The Stonewall Inn relied on donations to stay afloat.
San Francisco icon The Stud shuttered after 54 years.
Last year, Pride festivities were cancelled nationwide, and COVID-19 threatened many bars. In 2019, we celebrated 50 years of fighting for our rights. The Lesbian Bar Project, started during COVID to raise awareness for bars’ GoFundMe campaigns, puts that current number of U.S. Places for queers of color saw the steepest decline, losing nearly 60 percent of their numbers. The 2008 recession, dating apps, and the mainstreaming of a community that can now drink elsewhere have helped to put many gay bars out of business. Between 20, gay bars declined by more than a third. My son, a 22-year-old gay man, is coming of age with far less gay places for him to hang out. You might think that with the emergence of LGBTQ+ rights, the gay bar scene would be stronger than ever. “Some of the early civil rights cases were about gay people drinking in public and being served alcohol.”Īs Dick Leitsch, a leader of the 1960s activist group the Mattachine Society, is known to have said, for the gay community, bars are church. “Especially after World War II, the bars were the only place you could reliably find other LGBT people because they were the first place LGBT people could gather legally in public,” says Oberlin College sociologist Greggor Mattson. Through the 1990s and the painful height of AIDS, these bars were where lesbians and our gay male pals hung out together after ACT-UP meetings, where we gathered for memorials, where we organized around politics and health care, where we created art and performances.
#GAY BAR SHOOTING SAFE SPACE CODE#
I could flirt, drink, party, and not have to code switch for the comfort of straight people or protect myself from harassment by men. When I came out in the 1980s, gay bars were where I went to meet other women, to make friends and find lovers, to feel like myself. To a 57-year-old lesbian like me, it makes sense. We have them to thank for advances like 2020’s Supreme Court ruling against LGBTQ+ discrimination in the workplace. This diverse group-which included many Black and brown trans people-created the foundation of the modern gay rights movement. In resistance to yet another cop raid on a gay bar, they started a riot that lasted three days. On June 28, 1969, The Stonewall’s patrons rose up. It is the most important symbol in the U.S. But on certain nights-Pride Sunday, the spectacular Drag March that kicks off Pride Weekend at the end of June, and any time the queer activist community needs to speak out against the brutality and oppression we’ve experienced-The Stonewall is something else.
On any given night, The Stonewall is a happy-go-lucky, touristy gay bar. One of many hundreds of protests in the same spot, this demonstration was happening on Sheridan Square because it is the home of The Stonewall Inn. Gays Against Guns’ event was both a remembrance of those lost to the LGBTQ+ community and a protest in demand of the kind of gun laws that could make all communities safer. In this case, the portraits were of the 49 people killed five years ago in a mass shooting by a homophobic murderer at the Orlando gay bar, Pulse Nightclub. They were dressed in their signature “Human Being” costumes: a ghostlike ensemble of white pants and shirt, white shoes, white hat and veil, and in each of their hands, a large photograph of a gun violence victim. On June 12, 2021, members of the activist group Gays Against Guns took over Christopher Street on Sheridan Square in New York City’s West Village.