Gay bars have operated as the most visible institutions of the LGBTQ+ community in the United States for the better part of a century, from before gay liberation until after their assumed obsolescence. In The Bars Are Ours Lucas Hilderbrand offers a panoramic history of gay bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures. Hilderbrand cruises from leather in Chicago and drag in Kansas City to activism against gentrification in Boston and racial discrimination in Atlanta; from New York City’s bathhouses, sex clubs, and discos and Houston’s legendary bar Mary’s to the alternative scenes that reimagined queer nightlife in San Francisco and Latinx venues in Los Angeles. The Bars Are Ours explores these local sites (with additional stops in Denver, Detroit, Seattle, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Orlando as well as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Texas) to demonstrate the intoxicating---even world-making---roles that bars have played in queer public life across the country.
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface: Drunk History, or I Just Wanna Hear a Good Beat
- Acknowledgments: I Feel Love/Can’t Get You Out of My Head
- Color Plates
- Introduction: We Were Never Being Boring
- Part I: Cultures
- 1. Nights in Black Leather: Inventing a Bar Culture in Chicago
- Interlude 1. Triangle Lounge in Denver
- 2. Show Me Love: Female Impersonation and Drag in Kansas City
- Interlude 2. Safe Spaces in Detroit
- Part II: Politics
- 3. Somewhere There’s a Place for Us: Urban Renewal, Gentrification, and Class Conflicts in Boston
- Interlude 3. Seattle Counseling Service
- 4. Midtown Goddam: Discrimination, Coalition, and Community in Atlanta
- Interlude 4. Gay Switchboard in Philadelphia
- Part III: Institutions
- 5. Welcome to the Pleasuredome: Legends of Sex and Dancing in New York
- Interlude 5. The Saloon in Minneapolis
- 6. Proud Mary’s: An Institution in Houston
- Interlude 6. The Main Club in Superior, WI
- Part IV: Reinventions
- 7. Further Tales of the City: Queer Parties in Post-disco San Francisco
- Interlude 7. The Casa Nova in Somerset County, PA
- 8. Donde Todo es Diferente: Queer Latinx Nightlife in Los Angeles / Researched and Written with Dan Bustillo
- Interlude 8. Mable Peabody’s Beauty Parlor and Chainsaw Repair in Denton, TX
- Epilogue: After Hours. Pulse in Orlando
- Appendix 1. Selected Bars and Clubs
- Appendix 2. LGBTQ+ Periodical Sources
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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Adobe DRM
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