UCI Podcast: The history of gay bars in America

Every June, the United States celebrates Pride Month, commemorating the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn that inspired a global movement toward LGBTQ+ equality. The rich history of gay bars leading up to and since the Stonewall Riots is thoroughly explored in The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After, written by Lucas Hilderbrand, UC Irvine professor and chair of film and media studies.

The combination of a dearth of books investigating the history of gay bars and the closure of many gay bars around the nation catalyzed Hilderbrand’s motivation to tackle what he calls an “ambitious project” to “look at the role of gay bars in shaping community politics, subcultures and the ways in which we imagine what queer public life could be in the United States.”

In this episode of The UCI Podcast, Hilderbrand shares how bars are powerful community cornerstones; what he learned on his extensive research journey examining archival accounts in all corners of the U.S.; and why he chose to inform this unique history with anecdotes, stories and even musical references. Playlists to accompany the book can be found on both YouTube and Spotify.

The music for this episode, titled “The Gentlemen,” was provided by DivKid via the audio library in YouTube Studio.

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TRANSCRIPT

The UCI Podcast/Cara Capuano:

From the University of California, Irvine, I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to The UCI Podcast.

Our guest today is Lucas Hilderbrand, professor and department chair for film and media studies at UC Irvine. Professor Hilderbrand followed a bachelor’s degree in film studies from the University of Minnesota with a Ph.D. in cinema studies from New York University. Then he went to the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California for a postdoctoral fellowship.

Since 2007, he has been faculty in film and media studies at UC Irvine, teaching a variety of different classes like the history of cinema, film and media theory, audio cultures, representations, and courses in queer studies – it’s really a comprehensive list. He was named department chair in 2022. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today, Professor Hilderbrand.

Lucas Hilderbrand:

Thank you for inviting me.

Capuano:

There are a lot of people who identify themselves as cinephiles. I, for one, am someone who absolutely loves the movies, but you have turned your passion into an academic career. I find myself rather envious. What drew you to this line of study?

Hilderbrand:

So, I’ve always had a passion for cinema and I think the early question was whether I wanted to make films or write about them. And I learned pretty quickly as an undergraduate that I didn’t enjoy making them, that my passion was actually watching and writing about cinema. And so, I really pursued early on two kinds of parallel careers. One was as a film critic, and one was as a curator/programmer of cinema. And that’s actually what led me from undergraduate into graduate school is I actually went to graduate school to become a curator to work in a museum or film society context. And while I was doing my master’s, I continued onto the Ph.D. and effectively made my peace with becoming an academic instead of a public programmer.

Capuano:

So, you really ran the gamut of “How can I make this my career?” and came to your educated choice.

Hilderbrand:

I did, yeah.

Capuano:

Your academic journey has taken you to all corners of the U.S. – from the Midwest, where you started, to NYU to USC. What led you here to UC Irvine?

Hilderbrand:

Well, to be honest, it’s the place I got a job, but it was a really great opportunity to come to UCI and it was honestly the only job I really wanted after the interview. It was such a generative and generous department and space that it was just such a supportive environment to invent whatever kind of academic trajectory I wanted to pursue.

Capuano:

That’s fantastic. Along with your vast knowledge of media and cinema, you’ve written several books, most recently publishing The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After. Publisher Duke University Press describes the book as “a panoramic history of gay bars showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics and culture.” What would you add to that broad overview to give readers a bit more insight on what they’d learned from your book?

Hilderbrand:

Well, I started the book because I realized about 15 years ago that nothing of the kind existed. There wasn’t a book that gave a history of gay bars, particularly in a national framework. So, I was really interested in exploring that history and revisiting that past, particularly because we were already seeing discourses that the gay bar as an institution was dying within our culture. We’ve seen a number of gay bar closures in the last 20 or so years. So, I was really interested in tackling an ambitious project that was looking nationally at the role of gay bars in shaping community politics, subcultures and the ways in which we imagine what queer public life could be in the United States. In doing that, I knew it was an ambitious project, but I was also curious to just explore the ways in which there’s both national trends and very local stories and very local histories.

Capuano:

As you mentioned, “ambitious” is the perfect word. I mean, 1960s and after – that’s over 60 years of history to sort through! What gave you the motivation to tackle such an ambitious task?

Hilderbrand:

Well, I really wanted to do something historical and something that had a scale that I’d never tried before. My first book, which was based on my dissertation, I wrote very quickly, and I wanted to really sit with a project for a long time, and I wanted to let the archive reveal to me what the shape of the project would be.

So, when I started, I had an idea of what cities might be in the book, but I didn’t actually know for sure which cities would tell which stories or what the chapters would be. I went to as many archives across the country as I could, as well as did extended summer – basically – residencies at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles, which is the largest queer archive in the world. And by digging through both the local and national gay press and looking through every collection I could find in collections across the country, began to realize certain stories emerged, certain histories emerged, and certain locations emerged as ways to tell what is a really complex history.

