These bars, according to Chauncey, were able to exist because of bribes and “they became targets,” he says.īut it wasn’t long before another legislative initiative, Prohibition, provided the environment for a new wave of bars to open up. The struggles by police and reformers to shut it down “helped to define the construction of what homosexuality would be.”Īt the turn of the century, the New York State Legislation went on a campaign to rout out corruption. The Slide “also tells the story of oppression and harassment,” says Lustbader. Absinthe, he says, was also often used to tip off gay men that they were welcome at an establishment.īut this period was short lived.
So, what were people drinking in these watering holes? According to cocktail historian David Wondrich, author of Imbibe! and Punch, regular bars served beer and whiskey, while in the better bars you could find Manhattans, Gin Rickeys and Martinis. While Chauncey says that these joints were “pretty out there sexually” there were, in fact, other saloons in the area that went further and “had back rooms where men could have sex.” In 1890, The Slide, according to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, was called by the New York Press “the wickedest place in New York.” It however, was “one site in the middle of a whole neighborhood of places where fairies gathered,” says Chauncey. (For 36 years, it also housed famed music club Kenney’s Castaways, that showcased a range of artists, including Bruce Springsteen, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith and even the Fugees.) “The façade changed but the building is still there,” says Lustbader.
Amazingly enough, more than a century later, the building that The Slide was located in, 157 Bleecker Street, still stands.
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The Slide, which was slang for hook up in 1890’s parlance, was perhaps the most famous and infamous of these watering holes thanks to a series of attacks in local newspapers. These establishments, which were clustered near the Bowery, offered drinkers a lively atmosphere where some of the waiters wore makeup and, according to Chauncey, “some of them would sing in a falsetto voice.” You could also expect “campy repartee with the customers.” However, “you wouldn’t call them gay bars,” warns George Chauncey, author of Gay New York and co-director of The Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities. (Several years earlier Walt Whitman even featured the spot in an unfinished poem: “The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse…”) By the 1890s, there were also what Lustbader says were called “pansy bars” that were “commercialized places of vice.” It was popular with gay men as well as with straight men and drew a crowd of writers and artists. In the 1870s, there were establishments that were known for their “bohemian” atmosphere, like the subterranean Charles Pfaff’s Beer Cellar that was staffed by effeminate men. There’s “a way longer history,” says Ken Lustbader, who is one of the directors of the New York City LGBT Historic Sites Project. Thanks in great part to the protest and the publicity that it generated, this outrageous policy was changed, which paved the way for a new generation of bars that welcomed gay men and lesbian women.īut this wasn’t the first time that New York bars helped shape gay identity.