Mapping Boston's Former Gay Bars

Over the course of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the temporary or permanent closure of many bars, clubs, and restaurants worldwide. Amid tremendous personal and cultural loss, communities grappled with what the loss of physical meeting spaces meant for identity and well-being.

This is an old question for Boston’s LGBTQ community. The four Boston gay bars that closed during the pandemic were a pointed reminder of changes the community has experienced for decades. Historically, gay bars were spaces where LGBTQ people could meet, exchange information, learn about events and politics, and form connections that might be challenging or dangerous to pursue elsewhere. In this context, gay bars and clubs emerged as spaces that filled a wide breadth of social and political needs.

These needs were not (and are not) immutable. As the political and technological landscape morphed, so did the environment of Boston’s gay bars. As Russ Lopez writes in The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond, “Same-sex marriage began as technology greatly transformed LGBTQ life. Up until the 1960s there was almost no way to know of the existence of other LGBTQ people except through face-to-face contact, creating a heavy reliance on bars and cruising areas for information.”

Boston's history of gay bars spans back at least to the 1920s, but the rise of the internet, dating and hookup apps, and a changing political environment all contributed to the more rapid closure of spaces that were once vibrantly active.

With queer spaces closing, there aren't many options or a variety of places to choose from. It'd be nice to have more spaces that could cater to different members of the community. - Anonymous respondent

Sociologist Amin Ghaziani employs the term “post-gay” to refer to “urban twenty-somethings” who feel “free from persecution, even while they acknowledge that inequalities exist,” and may “prefer sexually mixed company" (There Goes the Gayborhood, 28). In Ghaziani’s construction, LGBTQ spaces lose relevance when LGBTQ persecution abates. Assimilation, he posits, goes hand in hand with security. "Boston," Ghaziani writes, "is another city where gays and lesbians are leaving the gayborhood. Assimilation here has expanded the local residential repertoire beyond the South End, which was formerly the nucleus of queer life" (39). This is exemplified further by the LGBTQ nightlife that has thrived in Boston in recent years—largely rotating events, organized online, that take place in venues not typically catering to LGBTQ people specifically.

The problem I see is that Boston rent is so high that the average person who may greatly desire to create these types of spaces would need to spend incredible costs to open and maintain these spaces. - Anonymous respondent

The “assimilation” that Ghaziani talks about has a number of causes, but one of the most vital of these is technological advancements. In the 1980s, phone sex lines made it possible for certain LGBTQ people to communicate across physical distances, and with potentially less concern for physical safety. For some, this made communication with other LGBTQ people possible for the first time. This trend toward virtual encounters continued rapidly with the advent of the internet, starting with chat rooms and message boards.

Outlining these changes, Lopez notes that early virtual meeting spaces were not necessarily inimical to physical ones. “Initially,” he writes, “these chat rooms complemented bars. Luxor, for example, held AOL nights where users sported tags featuring their screen names. Over time, however, the technology further reduced the community’s reliance on bars and cruising areas. Bars began to empty out and close while the Fens and other cruising areas ceased to be popular places to meet” (302). Technology made it possible to coordinate encounters in advance, and offered the alluring (if not always reliable) promise of convenience and relative safety.

In the 21st century, another relationship has emerged between dwindling physical spaces and individuals online: that of preserved object and preservationist. Facebook groups, GeoCities webpages, and online forums allow anyone with access to the internet to record memories of spaces in which they once gathered, danced, celebrated, fought, fucked, and forged families. Virtually organized rotating LGBTQ events have, in some cases, directly replaced Boston’s gay bars. Despite this, the internet has also been used to tremendous effect to holds onto the memory of bars, clubs, and other meeting spaces—a critical reminder that queer world building is possible in a wide variety of circumstances.

There is a vibrant queer community here, bursting with artistic energy and talent. Unfortunately, many spaces have been bought, sold, developed, leaving us with fewer and fewer queer-centric spaces. I love the community I’ve found here, but wish we could maintain physical community as well. - Anonymous respondent

Boston photographer, DJ, and chronicler Bobby Busnach spent much of his life recording the sights, sounds, and emotional texture of the nightlife he knew. Busnach also moderated, populated, and maintained a Facebook page dedicated to the Other Side nightclub—a page I pored over while developing this project. Busnach, along with a number of other individuals who maintained similar pages, accomplished a lively and vital kind of preservation, combining that work with social connection, and providing a space for commemoration, love, and grief. Pioneers like Busnach model how community-led digital preservation can be used to share emotionally rich stories.

