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(For 36 years, it also housed famed music club Kenney’s Castaways, that showcased a range of artists, including Bruce Springsteen, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith and even the Fugees.) “The façade changed but the building is still there,” says Lustbader. Amazingly enough, more than a century later, the building that The Slide was located in, 157 Bleecker Street, still stands.
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1970S WEST HOLLYWOOD GAY BARS SERIES
The Slide, which was slang for hook up in 1890’s parlance, was perhaps the most famous and infamous of these watering holes thanks to a series of attacks in local newspapers. These establishments, which were clustered near the Bowery, offered drinkers a lively atmosphere where some of the waiters wore makeup and, according to Chauncey, “some of them would sing in a falsetto voice.” You could also expect “campy repartee with the customers.” However, “you wouldn’t call them gay bars,” warns George Chauncey, author of Gay New York and co-director of The Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities. (Several years earlier Walt Whitman even featured the spot in an unfinished poem: “The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse…”) By the 1890s, there were also what Lustbader says were called “pansy bars” that were “commercialized places of vice.” It was popular with gay men as well as with straight men and drew a crowd of writers and artists. In the 1870s, there were establishments that were known for their “bohemian” atmosphere, like the subterranean Charles Pfaff’s Beer Cellar that was staffed by effeminate men. There’s “a way longer history,” says Ken Lustbader, who is one of the directors of the New York City LGBT Historic Sites Project. These venues included the old Le Bar on Glendale Boulevard (now the hipster haunt Cha Cha Lounge), the now-defunct Circus Disco in Hollywood, the divey New Jalisco on Main Street, and Tempo on Santa Monica Boulevard, a veritable club of worship to gay vaqueros and queens.Thanks in great part to the protest and the publicity that it generated, this outrageous policy was changed, which paved the way for a new generation of bars that welcomed gay men and lesbian women.īut this wasn’t the first time that New York bars helped shape gay identity. Then there was the immigrant-led underground, dominated by working class gays and lesbians, Latin drag queens, trans people. There were the more mainstream-adjacent scenes that centered in East Hollywood and Silver Lake: leather, bears, rockers, “creative” types, the people who congregated at places like Akbar, MJ’s, the Eagle, Cuffs and Faultline. As a result, it’s taken me some years to realize that there were actually two alternative gay underground cultures in Los Angeles at the time, and that many of us had firm footholds in both. The corresponding flow was fluid and bent slightly toward the nihilistic in everything from music to sexual practices to street fashion. 11, but also well before dating apps, necessitating analog contact with strangers in order to have a life in a driving-heavy metropolis. Maybe this was because the period came right after the vibrating trauma of Sept. There wasn’t a lot of overthinking going on labels weren’t in style. In L.A.’s central neighborhoods and its Eastside, denizens followed the underground gay calendar from club to club, week to week, where we made bands of friends and notched strings of enthusiastic bed mates.