The Bars that Built Us

By Stuart Weaver with Chris Cabrera

In observance of LGBTQ+ History Month, Bartender Magazine is shining a light on the bars that have helped shape queer history in America: six that are gone, and six that are still pouring drinks today.

Twenty years ago, in 2006, I moved from a small rural town in south-central Texas to Washington, DC for college. I was 18 years old, one foot out of the closet, and had very little idea what being part of a queer community actually looked like.

Growing up, I had been bullied at school for being gay long before I was ready to call myself gay. I knew I was different, and I knew I didn’t belong where I was. I remember waiting until everyone else had gone to bed, sneaking off to watch the newest episode of Will & Grace, and imagining this completely different life somewhere else.

Then I got to DC, and suddenly that world was real. For the first time, I walked into gay bars and found rooms full of people like me. People with different backgrounds, different stories, different versions of queerness, but people who understood something about me without my having to explain it. I found friends. I found chosen family. I found places where I could relax, dance, be ridiculous, and slowly figure out who I was.

Now, 20 years later, bars have become my career. I’ve spent my life in hospitality, and for the past seven years I had the privilege of helping build and run a queer neighborhood bar of my own. Looking back, I don’t think that trajectory is accidental.

For generations, bars have been gathering places for LGBTQ+ people. They were places where we could meet one another, organize, raise money, build chosen family, dance, flirt, fall in love, and, most importantly, simply exist openly.  Bars aren’t just places where we drank, they are our community institutions.

Long before LGBTQ+ people had widespread legal protections or mainstream visibility, the bar was often one of the few places where we could find one another. Early gay-rights organizing happened in bars. Protests happened because of bars. During the AIDS epidemic, bars hosted benefits, raised money, distributed information, and gave people somewhere to grieve together and, at the same time, somewhere to feel encouraged and empowered.

Dan Savage captured that idea beautifully when he wrote, “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”

There is something profound in that. Queer nightlife has always existed somewhere between resistance and joy.

Many early gay bars were dives, tucked into working-class neighborhoods or marginal parts of cities where rents were cheaper and a certain amount of anonymity was possible. Windows were often covered and entrances were discreet. Being seen walking into a gay bar could cost someone a job, a family, or even get you thrown in jail.

That’s what made Twin Peaks Tavern in San Francisco so radical. When its lesbian owners uncovered its enormous plate-glass windows in the early 1970s, patrons could suddenly be seen from the street. It sounds almost laughably ordinary now, but at the time, it was a declaration: We are here, and we are not hiding.

Queer bars have represented so many expressions of queer life. Places like Maud’s in San Francisco, which opened in 1966, gave lesbian women a dedicated gathering place at a time when those spaces were incredibly rare. The Mineshaft in New York, open from 1976 to 1985, represented another part of the story entirely: leather culture, sexual liberation, and a generation of gay men creating spaces where their sexuality could exist unapologetically. Its closure during the AIDS crisis also illustrates how dramatically that epidemic reshaped gay nightlife.

Different bars served different communities (lesbian bars, leather bars, Black gay bars, Latino clubs, drag bars, neighborhood dives) each tell a slightly different piece of our history.  Out of those communities came bars, and out of those bars came movements.

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Six Bars We Lost

The Black Cat Tavern — Los Angeles, California

On New Year’s Eve 1966, police raided the Black Cat Tavern just after midnight, beating and arresting patrons for doing something as scandalous as kissing one another. In February 1967, hundreds of people gathered outside the bar to protest the raid in one of the earliest large public demonstrations for LGBTQ+ civil rights in the United States. The resulting legal fight became an early attempt to argue that gay people deserved equal protection under the Constitution. This was more than two years before Stonewall.

Paradise Garage — New York, New York

Paradise Garage wasn’t simply a gay nightclub. It changed nightlife.

From 1977 to 1987, resident DJ Larry Levan and a largely Black and Latino queer crowd helped reshape DJ culture, dance music, club sound, and the entire idea of what a nightclub could be. Its influence can be heard in house, garage, and modern dance music around the world. Gay Men’s Health Crisis also held its first major fundraiser there in 1982, raising more than $50,000. The club closed in 1987, and the building was demolished in 2018.

Nob Hill — Washington, D.C.

For decades, Nob Hill was one of Washington’s most important Black gay bars. At a time when racism could make predominantly white gay spaces just as unwelcoming as straight ones, bars like Nob Hill gave Black gay men a place to find community on their own terms.

That distinction matters. There has never been one singular gay-bar experience. Race, gender, class, sexuality, and geography have always shaped who felt welcome behind which door.

Jewel’s Catch One — Los Angeles, California

Black lesbian activist Jewel Thais-Williams opened Catch One in 1973. It became one of the first major clubs in the country built specifically around Black LGBTQ+ people and later welcomed a broad multiracial queer community.

Catch One was also a direct response to racism, sexism, and exclusion in other gay nightlife. During the AIDS crisis, Jewel and her wife, Rue Thais-Williams, expanded their work into HIV/AIDS services. Jewel operated the club until its LGBTQ+ incarnation closed in 2015. The venue remains open today as Catch One, and the building is now a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

Maud’s — San Francisco, California

Maud’s opened in 1966 and spent more than two decades as one of the country’s most important lesbian bars.

