![chicago gay bars 2021 chicago gay bars 2021](https://www.therooftopguide.com/rooftop-bars-in-chicago/Bilder/apogee-lounge-1.jpg)
By contrast, Mattson found 162 listed in 1977.) LBP now says there are 21 still operating throughout the U.S. (The exact number of lesbian bars still standing is also a source of debate, but it’s low. When the pandemic hit, Rose and Elina Street put together a short video to draw attention and raise funds for America’s few remaining lesbian bars. “They’re competing with the internet, they’re competing with gentrification, they’re competing with assimilation, they’re competing with Covid,” says Erica Rose, a filmmaker and co-founder of the Lesbian Bar Project, a documentary film effort. The causes for each closure vary, but there are common themes. According to his audit, the total number of listings tumbled over 14 percent between 20 alone.
![chicago gay bars 2021 chicago gay bars 2021](https://igx.4sqi.net/img/general/width960/338504_lKxNFFBUoXgLFB-qBRlHMmGV0eIQeb7pJhuKbBFZ5vU.jpg)
”There has indeed been a decline, the decline has been accelerating,” Mattson, who operates the Twitter handle tells VinePair. The sociologist’s figures indicate the country has lost 45 percent of gay and lesbian watering holes since 1977 - and those were only the locations well established enough to be indexed in the first place. This data is incomplete, as Mattson himself notes, but it paints a picture directionally, and that direction is unmistakably downward.
Chicago gay bars 2021 series#
After a brief uptick in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the total number of gay and lesbian bars in the United States crested around 2,000 locations, according to research published by Oberlin associate professor of sociology Greggor Mattson based on listings in the Damron Guides, a prominent LGBTQ+ nightlife guidebook series published annually throughout the back half of the 20th century. If the past 30 years are any indication, he has reason to worry. “I don’t know if there’s going to be, 30 years from now, a category that we call gay bar or the lesbian bar,” muses Frank Perez, author and co-founder and president of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. The first thing you must understand about the effort is that it’s urgent. As one put it, these bygone bars are “phantoms of the past.” Here’s a look at the effort to immortalize them - and the challenges archivists face along the way. Their work spans media, discipline, and geography, but each shares the common goal of collecting the memories and materials that animated American LGBTQ+ nightlife in its heyday. “It’s been a strange time to try to do this research,” says Lucas Hilderbrand, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California-Irvine who is working on a book about gay bar history.įor Pride Month, VinePair interviewed eight gay and lesbian bar archivers around the country about the challenges and urgency they’re currently facing in documenting America’s gay and lesbian bars while they still can. That was all true before the coronavirus pandemic put an unheard-of strain on the country’s hospitality industry, and believe it or not, that didn’t make collecting and preserving these vital American drinking histories any easier for the career scholars, authors, filmmakers, and hobbyists across the country trying to do so. Patrons’ recollections have gotten foggier photos and fliers have faded funds for preservation work are perennially tight. But archiving the history of the LGBTQ+ community’s beloved third places across the country hasn’t gotten any easier since de la Croix began his work some 30 years ago. The mob may have relinquished Chicago’s gay and lesbian bars from the vise-like grip it established on those businesses (and their New York City counterparts, too) during Prohibition. When you get picked up by a very famous mob leader in Chicago, and you give him a blowjob in the back of his car… I mean, it hurt me not to put the story in the paper.”
![chicago gay bars 2021 chicago gay bars 2021](https://media.timeout.com/images/101443945/image.jpg)
“I had some great stories I couldn’t print. “I had to be careful with some of the things I actually put in the paper,” recalls de la Croix. And when the self-deputized historian found himself too close to a source, things could get complicated. Turning barflies’ memories of the city’s shuttered gay and lesbian bars into publishable reports posed challenges, and de la Croix often found himself trying to reconcile conflicting contributions.
![chicago gay bars 2021 chicago gay bars 2021](https://i2.wp.com/www.gayla4u.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Bar-Mattachine.jpg)
A book, “Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall,” followed in 2012. For six years, the British-born de la Croix published weekly 1,000-word columns documenting the Windy City’s gay nightlife scene for local paper. “I went to my publisher and said, ‘Can I do a column?’” That was 1997. “I was listening to these two old guys in a bar, and they were wearing this old leather and they were arguing about the exact address of some old bar that wasn’t there anymore,” he remembers. Sukie de la Croix didn’t set out to be one of the prolific custodians of gay bar history in Chicago.