gay bars and gay liberation. Some men preferred the bass to the bars; others use the bars after the bars if they hadn't picked someone up. Some baths-or ‘tubs’ as they were often called-even featured bars, although most did not; local liquor licensing regulations dictated which could. Importantly, the baths were much more accessible to all customers than exclusive membership discos. Although they were hailed for equalizing class differences when men disrobed, other hierarchies-of endowment and body type-came to play. Nonetheless, they promised unlimited sexual contacts, from momentary coupling to orgiastic congregations, as well as ample opportunities for both exhibitionists and voyeurs. 160

Nearly every city also had a Club Bath. The first Club Bath opened in Cleveland when Jack Campbell purchased a small local sauna in 1965; with any year he opened a second location in Cleveland and one in Toledo. The business expanded into an Empire of franchises locations and more than 40 US cities, Plus some in Canada, by the late 1970s. The New York location opened in 1970s as the first openly gay owned (as opposed to bisexual owned) in the city and by mid decade would effectively displace the Continental’s position as the nicest gay bath.
Then in 1978 Bruce Mailman unveiled the New St. Marks Baths. The old venue had long attracted men who have sex with men but had become decrepit; Mailman renovated and turned it into a pace for clone masculinity, socializing, and sex. 163

The Club Baths, ad, 165

Esther Newton observed the irony that ‘just when police harassment had ended and men could dance with men and women with women, disco almost dissolved the couple as a dancing unit.’ [83. Newton, Cherry Grove, First Island, 244] As Lawrence writes, ‘The idea of dancing with a partner did not so much implode as expand.’ [84. Lawrence, “Disco and the Queering,” See also his “Beyond the Hustler,” Love Will Save the Day, and Life and Death] 176

As others have observed, disco advanced a shift from alcohol as the social lubricant for gay men toward various chemical combinations of drugs to orchestrate a peak experience. Angel dust, LSD, mesculine, and pot altered perception: MDS and cocaine boosted energy; and Quaaludes blocked inhibitions. Poppers topped off the experience by giving a head rush and relaxing muscles… in contrast, alcohol sedative effects risked fatiguing dancers, and it's diuretic effects could interrupt the dancing with the need for bathroom breaks. 177

This search of new events signalled an epochal paradigm shift from gay to queer. This conceptual and self definition transformation rejected and reimagined the world that gay man had realized in the liberation era. 228

The term generation gap became popular in the 1960s as the baby boomers came of age and rejected the World War II generations values. By the mid-1980s, a new generation-which would alternately be called generation X, the 13th generation, baby busters, slackers, and the MTV generation-emerged as the next cohort to come of age after the baby boomers. In the gay community this was also recognized as the first one to come of age after a public gay culture had already existed and during the AIDS epidemic. As early as 1982, the New York gay Press remarked upon the emergence of ‘the new gay man’ who thought that ‘the ‘70s was a bit much.’ [11. Neil Alan Marks, “the New Gay Man,” NTN April 12, 1982): 18] The first rumblings of gay intergenerational tensions emerged in the early 1980s; these were ‘subsumed’ attention to the developing AIDS crisis and then began to ‘reassert’ themselves by the decades end. [12. Blake, “Curating in a Different Light,” 25] 229

As a concept, queer strategically refused the politics and cultures of heteronormativity, subverted assimulationist homonormativity, and question all identity categories, including gay and lesbian. In their history of LGBTQ+ Life in San Francisco, Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk define queer as ‘an ideological and generational shift as profound as the transition from a homophile mentality to gay liberation.’ As they explain, ‘queerness is not about carving out a culturally sanction niche for a carefully crafted minority identity. Rather, it involved the perception of sharing space with people quite different from oneself who were nonetheless adversely affected by the same power structures.’ 231

Wayne Hoffman argues that for his generation there was a discernable ‘narrowing of sexual worlds.’ He continues: ‘We Young gay men do you know what we're missing as the sexual devolution and envelops us.’ [26. Hoffman, “Skipping the Light Fantastic,” 340] 232

Also in 1991, William Strauss and Neil Howe’s ambitious tome Generations offered an expensive theory and taxonomy of generations. Reflecting a turn from understanding generations familial genealogical terms to understanding them as sociohistorical cohorts, Strauss and Howe suggest that peer groups,

[Blane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the last few years I have read several works referencing the history of gay bars: 'Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys in the 1950s' by Will Fellows (2010)--just OK; 'In Exile: The History and Lore Surrounding New Orleans Gay Culture and Its Oldest Gay Bar' by Frank Perez & Jeffrey Palmquist (2012)--also, just OK; 'Gay Bar: Why We Went Out' by Jeremy Atherton Lin (2021)--pretentiously awful; and 'Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America' by Krista Burton--a fun, if slight read. But this one is far and away the best of the bunch--a highly readable, academically-skewed look at our bars and what they mean.

[Nate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Revisionism at its finest

You know where things are headed when the author picks up where Michael Warner left off years ago, with his ode to homosexual fluidity Fear of a Queer Planet. In the preface, the author, sounding much like Warner, gushingly venerates an ad for The Lion Pub for its confrontational fantasy: "I have been attracted by the ad's audacity and sense of fabulation; it queerly refused plausibility or convention in favour of envisioning wild possibilities."

Here is the standard equation of the queer with ostensibly endless prospects leading to ... to what? Having sex with lions? Let's face it. Not everything about gay histories is laudatory and not everything should be esteemed simply because it existed. But Hilderbrand wants to rescue an ad whose crumbs of irony -- oh! the provocation! the queer refusal! -- aren't contestatory; they're just dumb and the ad is dumb. But I suppose when you're looking at gay history though a lens that necessitates "audacity" and a "sense of fabulation," then you miss out on the important fact that gay lives were complicated, that gay people were sometimes fun and bright and cutting edge and sometimes were dour and mistaken and stupid.

