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Published online 2016 www.nps.gov/subjects/tellingallamericansstories/lgbtqthemestudy.htm LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History is a publication of the National Park Foundation and the National Park Service. We are very grateful for the generous support of the Gill Foundation, which has made this publication possible. The views and conclusions contained in the essays are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of the U.S. Government. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute their endorsement by the U.S. Government. © 2016 National Park Foundation Washington, DC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced without permission from the publishers. Links (URLs) to websites referenced in this document were accurate at the time of publication. THEMES The chapters in this section take themes as their starting points. They explore different aspects of LGBTQ history and heritage, tying them to specific places across the country. They include examinations of LGBTQ community, civil rights, the law, health, art and artists, commerce, the military, sports and leisure, and sex, love, and relationships. LGBTQ 16BUSINESS AND COMMERCE David K. Johnson As the field of gay and lesbian studies first began to take shape in the 1980s, writer and activist Dennis Altman called attention to the central role that commercial enterprises played in the development of LGBTQ communities. “One of the ironies of American capitalism,” he observed, “is that it has been a major force in creating and maintaining a sense of identity among homosexuals.” While other minority groups depended on home and religious institutions to support their social and cultural practices, Altman observed that “for homosexuals, bars and discos play the role performed for other groups by family and church.”1 As numerous historians have since demonstrated, LGBTQ communities first coalesced and became visible to themselves and the larger society in the early twentieth century largely in bars, rent parties, diners, bathhouses, and other commercial establishments.2 1 Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America: The Americanization of the Homosexual (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 21. 2 See Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993). David K. Johnson Commercial enterprises played a key role in the development of LGBTQ communities at both the local and national level. It was in such commercial establishments that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender patrons could find lovers, make friends, form communities, and learn to navigate in a hostile environment. As historian Nan Boyd argues, such commercial spaces “facilitated the development of a shared public culture, a new language and lexicon of sexual meanings.” When such important sites of community building became contested, raided, or otherwise closed to the LGBTQ community, they became important sites of community resistance to authority. Boyd calls them “politicized community center[s].”3 Indeed the most iconic moment in LGBTQ history—now commemorated annually in LGBTQ Pride festivals all over the world—was the June 28, 1969 riot at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village. It was the first LGBTQ site to be designated a National Historic Landmark.4 Hundreds of commercial sites figure prominently in the history of LGBTQ community formation and deserve recognition. Because of the regularity of police raids and crackdowns on such spaces, especially in the early twentieth century, many were short-lived. This essay will discuss those most iconic types of LGBTQ businesses that have gained recognition at the national scale, paying great attention to those that were the first of their kind, most enduring, or were the site of noteworthy events in LGBTQ history. Favoring the oldest LGBTQ sites, this essay primarily highlights pre-Stonewall/pre-1969 sites rather than the much larger number of places that eventually proliferated in the wake of gay and lesbian liberation. I will look at five types of businesses of historic significance to LGBTQ community formation: bars and rent parties; diners and cafeterias; bathhouses; book and clothing retailers; and media companies. 3 Boyd, Wide-Open Town, 61–62. 4 David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004). Stonewall at 51-53 Christopher Street, New York City, New York was added to the NRHP on June 28, 1999; designated an NHL on February 16, 2000; and declared Stonewall National Monument (an NPS unit) on June 24, 2016. Because The Stonewall Inn has already been designated an NHL, it is not detailed here. 16-2 LGBTQ Business and Commerce Because the sites focused on here are commercial enterprises, they reflect the inherent biases of a capitalist economy. Both the founders and patrons of these businesses tended to be people with financial means; they were more often male then female and much more often white than they were people of color. Although I have attempted to be inclusive, documenting the history of commercial spaces tends necessarily to privilege white men. Gay bars in particular—like many drinking and eating establishments in the mid-twentieth century United States—often adhered to informal codes of racial exclusion. Lesbian-centered businesses tended to develop later than those targeting or founded by gay men. So while these commercial establishments fostered community, it was not always an inclusive one.5 The history of LGBTQ-centered businesses follows a fairly uniform trajectory. Early in the twentieth century, most such businesses were straight-owned sites that became important to the LGBTQ community through a process of spatial appropriation. Certain straight-owned bars, for example, became well-known sites where LGBTQ people gathered and socialized. After World War II, LGBTQ entrepreneurs began to open their own bars, bathhouses, magazines, and bookstores to cater to this growing market. In many cities, these businesses encouraged the formation of LGBTQ neighborhoods.6 The postwar rise of LGBTQ entrepreneurs represented a clear manifestation of community empowerment, parallel to and often supportive of the community’s political involvement. The story of Harvey Milk’s political campaign to become an openly gay San Francisco city supervisor from his Castro Camera storefront perhaps most clearly embodies this process.7 With increasing visibility, the gay market was discovered by mainstream advertisers, who began special niche marketing campaigns. As large corporations become more gay-friendly and as the LGBTQ community has won basic legal protections, such as marriage equality, there has been a decline in many LGBTQ-centered businesses 5 Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed, Homo Economics: Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life (New York: Routledge, 1997). 6 See Hanhardt (this volume). 7 Castro Camera was located at 573-575 Castro Street, San Francisco, California. 16-3 David K. Johnson due to a perceived process of assimilation. The historic ebb and flow of LGBTQ commercial enterprises underscores the need to commemorate such sites.8 Bars and Rent Parties Bars have played a more central role in LGBTQ community formation than perhaps for any other social group.9 Like the immigrant saloon or the African American barbershop, the gay bar created a sense of camaraderie and provided a space not only for personal intimacy but also to share gossip and exchange information. Ricardo J. Brown recalled what an important social setting the gay bar Kirmser’s was to life in 1940s St. Paul, Minnesota, typical of bars across the nation. Run by a straight German couple, the working-class bar served as “a refuge, a fort in the midst of a savage and hostile population.”10 As a patron of Maud’s summarized about her experience at the lesbian bar that closed in 1989 after over twenty years of business in San Francisco, “It was just home.”11 As a longtime bartender at Chicago’s Lost and Found, a lesbian bar that served the community for over fifty years explained, “Everything happened here. It was the only place.”12 The 2006 documentary Small Town Gay Bar 8 Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); Moira Rachel Kenney, Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection of Place and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Mark Abrahamson, Urban Enclaves: Identity and Place in the World (New York: Worth Publishers, 2006); Amin Ghaziani, There Goes the Gayborhood? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 9 See Gieseking (this volume). 10 Ricardo J. Brown, The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s: A Gay Life in the 1940s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 7. Kirmser’s was located at 382 North Wabasha Street, St. Paul, Minnesota. 11 Last Call at Maud’s, directed by Paris Poirier (San Francisco: Frameline, 1993). Maud’s opened in 1966, and was located at 937 Cole, San Francisco, California. See “Maud’s,” Lost Womyn’s Space (blog), March 30, 2011, http://lostwomynsspace.blogspot.com/2011/03/mauds.html. Former patrons of Maud’s hold an annual reunion at Finnegan’s Wake, the current bar in the old Maud’s space. See San Francisco Bay Times Facebook page, “Maud’s Reunion,” May 11, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/SanFranciscoBayTimes/posts/1198052323547064. 12 Marie Cartier, Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall (New York: Routledge, 2014), 10. Lost and Found, 3058 West Irving Park Road, Chicago, Illinois, was in business from 1965 through early 2008.

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