St. Sukie de la Croix didn’t set out to be one of the prolific custodians of gay bar history in Chicago. “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. “I went to my publisher and said, ‘Can I do a column?’” That was 1997. 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. A book, “Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall,” followed in 2012.
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. And when the self-deputized historian found himself too close to a source, things could get complicated. “I had to be careful with some of the things I actually put in the paper,” recalls de la Croix. “I had some great stories I couldn’t print. 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.”
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. 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. Patrons’ recollections have gotten foggier; photos and fliers have faded; funds for preservation work are perennially tight. 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. “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.
For 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. 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. 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.