Gay bars are often assumed to be relatively common places by, and exclusively for, LGBTQ+ people, but that is a mid-20th-century invention. Today, as debates continue to surface about the need and desirability of gay bars, one of the earliest gay-owned gay bars — Seattle’s Garden of Allah — has surprising lessons about the history of gay bars and their likely future.
World War II is credited for a sea-change in LGBTQ+ life. Millions of people were mobilized from small towns and pressed into sex-segregated spaces, like barracks and women’s boardinghouses, where some discovered other people who shared their same-sex desires. During the war, Uncle Sam banned soldiers and sailors from visiting gay hangouts, inadvertently advertising them by naming them “off limits.” Yet once they found each other, LGBTQ+ people could be bold.
, “I have a friend who was a teacher, who was a snob, still is, and he would only go to hotel bars, never would go to the other bars.” These disreputable hangouts, however, allowed patrons to openly flout sexual and gender norms amid straight bohemians and, who were middle-class gawkers who rubbed shoulders with “pansies” for a thrill. In these places unconventional people could flourish in the shadows, at the risk of their reputations and jobs. However, because so many bars banned women altogether, many lesbians socialized inThe Garden of Allah opened in 1946.
Patrons and performers at the Garden of Allah were gender diverse, including butches who wished to live as men, queens who lived as women and some whose gender changed over their lives. LGBTQ+ people learned many ways to be in the world and built a gender-diverse community.The crowd was diverse in other ways, too. Straight people in interracial relationships, Black jazz musicians and Asian people unwelcome in many other clubs also found a home there.