The dance floor became a place to escape the grief. “It was a horrible moment, but the gay community really got together and gave what they could,” he says. While the AIDS crisis brought the gay community and its bars together, COVID is driving them apart.Īt the height of AIDS, Grooms remembers attending up to five funerals a week-followed by benefits at the bars.
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And gay nightlife is now further imperiled by the threat all bars face as a result of the pandemic. In the 1970s, there were 2,500 gay bars across the country today, there are half as many. Yet as queer culture has gone mainstream enough for the crosswalk near Blake’s to be repainted as a rainbow, the gay bar scene in the city and nationwide has contracted. “Then, there’s a new wave that is a little more artistic and free.” “The South has always had a particular style that’s very glam: big hair, jewelry,” says Future Lounge entertainment director Phoenix (who goes by only his first name).
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Even the drag shows, past and present, have been fashioned to appeal to specific subcultures: classic pageant in Midtown and more alternative in East Atlanta. “I’m not going to argue with the fact it was segregated, but Atlanta was and is the gay capital of the South, and so, you went to the bars that catered to what you liked,” says Reverend Duncan Teague, one of the first Black AIDS outreach workers for AID Atlanta. “We called it ‘doing your ABCs,’” says Mitch Grooms, a bartender at the Armory from 1987 to 2001. But almost everyone ended their nights at the Armory, Backstreet, and the Cove because they were open so late-or never closed. In the 1990s, lesbians counted the Otherside Lounge and Revolution as mainstays, and the Black gay crowd frequented the likes of Bulldogs. “Gay bars felt like a safe space to open up the possibility of figuring out who you were.” Doug Craft, a bartender at Blake’s on the Park for 30 years, says the purpose of a gay bar transcends mere socializing: “I’ve felt like a counselor who helped others make the transition into self-acceptance.” “We were still not really out as a society, even in the 1990s,” says Alli Royce Soble, a mixed-media artist and queer documentary photographer. Back then, those were the only places where he could comfortably hang out and be himself. When Smith first discovered Atlanta’s gay nightlife, the scene was booming with dozens of places to drink, dance, and watch drag. They decided the next day to move to Atlanta.
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“We were so overwhelmed by the feeling of inclusion and energy in the gay scene,” says Smith, who lived with his boyfriend in Nashville at the time. Revelers at leather bar the Eagle in 2015, six years after an infamous police raidĪrt Smith’s first Atlanta gay bar experience was when he danced in the new year at Backstreet during a weekend getaway at the end of 1982.