In praise of gay bars
I first went to NYC in spring of 1959 on my Easter break from a college in upstate New York. What I discovered (in Manhattan, at least) was a thriving, albeit harassed, gay male subculture. The fact that there were just over twenty bars or bar & restaurants catering to gay men in Manhattan, plus some for lesbians made for a buzzing social life, though one that always had an ax over it.
I lived in NYC that summer, and returned to college in the fall. At that point Lee Mortimer, a muck-raking columnist for the NY Daily Mirror, started an anti-gay bar crusade in his column. A very nervous Mayor Wagner, having various political problems of his own, was not adverse to a widespread anti-gay campaign as part of cleaning up his image. The result was the severest wave of oppression of gay subculture in NYC history.
When I arrived in the city after being graduated from college at the beginning of summer 1960 I found only two bars left open out of the more than two dozen from the previous year. I then found another, but it closed down within one or two weeks. The next six years saw gay bars come and go with the regularity of a revolving door. The baths remained, risky meat rack cruising and tea rooms were still options – but even if you were willing to take the risks involved, these were not environments where you were likely to cultivate friendships, and certainly not ones in which you would probably develop a circle of friends and acquaintances. For a new arrival, like myself, this was a genuine problem. There was no stable place to hang out and have the time to develop social relationships over a period of time.
However, I will say that many of those virtually fly-by-night gay bars of these years had far more diverse crowds of patrons than the bars I had been introduced to in my college year in '59. I suppose this was pretty much dictated by the fact that the heat was on so intensely that there were extremely few bars to go to; therefore, everyone pretty much had to go to the same places. I've often thought in retrospect that this prolonged anti-gay bar campaign may have helped to break down some of the affectation and bitchiness that was part of the gay New York I was first introduced to in '59. However, despite what seemed to me to be a wider variety of guys, there might be only one or two black guys in a bar, and a few Hispanics. (My judgment of who might be Hispanic was off during my early years in the city as I often mistook Latinos to be Italians.)
Lee Mortimer – the gay-hating columnist - died, no tears shed there, and Mayor Wagner's career in office was coming to an end as the mid-Sixties approached. The occasion of the World's Fair brought about the last burst of concerted anti-gay activity; then he was gone and Lindsay was the new mayor.
Mattachine held the sip-in early in 1966 in an effort to provoke a court battle that they hoped would lead to the rescinding of the State Liquor Authority regulation which denied accommodation in licensed bars to homosexuals and revoked the licenses of places that did so. The sip-in was a success.
The Mattachine Sip-in of 1966 probably had a more profound effect on the lives of gay men in NYC of any single event in the late Sixties. With the State Liquor Authority retreating from its policy of prohibiting the serving of homosexuals after the Sip-in, and the subsequent finding of the courts that this policy was not constitutional, the legalization of gay bars had occurred. Running a gay bar was no longer just a lucrative enterprise, it was a legal one. This did not mean that all the criminal interests disappeared from the field, but it did mean that they were now running in competition with anyone who could raise the cash and pass the licensing requirements.
The gay population benefited in many ways - most immediately in that the number of gay establishments serving alcohol began increasing rapidly. As I recall, the management and staffs were friendlier, the surroundings were cleaner, the booze was unwatered and if they smelled, it was usually from stale beer and not the stench of piss and shit from non-functioning plumbing. Great as these things were, the long term effects were even more powerful.
Achieving public accommodation in a licensed bar was a major civil rights victory for gay people in NYC. No longer was having a drink with your friends to risk public humiliation, harassment or arrest. After almost seven years of police action against gay life in the city, a sense of safety and with it the promise of an ongoing public social life came to the gay men and lesbians of New York. While gay bars certainly functioned as places to pick up a trick, in many this was balanced by the steady patronage of customers for whom the bar was also a neighborhood meeting place.
In 1967 there was one bar in the Upper West Side neighborhood, in the following decade there were eight.
Right after the Sip-in I had discovered a gay bar in my neighborhood, one not operated by the Mafia. It was also, because of the character of the neighborhood, far more ethnically mixed than most gay bars farther downtown were. Anywhere from a quarter to a third of the customers were Latinos and a lesser numbers of blacks. Because of this place, called the Candlelight Lounge at that time, now just the Candle Bar, my social life became more stable and supportive.
I met the overwhelming majority of my friends in that bar or a couple of others in the neighborhood later, some on an individual basis and others because they were friends of people I had already met. And these were the people - and the places - that provided support that ran a gamut from pleasant companionship to help in times of serious problems. And my experience, I know, was shared by many others in the Seventies and Eighties. The bars also became information centers where you could find out what was going on around the city of gay interest – posters, handouts, bar rags all helped to create a connection to gay life around town, as did the grapevine.
In the Eighties bars collected money for AIDS organizations with collection cans, raffles, etc. And news and information about the epidemic was shared there, and through sharing their suffering people were encouraged to join volunteer activities. Gay bars were also used as drop-off points for free prepared meals made by God's Love We Deliver for home-bound PWA's.
While I found gay bars a source of sexual opportunity for many decades, what remains in my mind at age sixty-nine is what a rich source of friendship, good conversation and help and support these places were.
Jack
Poll