Capuano:

How did your idea of what that was going to be like align with your expectations and then your experience in your process in this journey?

Hilderbrand:

I knew, for instance, that New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago would figure in the book in some way, but I didn’t necessarily know what those chapters would be and what they would do. And it was really important to me that the book was not only a New York/San Francisco history, that we look beyond those two cities – as influential as they’ve been – to understand that queer life, queer expression and queer bars have been everywhere in the United States, sometimes innovating scenes without the influence of the coasts and sometimes innovating scenes alongside or in dialogue with what was happening on the coasts.

So, I had some idea of what cities would be in it, but most of those cities actually appear in the second half of the book and that’s deliberate. I wanted to start in the Midwest and in the center of the country to imagine that some of these cultures and some of these spaces actually emerge in the center of the country, away from where we might’ve imagined those histories. So, the book begins with Chicago, with Denver, with Kansas City. It continues with Houston and a number of cities that might not have been the expected cities or the places where we might imagine queer history having been defined.

Capuano:

And that was a big surprise for me as a reader. The fact that you started in these places that – in my mind – I’ve never actually associated with that culture and that history.

Hilderbrand:

Right. So, part of it was a deliberate attempt to decenter the coasts, and part of it was really responding to what I found in the archives. So, I think probably the chapter that will be the most surprising to people is Kansas City as the drag chapter.

So, it’s not a city that most people associate with leading queer culture or with drag historically but there were a number of convergences. And one of the things in my process that I really listened to is that oftentimes in the cities that I focused on, there were a couple of things that converged or came together that helped me understand that that was a city that could tell me a particular story.

So, in Kansas City, there was both an archival collection dedicated to a female impersonator lounge – and I had not found similar collections very many other places – but it was also a city where the most famous and influential early study of queer life – Esther Newton’s Mother Camp, which is an anthropological study of drag queens in America – she did field research in Kansas City at one of the venues that was collected in that archive. And so, I had both really rich accounts and documentation and analysis from Esther Newton from the time period. I also had archival documents and images from the archive.

And as it happened, Kansas City was also the center of the national homophile organizing conference to organize what gay political organizing would look like in that moment. So, at the same time that she was doing field research, and that this female impersonator lounge was in operation, it was also literally the center of gay political organizing in the United States.

Capuano:

In what year?

Hilderbrand:

Around ‘65 to ‘67.

It was also important to me that some of the histories predate the Stonewall Riots in 1969, which are often thought of as the turning point in gay political history – and in many ways it is – but one of the points I make is that it’s not necessarily the turning point in gay bar history, that a gay bar culture had to exist to be protected during those riots.

Capuano:

Excellent point. What are some of the things that you learned during this undertaking that surprised you?

Hilderbrand:

I think one of the things that really surprised me is how rich these different stories are. And there were certainly bars – and there were certainly locations – that had these rich histories that I had never heard about and that wouldn’t have been my expectation.

My favorite bar that I researched – in terms of the archive – was based in Houston, which is not a city I had any personal history with. But the bar Mary’s in Houston exemplified everything a gay bar could be in terms of building a community, in terms of cultivating a subculture, in terms of being ground zero for political organizing, but also as being the community center to mourn the losses of the AIDS crisis. And it was also a bar that stoked controversy around questions of racism. So, it was literally the bar that did every single thing in the book. And it was also sort of the founding bar of the developing gay neighborhood, the Montrose, in Houston, where questions of gay neighborhood formation and later on questions of gentrification also come into play.

Capuano:

You must feel like you still have so much of this story to tell. Is that true?

Hilderbrand:

So, this project has stayed with me more than anything else I’ve ever worked on, and I’m just beginning to feel like I’m ready to move on. But it was the first project where when it was done, I wasn’t done with it.

Capuano:

Just from hearing you describe it and the discoveries you made along the way, and I know that scientific mind is always thinking and investigating and wants more.

Hilderbrand:

Mm-hmm.

Capuano:

Plenty of rave reviews for The Bars Are Ours. It’s described as “a fascinating archival deep dive,” “a tour de force” and “a joy to read.” One reviewer specifically notes your skill at inserting yourself into the narrative to make it come alive while concurrently stepping back and analyzing. How did you do that?

Hilderbrand:

So, that was something that was really important to me strategically is I wanted, on the one hand, to make sure that I do what in cultural studies is called “positioning.” So, I disclose who I am and what my relationship is to my material, but also demographically I’m a white cis gay man and of Generation X. And so, I have a particular interpretive and political position in relationship to what I’m engaging, and I want to be transparent and honest about that. So, that’s part of what I’m doing.

But honestly, what was really important was that the history that I was conveying feel like a lived history. And I didn’t want the book to be boring. Like, I just felt like a gay bar book should not be boring. And one of the strategies for doing that, particularly when there weren’t always extensive archival accounts of what bars felt like or what they sounded like or what they smelled like, I could use some of my own experiences to extrapolate or to flesh out some of those scenes and some of those histories. I’ve been in so many spaces like the ones I researched that I could fill in some of those gaps from personal experience.

