From a piece I wrote for The Washington Post’s Made by History column: “Gay bars are disappearing. Their past holds keys to their future.”
Gay bars are often assumed to be relatively common places by, and exclusively for, LGBTQ+ people, but that is a mid-20th-century invention. Today, as debates continue to surface about the need and desirability of gay bars, one of the earliest gay-owned gay bars — Seattle’s Garden of Allah — has surprising lessons about the history of gay bars and their likely future.
Greggor Mattson 