THEYRE GONE FOREVER, BUT NOT IN OUR MEMORIES. WHY IM TRYING TO WRITE ABOUT IT ALL NOW. ITS IMPORTANT TO GET THE HISTORY DOWN. WHO WE WERE, WHAT WE DID. WE WERE ALL REVOLUTIONARIES WHO HELPED TO CHANGE THE WORLD. WELL, SOME OF THE WORLD AT LEAST :} -Bobby Busnach, The Other Side Facebook page, June 23, 2012

It would be misleading to position LGBTQ nightlife as the sole or primary indicator of LGBTQ health and happiness. Despite this, something is lost when these spaces close. The possibility of intergenerational mingling is one of these losses. Also lost are resources for survival—some bars served free food to patrons, while others served as hangouts for street kids, or places where sex workers conducted business. When closed bars and nightclubs fade out of discourse, the very memory of them is another loss, and one felt acutely by Boston’s transient student population, who may never take the opportunity to discover Boston as a city where LGBTQ spaces have existed, do exist, and will exist in the future.

Boston is not, in my opinion, good for queer people. I plan on leaving. - Anonymous respondent

In a 65-person survey of sentiment regarding Boston's LGBTQ nightlife, conducted for the purposes of this project, the starkest divide was a generational one. Older participants, and participants who had lived in Boston 10+ years, were markedly more likely to report knowledge of and appreciation for Boston’s LGBTQ venues (although many of these respondents also reported that they no longer participated in Boston nightlife).

Participants younger than 31 were more likely to report that they were unaware of gay bars in Boston. No respondents over age 30 reported being unaware of gay bars in Boston, although some respondents said they only knew of bars that had closed.

In addition to reporting less familiarity with Boston's gay bars, younger participants were also more likely to voice a desire for more, and more diverse, meeting spaces. Multiple write-in comments noted a sense that while Boston's current LGBTQ nightlife feels sparse in general, the spaces that do exist seem to be most welcoming toward cisgender white gay men. Younger participants were largely discontent with Boston's LGBTQ nightlife, with multiple respondents stating that they planned to leave the city partially due to this. These findings challenge claims that younger LGBTQ people are happy to sexually assimilate, and indicate a continued need for spaces in which individuals can exchange information and form connections across social and generational divides.

1978 Boston Pride Week theme

This map has been populated with images from The History Project's Bar Collection, clippings from the Boston Public Library's newspaper archives, digitized copies of feminist periodical Sojourner, and information from the Boston-based Gay Community News. Descriptions of the bars have been pieced together from survey responses, forum-scraping, and conversations with members of Boston's LGBTQ community.

Entries indicated by a yellow marker include narratives sourced from original interviews. The entries in this map are currently limited to clubs and bars located in Boston—significant spaces in Cambridge and Somerville are not represented at this time.

This map is intended to be a living document. If you have memories, media, or corrections to share, please reach out to Tessa Bahoosh at tessa_bahoosh@brown.edu.

• Adrien Doherty
• Aliza Shapiro
• Bill Holt
• Bobby Busnach
• Emily Bass
• Frank Donnelly
• Hillary Goodridge
• Jim Bahoosh
• Joan Ilacqua
• Juliet Degree
• Kali Isis
• Kathleen Irving
• Kathryn Roberts
• Lou Balikos
• Ruby Smith
• Russ Lopez
• Ryan Garvey
• Sharon Ulery
• Steven Fenton
• Tynan Byrne
• The American Studies and Public Humanities departments at Brown University
• The History Project

My personal history with this project began in the fall of 2020, when I was researching the story of a still-open Boston gay bar with the goal of submitting a nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. At this point in my life, I had experienced a lot of frustration witnessing LGBTQ businesses closing around me—but I had never before considered that exploring local LGBTQ history through the lens of cultural preservation might be an affirming or transformative practice. As I constructed a historical narrative for this single bar, I realized how impossible it was to divorce the significance of one venue from the people who had, over the course of the decades, filled it with music, conversation, love, and anger. There was no space in this project to say that this bar mattered in part because it was where a teen runaway met their found family, or because it was where one individual went immediately after coming out, or because it was where future spouses danced together for the first time. These stories didn't fit into the boundaries of my particular preservation project, but they did have a profound affect on my own sense of belonging within Boston. Even while respecting my own desire for more vibrant LGBTQ nightlife (frequently mirrored by those around me), I also began to realize that when I spoke dismissively about Boston's LGBTQ culture, I was speaking with hubris.

When I began this project, I was expecting to learn about bars I had never heard of before. I anticipated feelings of surprise and curiosity, but I did not fully realize what an intensely emotional experience this would be. I am sitting with new knowledge of how members of Boston’s LGBTQ community have supported one other’s wellbeing and survival. My project was not to create a repository of memories, but on a very personal, internal level, that is what it became. I am very grateful that this project forced me to understand, a little more deeply, that my life in Boston is only one of many, and that when I explore recent or distant history I am briefly brushing up against whole lives that I will never fully access. This project is indebted to the many people, both living and dead, who have recorded images, sounds, and memories, with the foresight to see that telling our own stories is to only way to preserve our own history.