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I couldn’t tell anyone else about my terror, but I avoided the entire Montrose neighborhood for the rest of the summer. I remember gasping in horror at the story in the Houston Chronicle. Outnumbered and surrounded, he was stabbed and pummeled to death with steel-toed boots, a Buck knife and a 2-by-4 spiked with nails at one end. Broussard wasn’t as lucky, and ran into a dead end. Broussard’s friends escaped by running down a busy street. On July 5th, at two o’clock in the morning, a 26-year-old gay man named Paul Broussard was walking home from Heaven with two friends when they were confronted by a group of 10 intoxicated young men, some of whom had also taken marijuana and LSD. As several members of the group later admitted, they were specifically targeting gay men that night. When a new friend asked me to go to Heaven with her for a night of dancing over the July 4th weekend, I felt a shiver of excitement and fear. I wasn’t yet out, but had heard about a popular gay bar called Heaven in the city’s Montrose neighborhood. “San Francisco has always been more ‘We’re here, we’re queer, we’re in your face.’ We’re queer, too, but we don’t have to have a big parade about it.In the summer of 1991, when I was 21 years old, I worked in a genetics lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. As one of the current managers tells the Chron, this is how the bar’s always been. These days the White Horse is an unpretentious, suburban-feeling hangout, with its pool tables and jukebox, that attracts a mix of older gay and lesbian regulars and the occasional gaggle of Berkeley undergrads. (One San Francisco bar, Twin Peaks Tavern, recently received landmark status as the first gay bar in the Bay Area to have glass walls to the street, since 1972, and another in the Castro district, the Midnight Sun, is about to undergo a renovation opening its front wall, making it the last bar in the neighborhood to do so.) And throughout the more conservative postwar period, the White Horse was spared from any police raids, possibly because the owners paid off the cops, and possibly because the Bay Area’s liberal attitude toward homosexuality extended to fifties Oakland politicians as well.
Older crowd seattle gay bars windows#
Like a number of other gay bars from the mid-twentieth century, the White Horse had no windows to the street until just a few years ago, dating as it does to a time when homosexuality was a criminal offense. Long before gay marriage, or even living openly, was a possibility, the White Horse served the East Bay’s LGBT community. The Double Header in Seattle, opened in 1934, is a close second. And in fact the entire building with the bar in it was moved about a block, into Oakland, in 1936 when a law was enacted prohibiting the sale of alcohol within a mile of the campus.Īs the San Francisco Chronicle points out, there’s another gay bar, Cafe Lafitte in New Orleans, which may be tied in official age with the White Horse, having also “opened” coincidentally in 1933, but it has changed locations once since then. Its proximity to the Berkeley campus, but just over the border in Oakland where liquor licenses were historically easier to get, was an obvious factor in attracting its early clientele. The current, open front patio is only a few years old.