The data is clear: gay bars are closing. In fact, there are 45 percent fewer of them than in 2002. Dating apps like Grindr and Tinder have broken bars’ monopoly on helping LGBTQ+ people meet one other. Despite the recent spate of new laws targeting LGBTQ+ people, rising social acceptance over past decades means that LGBTQ+ people are increasingly comfortable socializing anywhere. Meanwhile, big-city gentrification pushes gay bars out of the very neighborhoods they helped make hip. But LGBTQ+ culture is everywhere these days: at the local library, on television and on our phones.
Gay bars are often assumed to be relatively common places by, and exclusively for, LGBTQ+ people, but that is a mid-20th-century invention. Today, as debates continue to surface about the need and desirability of gay bars, one of the earliest gay-owned gay bars — Seattle’s Garden of Allah — has surprising lessons about the history of gay bars and their likely future.
World War II is credited for a sea-change in LGBTQ+ life. Millions of people were mobilized from small towns and pressed into sex-segregated spaces, like barracks and women’s boardinghouses, where some discovered other people who shared their same-sex desires. During the war, Uncle Sam banned soldiers and sailors from visiting gay hangouts, inadvertently advertising them by naming them “off limits.” Yet once they found each other, LGBTQ+ people could be bold. Denver airmen even commandeered a bar called Mary’s Tavern, driving straight patrons away.
Perhaps it was experiences such as these that inspired the postwar spread of something that until then had been quite rare: bars just for gay people.
LGBTQ+ people had long congregated, and not always furtively, but almost always alongside straight people. Certain hotels, parks, restaurants, YWCAs and YMCAs served as places for queer people to exchange looks, and sometimes more. But these were usually spaces designed for “respectable” masculine men or feminine women. For example, one 20th-century gay man recalled, “I have a friend who was a teacher, who was a snob, still is, and he would only go to hotel bars, never would go to the other bars.”
These disreputable hangouts, however, allowed patrons to openly flout sexual and gender norms amid straight bohemians and slummers, who were middle-class gawkers who rubbed shoulders with “pansies” for a thrill. In these places unconventional people could flourish in the shadows, at the risk of their reputations and jobs. However, because so many bars banned women altogether, many lesbians socialized in private homes instead.
The Garden of Allah opened in 1946. It combined cabaret with a makeshift dance floor propelled by a mighty Wurlitzer organ. Burlesque acts alternated with singing female impersonators. They rejected the term “drag queen” because that term described lip-syncing hacks. These were professional and unionized performers who sang live.
Patrons and performers at the Garden of Allah were gender diverse, including butches who wished to live as men, queens who lived as women and some whose gender changed over their lives. LGBTQ+ people learned many ways to be in the world and built a gender-diverse community. It was apt that the MC’s welcome was to “Ladies and Gentlemen and the rest of you.”
The crowd was diverse in other ways, too. Straight people in interracial relationships, Black jazz musicians and Asian people unwelcome in many other clubs also found a home there.
The mixed gay-straight crowd meant the Garden of Allah was out of step with other gay bars opening in the 1950s, which increasingly catered to either gay men or lesbians. Indeed, it shuttered its doors in 1956, citing causes that echo today. At the time, liquor liberalization meant gay bars increasingly competed with straight ones for business. Technology was also to blame for keeping patrons home as one Garden performer lamented, “I like television but because of it, all those places are gone.”
In contrast to the Garden, other gay bars flourished and played an integral part in gay politics. As historian John D’Emilio concluded, “Alone among the expressions of gay life, the bar fostered an identity that was both public and collective.” And collective identity could lead to rebellion. And it was a gay bar in New York City, the Stonewall Inn, that is mythologized as sparking the gay rights movement, when patrons fought back against police oppression in 1969.
The radical politics that flourished in the years after Stonewall often drew inspiration from revolutionary movements, spurning nightlife with calls to come “out of the bars and into the streets!” But most LGBTQ+ people used bars in less radical ways. In San Francisco, a coalition of gay bar owners worked for civil rights and funded gay-friendly politicians starting in 1962. A decade later in Minneapolis, the Gay Rights Lobby raised money and support for a presidential candidate out of the bars.
These bar politics set the tone for the national LGBTQ+ movement: working incrementally with the establishment. Bar owners often enforced conservative norms about racial segregation or gender presentation because interracial crowds and transgender people attracted greater police scrutiny. An Atlanta gay bar even ejected campaigners for LGBTQ+ pride in 1972. Though they weren’t radical, the mid-century gay bar became “a kind of politicized community center,” assessed historian Nan Alamilla Boyd. Living an openly LGBTQ+ life was itself political, even if these politics sought acceptance into the mainstream rather than upending it.
This legacy has made LGBTQ+ people ambivalent about them today. Some liken gay-only bars to racial segregation, as if that was itself already vanquished, while others see bars as frivolous distractions from “real” politics. And yet: more LGBTQ+ people go to the bars on any given weekend than donate to gay causes or attend protests. Bars continue to catalyze local pride celebrations and host queer cultural forms like drag. Gay bars’ survival helps many in the community survive even still.
That’s why the Garden of Allah matters. The reasons it closed are familiar today: competition with straight bars and technology that keeps people at home.
But the tactics it introduced may just be the key to gay bars’ survival today. Live entertainment is again key to gay bars that thrive: not just drag but also live music, comedy and burlesque. All genders again frolic together. Today’s gay bars, like their pre-World War II forebears, often host mixed crowds of straight and LGBTQ+ people. One of its last-ditch reinventions, drag brunches, has become a moneymaking staple of gay bars today. These keys to contemporary success are a surprising return to pre-World War II ways.
Make no mistake: times have changed. Crowds are not legally segregated by race today and most cities protect civil rights. A whole daytime LGBTQ+ world exists that just didn’t back then. LGBTQ+ people increasingly find support both within and beyond their schools and workplaces, even as transgender people are increasingly under attack.
But if audiences marvel at today’s burlesque revival and drag explosion, they might recall that their grandparents enjoyed the art forms, too. Now that gender diverse people are more explicitly welcomed in LGBTQ+ bars, let us remember that this used to be the norm. If the Garden birthed “the fantasy that someday there will be a world of comfort, support, and love,” it is a fantasy we are still fighting for. Perhaps we need to look up from our screens to make it real.