Over the years, so many people and communities, so many real and potential pleasures, were driven out of those neighborhoods, the ecstasy replaced by dispossession. Another, on West Fourth Street, was great, but today it seems to be a looming bank. If you wanted a bar for women only, you had a few options, but one of them, Sahara, was expensive and I felt awkward in my sweatshirt.
We spilled into the street: For brief moments, we seemed to own the neighborhoods. The whole place was warm, if not hot.īy the time I started going to bars in NYC in the late ’70s, there was the feel of a celebration and a political movement. In Albany, however, the different strata reflected different vibes: There was dancing to disco on one floor, slow cruising on another, and I was, well, not so very sure about what was happening in the recesses of the building.
Oddly, the same structure characterized the gay bar I went to outside of Albany in the mid-’70s. Men were upstairs, and drag shows became regular events, a kind of pre-Provincetown testing ground for the up-and-coming. In New Haven, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the bar Partners was known for its upstairs-downstairs configuration. They seemed to be spaces of freedom and excitement, islands in an otherwise unfriendly world. Its current space features gilt mirrors, a disco ball and a small performance stage.I am not sure about my earliest memory of the gay bar, but I do know that I was in bars very often starting at the age of eighteen, or just before. Wedged into a space in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood - the epicenter of the city’s tech world - The Stud opened in 1966 and quickly gained a reputation as a spot with a hippie vibe and eclectic customers. In 2016 The Stud’s current location was sold, and the bar’s then-owner received was notified that monthly rent for the 2,800-square-foot space would leap from $3,800 to $9,500.Ī cooperative group of 18 owners then bought the bar to keep it running.
It’s at least the second time the 54-year-old bar has faced the prospect of full closure.But previous situations were due to gentrification in San Francisco, now one of the nation’s tech hubs. “Because of a lack of revenue due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the historic bar will be announcing that they are permanently closing their location and will be holding a drag funeral to honor the end of an era of LGBT nightlife,” said one of the owners, Honey Mahogany, in a news release. The 18-member collective that operates the club announced late Wednesday that they had decided to close the bar, though they will look for a new location. The Stud is the longest continually running gay bar in San Francisco and known throughout the country as one of the bohemian, gender-bending, anything-goes institutions that made San Francisco into a gay mecca. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - One of the nation’s most celebrated gay bars is being forced from its home amid the financial fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.
This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.