It was way back in 1960, a long time before gay acceptance by society was even a dream, that a woman remembered only as “Lou” opened a little, dumpy beer bar at 1786 Madison called The Twilight Lounge. Also notice that this article on the history of George's and gay bars at that location (if you look it up) includes no photographs of women or lesbians-just drag queens and gay men.
And how the lesbian usage of that space is effectively erased from that history, so that only a few random individual women remain-even "Nancy,"the one who took over the lease for a time and made it into a lesbian bar, has disappeared. Notice that once again, we see a familiar theme: how gay men take over lesbian space and make it their own. This selection from an article at Memphis Vive Magazine adds a few more details. If you sere sitting a little bit closer, you immediately tried to act straight. you had your arm around somebody, you dropped it. If you were in there when they came in and. "If you pulled up in front of the Famous Door, and this was done many times, and you saw a police car there, you drove around and around and around. None of the butch narrators who participated in this study was ever prosecuted for cross-dressing, but several remember the anxiety they felt about going to the bars. After a short time Nancy gave up the lease on the Famous Door and opened the Psych-Out, which legally changed names several times throughout the 1970s but always referred to as the Psych-Out by patrons. At the time, the Twilight Lounge catered to both gays and lesbians however, when Nancy took it over lesbians predominated. The bar had originally opened as the Twilight Lounge Tavern. She subleased the Famous Door from a lesbian couple who had previously owned the Raven and the Aristocrat.
Nancy, one of the narrators, entered into the lesbian bar business in 1969 when she took over the lease for a bar named the Famous Door. Memphis's first primarily lesbian bars opened in the late 1960s. However, even that history is buried in the location's subsequently more famous history as a gay male bar known as George's.įrom a book called Carryin On In the Lesbian and Gay South, specifically the chapter called " Softball and Alcohol : The Limits of Lesbian Community in Memphis from the 1940s through the 1960s" by Daneel Burring: Location: 1786 Madison, Memphis, Tennessee, USAĪs far as I can tell, Famous Door was a (predominatly) lesbian bar for only a few months in 1969. The realignment of society at the back end of this will be ugly.From the Famous Door's later incarnation as a gay Radio host Jesse Kelly: "Not sure people realize how painful a national course-correction is gonna be. This is what happens when this crap gets normalized in society, you get gay bars grooming kids with Drag Queens." Investigative reporter Drew Hernandez: "This is vile, all of these LGBTQ pedophiles should be arrested immediately And the parents that enabled this should be arrested as well. The parents, performers, bar owners - everyone should be charged with sexual abuse of children."Ĭonservative commentator Matt Walsh: "Every adult in the room should spend the rest of their lives in solitary confinement." Podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey: "Every single Republican legislature should be creating a bill to criminalize drag shows that involve children. TheBlaze's Jason Whitlock: "This is satanic." There was immediate backlash to the "Drag the Kids to Pride" event.
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