Trans rights are under attack around the world. This project supports those fighting alongside them. As a queer music historian, I wanted to use our historic sites of joy as ammunition in the fight. Merch celebrating our queer venues – bars and clubs and cafes – will raise money for the beneficiary organisations. Join the cause! Wear a t-shirt! Support trans rights organisations across the globe!
*All proceeds from sales of merchandise and donations will go to the beneficiary organisations. Your contact information will not be shared with third parties.
Equal recipients of all money raised.
The Lexus Bar, which opened in Abidjan in 2005, was very popular with the local LGBT community. One of a small handful of bars in the Ivory Coast capital, it closed when the building was sold and the bar was no longer welcome. It was a venue that welcomed queer and trans members of the community, acting as one of the few places trans people could go and expect to be treated with respect. While homosexuality is not illegal in the Ivory Coast, it is culturally discouraged and queer people find it difficult to be out and proud.
The Q Cafe in New Delhi was a place for the queer community to come together for karaoke, drag nights and live music. Inspired by the owner’s travels around the world, this first of its kind queer space was meant to welcome everyone, including women and trans people, not just gay men. The tensions between the capitalist logics of a cafe and the desire to welcome everyone would in the end lead to the closure of the venue.
Stages was an unlicensed gay disco opened in 1977, with the aim of being a venue for queer people which was both safe and also glamorous. Its owners, Arnie Kliger and Stephen Cohen, wanted to create a quality late night experience and spared no expense on lighting and sound. Stages was known for its music. The DJs hired to play at the club played in innovative ways that included mixing tracks before this was a done thing. The audience also had access to percussion instruments like maracas and tambourines and were encouraged to play along.
Skyline Bar, known previously as the Butterfly Bar, was a very long running gay bar in Johannesburg. Reflecting the history of apartheid in South Africa, it was first known as a white bar in the 1970s, and then gradually ‘greyed’ and became predominantly black as its neighbourhood welcomed more black people in the 1980s. Patrons described Skyline as freedom; a place where gay men could be free to express themselves, away from the discrimination they experienced in their homes, communities and places of worship.
The Rockland Palace was a hall in Harlem, New York which hosted events, most notably the balls organised by the fraternal organisation the Hamilton Lodge. It was a popular venue during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, but drag balls continued to happen at the venue through to the 1960s. Thousands of people would come to attend events here, making it a key site for African American queer culture.
Gipsy Bar at the Tropicanna Restaurant was a fixture in Nairobi for 27 years. It served a queer community that is legally constrained by colonial era laws, where homosexuality is still illegal. One regular patron noted that while it was initially an unwitting venue for LGBTQ patrons, the owner and staff would later welcome them. He remembered it as a place that was special for the freedom it allowed the community.
La Petite Chaumière was a descriptive name for a small cottage on the hill of Montmartre, but inside it was far more radical than it looked. This venue, opened in 1922, hosted drag nights and was well known for welcoming queer patrons. Among the later well known people to make the place come alive were Gaston Baheux, an impresario and Louis Gaudin, or Zig, a costume designer to the stars. Gaudin also performed in drag at La Petite Chaumière under the stage name Zigouioui. Tourists visited, eager to see ‘gay Paris.’
Named after an Oscar Wilde novel, the Café Dorian Gray was a queer venue for both men and women in the 1920s and 1930s. In its later years it became predominantly a lesbian venue, up until its closure in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. It was located in Bülowstrasse, a street with a number of queer venues. It was documented in private letters and also in guidebooks as a place for young queer people to go out dancing. It was described as having ‘flattering music, elegant patrons, comfortable seats and pretty cutouts on the walls.’
The Caravan Club was billed as “London’s greatest bohemian rendezvous” in 1934, and lived up to its name until police raids closed it in the same year. The private members’ club in the West End welcomed queer men and women of an evening to drink, chat, and dance to the sound of the club’s accordion player. Much of what we know about this club came out in the court cases associated with the raid, as it was illegal at the time to be out and proud. The clubs more successful at keeping their business quiet don’t appear in the archives.
Galeria Alaska is a shopping arcade in Rio de Janeiro, known for several decades as a haven for gay and trans people along Copacabana beach. It housed Stop, a club in the 1960s, Sotao, a club in the 1970s and 80s, and a male strip show called Los Leopardos in the 1980s and 90s. A song called Galeria do amor by Agnaldo Timóteo, released in 1994, is about this galeria, and a line in the lyrics evokes it as a place: ‘onde pode se amar livremente’ or where you can love yourself freely.
Abanicos Bar in Cuenca, Ecuador was the site of an infamous raid by police in June 1997. The bar was hosting a drag pageant to elect the first travesti queen of the city. Instead sixty three patrons were arrested, and subjected to torture and sexual assault while in police custody. In the wake of this raid, activist groups came together to lobby the government for the depenalisation of homosexuality in Ecuador, which was approved in November of that same year.
Le Monocle was a lesbian club located in Montparnasse in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The monocle was a lesbian symbol at the time, and was often paired with a suit or a tuxedo. Women were free to dance with each other in this bar, and photographs taken by legendary photographer Brassai show women kissing as well. The bar closed with the arrival of the invading Nazis in 1940.
The Half and Half was a bar in the Sanlitun neighbourhood in Beijing, the diplomatic centre of the capital and subsequently the epicenter of nightlife. The bar was declared a queer bar by a group of queer activists led by Susie Jolly, with an inaugural party that celebrated the anniversary of the Stonewall raid of 1969. Tensions existed between this western model of queer culture and its ties to capitalism, and the bar eventually closed with the decline in queer patronage.
Capriccio’s was one of the first queer venues to open in Sydney in the 1960s. It was a nightclub but also had a stage and held spectacular drag performances for decades. Open seven days a week, patrons climbed the stairs to the venue, where cover entry also got you a meal. Known for its suburban audience, it became a feature of what became the Golden Mile, the heart of Sydney’s gaybourhood.
Bar Code was a bar in the Jongno neighbourhood in Seoul. Jongno is the original 'gaybourhood' in Seoul, where the bars are quieter and more intimate, preferred by an older crowd. Bar Code was one of the first bars where you could order drinks without food, and owner Jin kept the drinks flowing to the mixed crowd of local Koreans and visiting foreigners. Jin would happily speak English, making his bar popular among tourists looking for a good gay time. One regular called it 'the friendliest gay bar in Seoul.
Yanagi Bar (’willow’ in Japanese) was the first modern gay bar in Tokyo, opened in 1950 by Masao Shimada. It was a tiny venue, with six or seven seats at the bar on the ground floor, and originally was a curry and katsu-don bar more than a drinking establishment. Staff from this bar became de facto apprentices, leaving their jobs to open other gay bars in Tokyo.
The Black Cat of San Francisco, open since the 1900s, started collecting a gay clientele in the years after the Second World War. It featured live performances, notably by José Sarria, who would perform torch songs in drag, and would even reenact the arias from the opera Carmen. The police raided it regularly and despite the drag queens wearing paper labels saying ‘I am a boy’, many would be arrested. Anti gay pressure would finally close the bar in 1964, as its liquor license had been revoked and it couldn’t survive without it.
Balvanera al Sur was a restaurant and dance hall in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It operated for five years from 1980 to 1984, during one of Argentina’s military dictatorships. This atmosphere meant that those who came to the Sunday dances had to be vouched for by other patrons. Its importance in Argentinian LGBT history comes from one fateful raid of one of their dance nights, which led to the formation of the CHA (Homosexual Community of Argentina), an organisation that would campaign for LGBT rights.
