A place to ‘feel free in a sometimes dangerous world’: Stonewall Museum joins project to document gay bars in America
How many gay bars are there in America? A new project is working to compile a definitive count and chronicle their history and importance to the culture of the United States.
The Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library in Fort Lauderdale has teamed up with the Florida-based website GayBarchives.com to assemble the stories of watering holes past and present. They are calling the project Raising The Bars.
Over the next year, with the help of volunteers, they plan to interview gay bar owners, patrons and employees and build traveling exhibits on the taverns’ history. Stonewall executive director Robert Kesten said organizers came to realize the centrality of gay bars to the security of LGBTQ+ people in America, where historically they were not always welcome for being out.
“Gay bars were places where you could let your hair down and feel free in a sometimes dangerous world,” Kesten said. “They are equally important today as a place to build community.”
South Florida has a thriving gay bar scene that attracts not only gay and lesbian tourists but also heterosexual men and women who feel comfortable in the friendly, nonjudgmental spaces.
In Miami Beach, Palace, open since 1988, is famous for its over-the-top drag brunches. In Broward County, there are cruise bars with a “cozy dungeon atmosphere,” such as Ramrod in Fort Lauderdale, and those famous for campy adult humor in their decor and menu, such as Rosie’s Bar & Grill in Wilton Manors. Raucous drag shows are a staple at several Broward sites, including Hamburger Mary’s in Wilton Manors.
It’s a complicated endeavor to tell the story of all these gay watering holes, said Art Smith, a Tampa resident and founder of the Gay Barchives project, which began four years ago as a Facebook group that solicited patrons’ memories.
Smith, working with the Stonewall museum, hopes to make his database more complete and expand the project to create a gay-bar trivia competition, museum collections and a passport-like program where bar patrons get stamps after their visits.
Before Prohibition and even through World War II, Smith said most gay bars were well-kept secrets, with fear of police raids a constant stress. The Stonewall riots in 1969, when New York City police arrested 13 people at a gay bar and a melee and fire ensued, brought the discrimination and fear gay people faced to national attention.
As rights campaigns in the late 20th century prompted compassion for America’s LGBTQ+ community, gay men and women began to feel more comfortable in public spaces outside the bar scene, said Rick Karlin, a Fort Lauderdale resident who is writing a book on South Florida’s gay bars. There were more than 200 gay bars in South Florida in the 1970s and 1980s, he said, but it’s now down to about 100.
He said there are additional reasons for the decline.
The AIDS crisis of the 1980s made some fearful of meeting a stranger in a bar, he said. More recently, dating apps have reduced the need to go to a public place to find a partner.
Karlin, co-author of “Last Call Chicago: A History of 1,001 LGBTQ-Friendly Taverns, Haunts & Hangouts,” which documents that city’s gay bars, moved to Fort Lauderdale 10 years ago. He is putting together his next book, “Last Call South Florida,” which he calls an encyclopedia of gay bars in Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, and is working closely with the Raising The Bars project.
Charles Horton, owner of LeBoy in Fort Lauderdale and LIT in Wilton Manors, said he is not worried that gay bars will disappear.
“People still like to drink and socialize,” Horton said. “There are three theaters in Wilton Manors and people want a place to go to after the show. There’s an immense amount of opportunities.”
The Stonewall Museum expects bars to take on increasingly consequential roles in the coming years as renewed violence confronts many minority group members, including LGBTQ+ Americans.
“Bars and other community gathering places will become more important because we don’t know which institutions are on our side,” Kesten said.
If you’d like to volunteer to help with this history project, call the Stonewall Museum at 954-763-8565. Visit raisingthebarsproject.org for more on the initiative and stonewall-museum.org for information on the museum.
