Lucas Hilderbrand
The Bars Are Ours approaches gay bars as the medium through and against which most forms of LGBTQ+ public life, subcultures, activism, and community debate have been articulated. As the primary social institution for the gay community, the gay bar became the most visible site for people to find community but also to organize and to see the conditions and politics that structure the possibilities and limitations of that community. The Bars are Ours, then, reflects a history that is complex and that is lived—it is felt and fun—while scaling between local and national, past and present.
NOTCHES: What drew you to this topic, and what questions do you still have?
Lucas Hilderbrand: It occurred to me that no book on the history of gay bars—at least nothing national in scope that covered the period when they have been most ubiquitous—existed. It seemed like a book that should exist and a fun project, so why not do it myself? When I started the project, people were proclaiming the gay bar dead, and many bars have closed in the past couple decades. But bar cultures persist and evolve. I let go of trying to find definitive answers for questions that asked what the first gay bar was or which bars were owned by the mafia. The questions that remain for me are forward-looking: how will gay bars continue to evolve as the culture evolves?
NOTCHES: This book engages with histories of sex and sexuality, but what other themes does it speak to?
LH: I state in my book that I approach issues such as police raids, zoning, and liquor licensing as structuring conditions or context for what I am more interested in, which is the cultures that develop through these spaces. But, inevitably, bars exist in relation to urban geography and economics, so redevelopment planning and gentrification play a significant role in where bars open and where they sustain. In addition, as community institutions, they mirror and make visible broader cultures of racism, sexism, classicism, etc. Bars became the site for protests and activism to address bias in the LGBTQ+ community at large.
NOTCHES: How did you research the book?
LH: I did research in as many gay community archives and special collections as I could travel to while also exploring the different local scenes by night. I’ve looked at and touched a lot of fascinating materials in archives, but the gay press became my most important source because it documented and narrated what was happening in a given moment and included a lot of personal accounts, commentaries, and anecdotes. Where possible or necessary, I supplemented this with conversations and interviews with locals. I also brought my own decades of experience going out to infer or to make connections with pasts or scenes I never experienced first-hand.
But I let the archive reveal to me which cities could tell which stories, and often this happened through serendipity. For instance, in Kansas City, there was a collection with materials from a female impersonator lounge that was also where Esther Newton had done research for Mother Camp decades before, so I could read the documents with and against her account. I also included interludes with shorter-form accounts of other kinds of documents or ways of understanding bar history.
NOTCHES: Whose stories or what topics were left out of your book and why? What would you include had you been able to?
LH: My book focuses on primarily male bars. What I encountered in the archive, as well as my own experience, has demonstrated that cities that were large enough to have more than one gay bar tended to have gender-segregated—and often racially and/or ethnically segregated—bar scenes. My understanding is that lesbian bars produced their own cultures, and they deserve their own books—which they have (though more are needed). My book doesn’t include a chapter on gayborhoods or resort towns; if I had included one, it would have focused on Oak Lawn in Dallas, where I met very generous locals and where there was a thriving and locally specific scene. But I didn’t have enough material to build a chapter on Dallas. I deliberately decenter the Castro, West Hollywood, Boystown, and West Village/Chelsea/Hells Kitchen gay ghettos in my book, because they already take up a large share of the cultural imaginary of what gay bars are.
NOTCHES: Did the book shift significantly from the time you first conceptualized it?
LH: I worked on the book for about 15 years, and the revisions took place mostly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdowns. What shifted was mostly trying to figure out how to do the project and how to scale it. Initially, I wanted each topical chapter to hop between four different case study cities, but this became too unwieldy. So I had to figure out how to locate each topic in a specific city that could ground the analysis but also speak to other sites. I was cautious not to be predictive in my analysis and to try to historicize or to draw historical parallels when speaking of the present.
NOTCHES: How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom? What would you assign it with?
LH: My hope is that the book could be used in any number of ways or contexts. Beyond assigning the book as a whole in a queer studies or history or American Studies context, I would like to think it could be engaged to question historical research methods or in excerpts to think through the specifics of what each chapter discusses. It could be read against performance studies work that foreground theory over historiography, or it could be read with sociology of contemporary gay scenes and geographies. Or it could be read along with an assignment for students to go out and explore nightlife for themselves!
NOTCHES: Why does this history matter today?
LH: On the one hand, we’ve seen efforts to curtail LGBTQ+ lives and expression in public spaces, most visibly with drag bans and a range of anti-trans bills. This reiterates the idea of gay bars as safe and as contested spaces. On the other hand, as queer people continue to expand and redefine their identity categories, we may come to a place where we will rethink the idea of a gay bar or who it’s for or what it does.
NOTCHES: Your book is published, what next?
LH: I worked on this book longer than anything I’ve done, and it stayed with me longer after I finished it than anything else. But beyond my day job (which includes chairing a department), for the moment I’m pivoting back to writing about cinema and am working on what I’m jokingly referring to as my love letter to heterosexuality: a BFI Film Classics book on the Before Sunrise trilogy.
Lucas Hilderbrand is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, Paris Is Burning (Queer Film Classics series), and The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After.
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