Lesbian bars have historically been particularly vulnerable to disappearing, which makes places like Maud’s especially important to remember. Owner Rikki Streicher wanted women who loved women to have somewhere to meet, connect, and build community. When Maud’s served its final drink in 1989, its closing became the subject of the documentary Last Call at Maud’s.

Pulse — Orlando, Florida

Pulse opened in 2004 as an LGBTQ+ nightclub and became particularly important to Orlando’s Latino queer community. On June 12, 2016, during Latin Night, a gunman murdered 49 people and wounded dozens more.

Pulse never reopened. Its place in LGBTQ+ history is now inseparable from grief, but also from the importance of queer spaces themselves. The attack was devastating precisely because a place built for safety, celebration, dancing, and community had been violated.

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Six Bars We Won’t Let Go

Stonewall Inn — New York, New York

Stonewall did not invent the gay-rights movement, and the people fighting for LGBTQ+ equality before 1969 deserve better than having their history erased.

But Stonewall changed everything. After a police raid on June 28, 1969, patrons and people in the surrounding neighborhood fought back. The demonstrations continued for several nights, helping galvanize a much larger and more visible gay-liberation movement. Today the Stonewall Inn and the surrounding streets are among the most recognizable LGBTQ+ historic sites in the world.

Julius’ — New York, New York

Three years before Stonewall, activists from the Mattachine Society walked into Julius’, announced that they were homosexuals, and asked to be served.

They were refused. The 1966 “Sip-In” deliberately borrowed from the tactic of the civil-rights sit-in and challenged policies that made it difficult for gay people to openly gather in bars. It remains one of the great moments in queer bar history.

The Civil Rights Movement had sit-ins. We had a Sip-In.

Café Lafitte in Exile — New Orleans, Louisiana

Café Lafitte traces its history back to 1933 and claims the title of America’s oldest continuously operating gay bar. After moving to its current Bourbon Street location in 1953, it became deeply embedded in queer life in the French Quarter.

Bars like Lafitte are important precisely because they survived. Through police harassment, changing neighborhoods, the AIDS epidemic, hurricanes, and decades of social change, the doors kept opening and people kept coming back.

Akbar — Los Angeles, California

A wonderfully scruffy neighborhood gay/queer dive on Sunset Boulevard that opened in 1996. The location had housed gay bars going back to the 1970s, and Akbar arrived at a moment when Silver Lake was losing queer spaces following the devastation of AIDS and increasing gentrification. Its founders wanted to preserve a neighborhood gathering place for the queer community, and nearly 30 years later, it’s still there.

Wildrose — Seattle, Washington

Wildrose has been a home for Seattle’s lesbian and LGBTQ+ community since 1984 and today identifies itself as the oldest lesbian bar still operating in the United States.

That matters because lesbian bars have been disappearing at a remarkable rate. The survival of a place like Wildrose is not simply nostalgia. It preserves a physical gathering place for a part of the queer community that has too often been pushed to the edges, even within LGBTQ+ nightlife itself

Nobody’s Darling — Chicago, Illinois

Nobody’s Darling is much newer than the other bars on this list, and that is exactly why I think it belongs here. Opened in 2021 by Angela Barnes and Renauda Riddle, Nobody’s Darling is Black-owned, women-owned, and queer-owned. Rather than preserving an older model of what a gay bar has traditionally looked like, it represents where queer hospitality can go next.

The bar intentionally centers women, Black and Brown queer people, and others who haven’t always been at the center of mainstream LGBTQ+ nightlife. It proves that queer spaces do not have to be relics of the past to have cultural importance.

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Our history is still being written.

The Gay Bar Is Changing. It Isn’t Going Away.

Today, queer visibility is greater than it was when many of these institutions opened. Queer people live openly in places where that would once have seemed impossible, but this basic freedom is still being threatened. 

LGBTQ+ spaces have also evolved beyond the traditional gay bar. A new generation of queer “third spaces” is emerging across the country and many reject the idea that a queer space needs to cater to just our slice of the community.

One of those places, for me, is Lady Jane in Denver, a bar I was incredibly proud to help run for seven years. Since opening in 2018, Lady Jane has been a neighborhood bar that celebrated queer culture, drag, raucous parties, visibility, and queer joy (all while sipping world-class cocktails) and invited everyone who respected that space to be part of it. That, to me, is where the queer bar continues to evolve. Similar bars exist from coast to coast including Clover Club and Milady’s in New York, Gilly’s in San Diego, and so many more!

I still think back to being 18 years old in DC, walking into gay bars for the first time and realizing there was an entire community waiting for me.  Many of the bars that shaped those early years of my life are gone now, but what they gave me isn’t. They showed me what a bar could be for someone. They were a home for my community and made me feel welcome. They gave me permission to be myself. And, ultimately, they are a major reason I was drawn to bars and bartending in the first place…gay bars were the first place I could truly be myself.

I often think back on that kid who needed a queer space to the bartender who eventually helped create one. More than 20 years later, that is still what I believe hospitality is supposed to do. A good bar gives you a drink. A truly great one gives you somewhere to belong.