Bill's Bar & Zebra Lounge

The place: Bill’s Bar and Grill at 5221 Easton (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive), on the edges of The Ville neighborhood.  

The year: 1964.

The scene: Sociology graduate student Ethel Sawyer follows her “girls,” a group of young black women into the long, narrow bar, where they gather at a table. The "girls" live in the West End, the Greater Ville, and the Pruitt-Igoe housing project. Over the course of the evening they’ll have some drinks, do some dancing to the jukebox, flirt with each other and, sometimes, fight. Bill Atkinson, the proprietor, will welcome them, and other patrons pay them no mind.

Bill’s had a reputation as a “girls’ gay bar,” and Sawyer would later remember it was a place where the women whom she studied felt at home.

Bill’s was also Gini Morton’s go-to place in the late 1950s, when she was a young married woman who was coming to grips with her desire for women. A friend, thinking Gini might be a lesbian and would need a place like that, first took her there. It was a gathering place for Black gay women, not too far from where she lived, that served cold drinks and good food, too.

The place: Zebra Lounge at 3230 Olive Street, Midtown St. Louis

The year: 1980

The scene: Fifteen year old Erise Williams, Jr. entered the Zebra Lounge for the first time. Miss Edith, at the door, took a look and asked, “Baby, how old are you?” When he claimed to be 21, she scoffed and told him, “I better not see you drinking or anything.”

As he went through the door, the DJ was spinning Diana Ross’s anthem,  “I’m Coming Out,”  which had been released that year. Williams remembered, “I knew this was my night, because this was my song.”

With the slogan, “A Beautiful Blend of Black and White,” the club’s owner aimed to attract a racially mixed crowd, but it was especially a place where Black gay men and lesbians felt welcome.

Glen Williams was a DJ at the bar, and he recalled, “It was a very unique spot… It was black, gay, it was inviting for people who didn’t otherwise have places to go…The feeling of the place was a family. You watched out for everyone else.” ( Pride DJ )

Erise Williams, who became a mainstay at the Zebra Lounge after that first night, agreed. As he recalled in a 2011 article:

“I thank God for the Zebra Lounge! It’s etched in my mind. When I’m 80, I’ll still be thinking about the Zebra Lounge.” (River Front Times)

Black LGBTQ people created their own places in the city, despite the barriers of racism, police violence, and often, poverty.

 Before the 1960s, it appears that Black LGBTQ St. Louisans who wanted to gather in public went to neighborhood bars like Bill’s. By the late 1960s, they also had access to gay and lesbian bars that catered to a mostly Black crowd. In addition to the Zebra Lounge, these included Little Caesars, the Onyx Room (in its later years), Uncle Marvin’s, Le Booze Parleur, and the Hitching Post in St. Louis, and Art and Ernie’s Disco on the east side.

House parties were another popular way for the area’s African American gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans folk to gather. They were affordable and shielded participants from the police harassment they might experience in and around bars. (note: these locations are not mapped since exact party locations are not known).

They were also necessary because many St. Louis gay or lesbian bars were strictly segregated and found ways to keep Black people out.

In Black LGBTQ spaces, St. Louisans found ways to navigate the racism, poverty, and homophobia that constrained their lives.

For example, the gay women who gathered at Bill’s Bar, like those in white lesbian bars, organized their relationships around gender difference (masculine / feminine), but the language they used to describe their identities and the community they created was their own.

At Bill’s, a couple was made up of a masculine “stud” and a feminine “fish.” Studs saw themselves as the leaders of this community. But the economic precarity Black women experienced shaped their relationships in important ways. Studs’ masculine presentation often made it difficult to hold down a job. They depended on financial support from fish, who could find work or, as mothers, sometimes could access resources from a former male partner. These dynamics created conflicts that made long-lasting relationships difficult. Still, they made this Black lesbian space possible.

Similarly, the music at the Zebra Lounge centered Black gay culture. When Glen Williams DJ’d there, he played “everything”: funk, disco, Black disco, high energy disco and other genres. The music, and the dance floor, connected people, and the bar drew “huge crowds…. It was doing 3-400 in a small place like that” every weekend ( Pride DJ ).

For Erise Williams, it was the music that made the bar: "The beats! It was electrifying. This was Black gay men comfortable in their own skin in a safe space. It was something to behold” ( RFT ).

Stories like these are explored throughout Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis. They remind us both of the ways that racism has structured LGBTQ life in the St. Louis region, and of the importance of African American culture and resistance to the history of our communities.   

 For more, explore:

Melissa Meinzer, “Gay Old Times: It’s LGBT history to us. To them, it was life.” Riverfront Times 16 July 2011  https://www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/gay-old-times-its-lgbt-history-to-us-to-them-it-was-life/Content?oid=2494650 

Documenting the Queer Past in St. Louis Oral History Collection (WUA000478), Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections  https://libguides.wustl.edu/WUA00478 

Ethel Sawyer, A Study of a Public Lesbian Community. Department of Sociology-Anthropology, Washington University. 1965. https://spokane.wustl.edu:443/record=b1176745~S2