![history of gay bars in san diego history of gay bars in san diego](https://queerintheworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Gay-San-Antonio-1024x683.jpg)
Visitors can enjoy year-round, near-perfect weather 70 miles of beautiful coastline, including the well-known Black's Beach, and the spirit of a city where people from all walks of life come together to meet, shop, dine, and enjoy the area's eclectic arts, nightlife, and special events. One of the top LGBTQ+ destinations in the country, San Diego embraces people of all stripes and types and meets the world with pride, energy, enthusiasm, and true alegría de vivir. A gay bar is not “just” a bar.Ĭheck out this moving documentary on the history of gay bars in San Diego.San Diego warmly welcomes LGBTQ+ visitors and guests with a vibrant LGBTQ+ community and wide array of activities and attractions. Without the social structures those bars created, we wouldn't have survived AIDS. Without those bars, we wouldn't be holding hands on the street.
![history of gay bars in san diego history of gay bars in san diego](https://sodiegotours.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/TheHistoryOfHillCrestFT.png)
But why explore and embrace one's sexual identity primarily on a phone screen? We fought to be able to go outside. In fact, one doesn't have to necessarily go outside. Now one doesn't have to go a bar to embrace one's identity. And I knew by that time there was no going back. Note the getting drunk is last on the list.
![history of gay bars in san diego history of gay bars in san diego](https://qvoicenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/shawposter-scaled-1200x900.jpg)
![history of gay bars in san diego history of gay bars in san diego](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/13csbgS79n99wQNAjOfOc1A7Q9g=/21x0:540x533/1200x800/filters:focal(227x197:347x317)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/59910161/IMG_7519.0.jpg)
I made out with a guy, I sang opera in falsetto, and I got drunk. This place was off the beaten gay neighborhood track at that time (most of the bars were further south in Lakeview). It was called Charmers (it has since closed). A safe space in some ways, perhaps, but not a social space where I could embrace the identity I was looking for.įast forward about four years, and I was sitting in one of the oldest gay bars in Chicago, many miles north in Rogers Park. One of them said, “This place has always been a toilet.” Yes, it was one of those gay dive bars, a stale, nondescript place smelling of cheap beer and cigarette smoke. I had danced at straight discos, I had smoked pot at mixed parties, but I couldn't interact with a guy the way I wanted and needed to.īy the way, many years later I went to that Nutbush place with a couple of friends who lived in the liberal suburb, now an LGBTQ mecca. But the pull was there, because I both knew and felt that I could go there and let all inhibitions down. My motivation for not going: how would I get home, what would happen to me sexually if I went, and what if someone saw me there. On several Saturday nights, usually alone, I would say to myself, I'll just walk down the street to the adjacent suburb and go to that bar. Even in a place where being gay did not necessarily mean persecution, I was afraid. I am sure the more sophisticated friends had figured it out (I fit the stereotypes at that time, especially cowboy boots and opera), but my gay “life” was jacking off to John Rechy's The Sexual Outlaw (my first gay book bought it at Barbara's Bookstore close to my place) and assorted jack off books. I hung out with some friends from college, including one who lived down the street, and I was chummy with the neighbors, but I was never totally myself. I was not out, but I wanted to go somewhere where I could totally be myself. Right after graduate school, living sparsely in a studio apartment in a liberal suburb, I knew about the existence of a gay bar in the adjacent suburb (the suburb I lived in was surprisingly dry given its overall liberal college-town focus, no bars or liquor stores, but one could obtain booze in a restaurant). And for many years, a precarious safe space, always at risk for being raided, and often depending for suvival on some rather “unsafe” connections (the Mob).Īs a young gayling (in and then out of the closet) in the 1980s, I knew about the existence of gay bars, but not much else. Lately there's been much talk about safe spaces (mostly for psychosocial reasons) on college campuses, but the gay bar, as far as I am concerned, was always a “identity” safe space for LGBTQ persons long before the days of mainstream acceptance of a diverse sexual identity spectrum.