During the 1940s and ‘50s, the clientele at several downtown bars, including the Brass Rail, transitioned in the evenings from a straight crowd into a gay one. At that time, however, it was not an exclusively gay establishment. The oldest continuously operating gay bar in San Diego, the Brass Rail, first opened in 1934 as a bar and restaurant inside the Orpheum Theater on the corner of 6th Avenue and B Street.
Settling in San Diego provided them the opportunity to live a life that they never could have actualized had they returned to their hometowns. San Diego, already a major military port city even before the war, became a new home for thousands of gay men and women who were then able to discover others of their own kind. Epoch 1: Post-Second World War to Stonewallīy the end of World War II, tens of thousands of veterans who served in all branches of the Armed Forces were stationed and/or had disembarked at California’s major coastal cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Diego. The film really just scratched the surface of a deep, multifaceted history-one of the many histories of this community that merits further exploration. I found records for at least 135 gay bars that have operated in San Diego since the late 1940s. The scope of this topic became quite expansive as my research progressed. They have provided sanctuary amidst a persistently hostile society, places where friendships were nurtured and lives anchored even in the face of changing cultural landscapes. From the oppressive secrecy of the postwar era to Stonewall the birth of the modern gay rights movement through the freewheeling 1970s and from the horrific AIDS crisis in the 1980s, which decimated an entire generation, gay bars have been more than just social drinking spots. The film frames San Diego gay bar history within three major epochs bound by a common theme. A main thesis of the documentary posits that gay bars have been a foundational part of the LGBTQ experience, not only as safe places for socializing and forming interpersonal relationships, but also as cultural institutions that have played important roles in the formation of community over generations. San Diego’s LGBTQ history, viewed through the lens of its postwar gay bars and nightclubs (and through the voices of witnesses who lived through this history) in many ways parallels the development of the modern LGBTQ community in other large cities throughout North America, and gives the documentary, while regional in its focus, a wider relevance. From 2017 to mid-2018, I sorted through a multitude of photographs, gay periodicals, and ephemera in the process of producing San Diego’s Gay Bar History, a documentary that was initially broadcast in June 2018 on KPBS, San Diego’s public television station, and had its premiere at FilmOut 2018, San Diego’s LGBTQ Film Festival.
They are some of the many artifacts in the Lambda Archives, a repository for collecting, storing, and preserving the LGBTQ history of San Diego and northern Baja California. The images I’m marveling at offer candid glimpses of San Diego gay bar culture from different epochs in modern gay history. A third snapshot: a festive lineup of Halloween-costumed contestants-a drag version of Tippi Hedren (a stuffed crow entangled in her stylish platinum updo), a garish clown, and a butch female cowboy-all vying for prizes awarded long ago in an unidentified San Diego gay bar.
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Another photo presents a dance floor crowd, beaming faces glistening under a sheen of sweat, big 1980s hair and lip gloss in full effect on the women (and on some men, too). There’s a shirtless, mustachioed blond on roller skates in front of a 1965 red Plymouth Barracuda the position of the Giant Dipper roller coaster and street signage in the background establishes the photo was taken in the vicinity of the Apartment, a women’s gay bar that opened in Mission Beach in 1974. I’m alone, but surrounded by faces smiling to me across the decades. I’m hunched over a smoky glass table covered with a treasure trove of photographs, shivering from the chilly air conditioning as much as from the excitement of discovering photographic gold nuggets.