Did I say gay lives? Should I not have said queer lives? I'm not sure. The author switches easily between the two, to the extent that a lack of definitional clarity grinds meaning to a halt. But perhaps that's purposeful -- you know, what with all that audacity flying around. This is the world of Warner's queer: a realm of fun and enervating possibilities in which no one has to do the hard work of writing letters to politicians or caring for friends dying of AIDS.

And this leads me to think of how the book then clearly locates itself in revisionist histories, wherein, for example, trans people, in the 1960s, exist not because there are testimonies beyond what one might find in Susan Stryker's books but simply because the author states such existance as fact and without comment. And it isn't that trans people didn't exist -- of course they did, and they deserve recognition of their histories. But Hilderbrand in, for instance, telling of the Stonewall riots, overrides gay male histories by making it appear that it was only trans (and queer) people who rioted and so much so that you'd think that they were there in the majority. They were not -- the rioters were mostly (white) gay men. Hildebrand even drags out the ol' Sylvia Rivera possibility, that Rivera instigated the rebellion, without mentioning that witnesses saw Rivera passed out on a bench, asleep at the advent of the riot. But revisionism demands that we all journey to the altar of intersectionalism because that is now where the dominant narrative lies. Who cares if the history is actually correct? Martha P Johnson (definitely a gender non-conforming person -- but trans?) is not raised here, thankfully, as a Stonewall participant (because Johnson wasn't there, contrary to popular belief).

Such revisionist queering of history necessitates, then, the erasing the history of gay men, which is why Hilderbrand bounces between "gay" and "queer" because we must pay some lip service to those people who actually existed. Queer is now and gay is passe, I suppose. One wonders then why Hilderbrand decided to write on (mostly) gay (male) bars, what with an apologetics that reminds us constantly of trans / gender non-conforming (and various other minority formations) exclusion. It is a admonishing sensibility that celebrates the divisiveness of identity politics wherein gay (white) men are pushed from their own histories in favour of highlighting non-majoritan identities (eg, Black, Latino [oops, Latinx], and so on); and it is this sensibility that colours every conjunction, noun and verb in the book.

An example of this is found within the discussion of racism in Atlanta bars. (No doubt racism did and does still occur, sadly, and continued attention needs to be drawn to it.) Hilderbrand writes (and I'll quote at length): "Although the efforts I revisit in this chapter created awareness of bias and effected some policy changes, they fell short of ending racism, integrating the community, or nurturing queer-of-color alternative spaces. These movements often appear to have been initiated by white activists acting as allies rather than starting from and centering queer-of-color perspectives" (129). I can't imagine an admonishment more hectoring and condescending (not to mention anachronistic) than this. Hilderbrand demands that those sad, misguided (white) gays do more than they might have known to be possible, to possess in the 70s and 80s the kind of (self) awareness about inclusivity that is the norm in the 2020s. On one hand, Hilderbrand is correct: (white) gay men did not do more; but viewed historically, they likely could not have done more. But I suppose when you're more interested in being (politically) correct than digging deeper into why (white) gay men could not have done more, well, you'll win every time. All that virtue-signalling gets you to where you want to go, I guess.

Aside from the look at bars, the book is filled with historical accounts that have already been discussed many times, in other books. I ended up just leafing through, looking at all the pictures, which is perhaps the only reason to pick up the book. You'd be better off with Jeremy Atherton Lin's lovely memoir Gay Bar: Why We Went Out.

[Ferris Mx · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminscence about the role of gay bars since the '60s, and how they have been important for the gay community. Beautifully produced.

[James Steichen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always been interested to read a history of gay bars and this book satisfied that curiosity for me. The author has an academic background but writes in an accessible manner and each chapter focuses on a different US city and kind of space or event. The book does a good job addressing issues around race and gender identity and pointing out how gay bars have been spaces of inclusion and exclusion.

Many of the bars and parties he discusses are closed or no longer active yet I was able to think about my own different experiences in gay and queer spaces through the examples he discusses. He includes tons of reproductions of photos and posters and fliers that he found in his research and it’s worth looking at all of those even if you don’t want to read the entire text.

Because gay bars became more prevalent in the wake of the beginning of the lgbtq rights movements of the 1960s this book is also a nice historical overview of lgbtq history up to the present and I learned a lot about how different people in different places responded to the AIDS crisis and other challenges.

This book might be too dense for some people and it’s certainly not a breezy beach read. The fact that each chapter moves to a different city made it more enjoyable for me. The author also talks about his own experiences going to bars earlier in his life and while researching the book which also made the research come alive.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My partner bought me this book as a gift and it is GREAT! It gives the reader an insight into gay bar and club culture in the US in the mid to late 20th century. A perfect historical insight into the American gay social world pre- and post-Stonewall. It also serves as a poignant reminder of events of the 21st century that threaten the freedoms of the queer communities and serve as a timely reminder that we can run today because of predecessors fought to walk (and freely).

[Virgowriter (Brad Windhauser) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lot of interesting content/history about the specific bars profiled.

[Michael Sheley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this nuanced take on gay/queer history through bars and their many stories.

[Joyaan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

[Phillip Crawford Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful look at the history behind gay bars which for many folks, including myself, once were the mainstays of the LGBTQ experience.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I had visited more of the bars Hilderbrand writes about instead of hotfooting it to the baths in every city I visited as a business traveler or as a tourist. It's a fascinating book, and very well worth reading.