I also felt very strongly throughout the research that anecdotes were really important, whether they’re my stories or someone else’s stories that I’m culling from interviews and archives. I really felt like it’s the details and it’s the stories people tell that give us a sense of the texture of these spaces, but also why they matter to people. So, the anecdote really references what’s the memorable detail that marks how do people think about, how do people know and how do people remember these particular spaces?

Capuano:

I also like how you wove song titles, whether it was the actual title or an allusion to a title, into your different topics. I’m assuming that was also intentional.

Hilderbrand:

That was deliberate. So, one of the strategies for doing this research was listening to a lot of music and imagining what kinds of songs would’ve been playing in different kinds of spaces. And the book has a kind of mnemonic soundtrack that is embedded into the way it’s written, whether it’s section titles or whether it’s references within the text itself. But the idea is that you can imagine a soundtrack as you’re reading. There are actually both a Spotify soundtrack and there’s a YouTube playlist. The YouTube playlist is more comprehensive, but it was very important to me that music be understood as part of this history and as part of the way of accessing this history.

Capuano:

I’m glad I asked that and that you shared with us that there are playlists, because I was wondering.

Hilderbrand:

Yes, there are. Yeah.

Capuano:

What would you like a reader to come away with after reading The Bars Are Ours?

Hilderbrand:

So, I think that my approach to bars has always been one of embracing their complexity and their contradictions. So, on the one hand, we have a historical understanding of the bar as a space of possibility. This idea that it’s where people went – or where people go still – to find community, to find lovers, and to sort of effectively invent themselves through those processes.

We also have a very well-documented history of many times these spaces are discriminatory. They’re sites of rejection. They’re sites that have contributed to high incidents of alcoholism. There are histories of exploitation, there are histories of street violence. And so, they also contribute a lot of pain and there’s a lot of complexity to that history. And what really interests me about bars is the duality of that – that they’re both spaces of possibility and they’re also spaces and structures that have a lot of pain and a lot of hurt within that. And that sort of the power of the bar is that dichotomy.

Capuano:

I’ve never thought of that dichotomy, and it’s really poignant the way that you describe it. Your book is just one example of the energy that you’ve invested in expanding knowledge about the history and culture of queer communities. Since this UCI Podcast will publish in June, how does Pride Month fit into those histories?

Hilderbrand:

Pride Month really starts from – or the first Gay Pride festivities – started as an anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969.

So, the Stonewall Inn was a bar in the West Village in downtown New York City. It had been subject to a number of police raids, but it was also part of a wave of raids of various gay bars across the city in the late 1960s. And effectively, this one particular night, the patrons of the bar were fed up with police raids and police violence, and they began to fight back. And it started a multi-day process of reclaiming these spaces and fighting back. Now, one of the reasons Stonewall happened where it happened and how it happened is that it was famously the only gay bar in the village that allowed for dancing. And queer people love dancing historically. And that was something that… it was a right that was threatened, and that people fought to protect and to maintain – the right to get together and the right to dance.

It was also a bar that admitted underage people, people on the gender non-normative spectrum, a lot of people of color, and so it was a very diverse and inclusive bar. It was also a Mafia-owned bar that had a rough history of exploiting its clientele. And so, it was all of those things in a very kind of contradictory way, but it was the space that its community had, and it was the space that was fought to be protected and retained.

The bar actually closed pretty shortly after the riots. It didn’t sustain as a bar itself, but it did create a political consciousness and an awakening. And it introduced a number of activist groups, most famously, the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance. It also inspired a lot of gay periodicals and gay liberation publishing in the immediate moment. And so, we begin to have a public discourse and a more conscious and generational pivoting activist orientation in the wake of Stonewall.

Pride happens with the first anniversary commemoration. We see it both in Los Angeles and in New York City. The reason that Pride happens most places in June is because it’s a reference to the riots happening at the end of June in New York City.

Capuano:

It may not have sustained as a bar, but boy, it sustained, didn’t it?

Hilderbrand:

It did, yes.

Capuano:

Do you have a piece of advice that you would give your younger self that you think someone might benefit from?

Hilderbrand:

I think the advice I would give is to take advantage of the opportunities that you have. And every choice you make opens up directions that you cannot anticipate. But if you fixate on the things that you think you want or that you don’t get – so the rejections, the sort of opportunities that you aren’t able to pursue – if you’re sort of fighting for those things that aren’t sort of opening up, you’re going to miss the opportunities that are opening up.

Capuano:

That’s an excellent, excellent tip.

Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Hilderbrand. Folks interested in reading The Bars Are Ours can find it anywhere they buy books. It’s also available through the UCI Libraries. I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to our conversation.

For the latest UC Irvine news, please visit news.uci.edu. The UCI Podcast is a production of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.