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The mafia-owned Stonewall had no running water. And in 1977, a blaze at the Everard Baths in Manhattan killed nine patrons and decimated the building (although enough of it was still usable for the bathhouse to continue operating until 1986, when Mayor Ed Koch shut it down in an attempt to slow the AIDS epidemic). In a 1973 arson fire at the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans, thirty-two people died, unable to escape the second-floor club. Gay bars were often located in dangerous neighborhoods, where queerbashers could easily attack patrons as they left, or even invade the bars and beat people up.įor all the policing the bars faced, they were often overcrowded firetraps. People of color, femme gay men, all lesbians (whom the bartenders said didn’t drink or tip enough), and generally nonconforming people were harassed, discriminated against, and banned. We didn’t.) Traditionally, bar patrons were required to be wearing at least three items of clothing of the “appropriate” sex or face arrest. We all gathered around and stared at them, hoping we looked intimidating. (Even in the late 1970s, I remember police invading The Saints lesbian bar and turning off the jukebox.
#Bottom rock gay bar boston 1970s license
Strange liquor license regulations limited behavior: in New York City, bars that served “homosexuals” simply were not granted liquor licenses, so all of their operations were illegal, at least on paper in Boston, blue laws forbade dancing after midnight. In some, if you weren’t actively drinking you could be ejected in some, touching was forbidden. The management would pay off the police in order to prevent raids, although sometimes raids happened anyway, and sometimes the police just came in and swaggered around, to make sure everyone felt sufficiently threatened.
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These bars were usually owned by the mafia, even when they were managed by queers. The old species of gay bar, of which the Stonewall Inn was an example, does not exist anymore.
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It’s impossible to understand the lives of queer people in the 1950s and ’60s without talking about the bars. In the following, which draws heavily on my own memory, I recall what LGBTQ life was like in the first decades following the Stonewall riots, and how that determined our response to a plague. While it’s too simplistic to speak in terms of lessons that can be transcribed from HIV/AIDS onto COVID-19, I believe we can benefit in general from recalling what it was like to live as a community under siege, and how we rose to the challenge of caring for one another. In particular, I have thought about how, when celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall in June 2019, we committed a grave error by not making the HIV/AIDS crisis a central feature of our recollections. Social distancing in my apartment during this new terrifying pandemic has given me time to reflect on the early days of queer liberation. (Perhaps the unique thing the Trump administration has brought to epidemiology is profiteering, as Trump and family allegedly attempted to buy rights to a German vaccine, and senators sell off stock while at the same time happy-talking the public.) Ignore it, cover it up, and wish it away. So instead of viewing Donald Trump’s daily barrage of fantasies and lies about the coronavirus epidemic as unprecedented and shocking, we should perhaps see it simply as business as usual.
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No mention of the fact that, before he finally deigned to mention it and no doubt afterward as well, the disease was treated around the West Wing as a hilarious fag joke. No mention of the Great Communicator’s failure even to utter the word AIDS in public until the end of his presidency, in 1987. It’s too simplistic to speak of lessons that can be transcribed from HIV/AIDS onto COVID-19, but we can benefit from recalling what it was like to live as a community under siege, and how we rose to the challenge of caring for one another.