I clarified that this was a community-led walk - not a tour.
The places we’ll see today are important because they offered a space for a community to gather that was excluded almost everywhere else.” I shouted to be heard, “Tonight we celebrate bars, clubs, piano bars, discos, drag shows that are no longer with us but live on through memory in one way or another.
#QUIET GAY BARS NYC SERIES#
This year was the second that I hosted the walk as part of the international Jane’s Walk festival organized by The Municipal Art Society of New York, and this year I was joined by Kyle Supley, an avid preservationist and creator of the forthcoming web series Out There! We weren’t sure how many people would show up for a two hour journey of closed gay bars, but by the time the walk started over 80 people of all ages and reasons for coming were signing their names to a sign-in sheet adhered to a Best Little Whorehouse in Texas record cover acting as a clipboard and waiting for the walk to begin.
#QUIET GAY BARS NYC FREE#
How could there be more space for LGBT New Yorkers and their allies to share stories about where they have found love, community, a good time, or if really lucky, all three?Īnd so “Gay Bars That Are Gone” was born: a free guided community-led walk about sharing stories from gay bars gone by. George Chauncey’s Gay New York and Charles Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis come to mind, but for the most part, histories of LGBT nightlife are relegated to something like the comments section of a DataLounge thread. There are a few informative books that aim to document the changing social landscapes of New York’s gay nightlife spots and the effect these spaces had on both civil rights in America and mainstream arts and culture. It put everyone on edge” - these stories range from trivial tales of nightlife to inspiring stories of brave New Yorkers forging community in the face of unimaginable, especially for someone my age, adversity. Whether by firsthand account (“We used to climb up on the High Line when it was still abandoned and party long after the club closed”) or by community lore passed down so continuously it bordered on urban legend - “You know, just before the Stonewall riots started Judy Garland died. Bette Midler’s legendary string of performances at the Continental Baths with Barry Manilow accompanying her - amazing! Learning that the Mafia operated most of the gay bars in the '50s and '60s in New York City and why - mind-blowing! Having the cruising scene at a Greenwich Village automat explained, not to mention learning what an automat was - bewildering! These are oral histories usually shared over a happy hour drink with a, shall we say, more experienced New Yorker than myself. I’m a big New York City history buff, but my favorite kind of local history usually involves the stories that don’t get memorialized on historical markers. As Dorothy once quipped, “People come and go so quickly here.” A two-floor dance club complete with onstage showers for the dancers, now a real estate office. An after-hours sex club, now a high-priced brunch spot. An antebellum underground vault where Walt Whitman cross-dressed, now collapsed. A piano bar turned Zagat-rated restaurant.