Connecting the Dots
A birds-eye view of St. Louis's LGBTQ history, 1945 - 1992
Dots on the Map
Static snapshot of the 800+locations documented. (Visit the Interactive Map to look at these sites in detail.)
Each dot on this map represents a site of LGBTQ life in St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and adjacent counties in Illinois, between 1945 and 1992.
These dots can be explored individually, but it is also useful to see how these dots connect to the general history of the region.
Why Maps?
Using a map offers new ways to understand history -- it allows us to visualize events in both place and time.
Maps helps us to see the ways history is shaped by:
physical boundaries (like the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers)...
... legal boundaries like states, cities and counties,
...and social and economic divisions such as the different neighborhoods where white and Black people live in the St. Louis area
(US Census data by race/ethnicity, 2014-2018)
St. Louis's LGBTQ history isn't somehow separate from the city's wider history -- it is embedded in everything else.
St. Louis as a Place
The history of LGBTQ people in the St. Louis region reflects national (and even international) trends in many ways, but it is also unique, shaped by St. Louis’s place as a crossroads and a border city.
And all this history shaped LGBTQ life in important ways -- altering everything from where gay and lesbian bars were located, to opportunities for worship, or who was welcome in public parks. The dots on Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis are not random.
A Midwestern, Southern town
St. Louis is often described as the “gateway to the west,” but its regional significance is far more complicated than this catch phrase.
This map maker shows Missouri between "blessing liberty" and the "curse of slavery." (Historical Geography, 1888.) https://www.loc.gov/item/2002624023/
Nineteenth century St. Louis was a border city in a border state, where the cultures of the slaveholding South and the North came together. In Missouri enslaving people was legal until 1865, although the state remained in the Union during the Civil War.
St. Louis is also located at the crossroads of the industrial Midwest and the upper South.
Many African American migrants in the twentieth century described the area as only “halfway north.” Drawn north to jobs in factories, they found most St. Louis neighborhoods, schools and institutions segregated by race, sometimes by law and other times by custom. (Ervin, 2016)
This mixture of the South’s Jim Crow legacy and the economic inequality of “rustbelt” factories made (and continues to make) the St. Louis region one of the nation’s most segregated or "divided" cities, both in racial and economic terms.
One of the most powerful and enduring divides among St. Louisans is race. It is no surprise that St. Louis’s LGBTQ history has also been split by race, with people often socializing in separate spaces and participating in different activist organizations.
The East Side
The St. Louis region is also divided between two states, Missouri and Illinois, each with different legal systems for regulating (or not regulating) commerce and society.
Known locally as the "east side" or the "metro-east," the area across the Mississippi River includes numerous smaller towns and municipalities in three separate counties.
(East St. Louis, although sharing a name, is an independent city from St. Louis.)
By the twentieth century, the east side became an industrial center where local officials welcomed livestock yards, steel mills, chemical factories and more regardless of noise, smell, or pollution.
Some cities like Granite City and Sauget formed as company towns , where the entire city was owned and controlled by a single corporation.
The industrial economy, plus common political corruption, and tolerance of organized crime, also made the area into a popular entertainment district, full of brothels, saloons, and gambling establishments.
Learn More: Interactive about the East St. Louis Region in general [external link]
Nightlife
Particularly through the 1970s, the metro-East functioned as an escape for Missouri residents who wanted to participate in LGBTQ nightlife (and sexual commerce of all sorts).
While liquor laws required bars in Missouri to close by 1:30 am, in Illinois local ordinances made it possible for some to stay open through most of the night -- sustaining the east side’s popularity as a hub for nightlife.
Drag shows and "female impersonation" acts were technically illegal in St. Louis city until 1986, but they were a common occurrence in east side clubs.
Together, these features helped sustain the area’s popularity as a hub for nightlife.
(Map) LGBTQ bars and clubs in Illinois, 1945 - 1992
(image 1) Advertisement for Donna Drag, Miss Candy, and Miss Tony performing at the Red Bull. From The Mandrake, circa 1970. (image 2) Newspaper ad for "female impersonators" performing at the Mounds Club, 1952.
Yet presumptions about race and safety were also at play. White flight and de-industrialization changed areas with bars from majority white to majority Black neighborhoods, and many of these closed by the early 1980s. Still, these changes also opened up space for a few short-lived bars that welcomed Black patrons, and the few clubs that remained continued to live up to the wide-open reputation of the east side.
Everyday Life
But the east side was not just a party town for those west of the Mississippi River. It was also home to folks whose lives did not conform to gender and sexual norms, many of whom lived in smaller towns or more rural areas of southern Illinois.
They ran businesses, worshiped together in churches, gathered in local restaurants and bars, and met for sex in parks.
At Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville (SIUE) they organized for visibility and rights , and in Belleville and other locations they provided housing and health care for people living with HIV/AIDS. And, sometimes, they suffered violence, even death, for daring to live their lives.
Map: non-bar LGBTQ locations in Metro-East, 1945-1992
Students for Gay Liberation distribute materials for Gay Awareness Week at the SIUE campus. Newspaper clipping from The Alestle, 1974. Image courtesy of J. Andris.
Learn More: SUIE Gay Awareness Week, 1974 [external link]
Urban / Rural
Early histories of queer life focused on cities as a place of freedom where LGBTQ identity and community became possible. Historians pointed to the anonymity, the greater economic diversity of urban spaces, and the possibilities for living outside of family structures. More recent studies offer a more complicated story about rural life, and this is true in the St. Louis region as well.
Many of the LGBTQ places documented are clustered in the city of St. Louis, but this is not a surprise, given its higher population for much of the same time. There will always be more businesses, more organizations, more entertainment spots of any sort in a place where more people are gathered. (Not until 1970 did St. Louis County have a higher population than St. Louis City, and that was spread over a much larger area).
Slide the arrows <|> to see LGBTQ locations outside St. Louis City limits (highlighted in yellow).
Suburban and rural spaces offered other forms of freedom: suburban shopping malls and off-the-beaten-track parks for cruising; hotels along the interstates where trans folks held monthly meetings; small-town bars that rewarded “discretion” with a welcome mat for lesbian and gay friends and couples.
If we look beyond the boundaries mapped in the project, we find more rural history.
Gay men and lesbians from St. Louis traveled to The Ranch in Lincoln County for weekend-long parties...
and area lesbian-feminists split their time between the St. Louis area and “womyn’s land” in the Ozarks of southern Missouri.
And there are private places that we know existed (although for privacy chose not not to show on the map). For example, many lesbian couples lived in suburban tract homes in Kirkwood, Webster Groves, or south St. Louis county.
As scholar John Howard has commented about queer life in mid-century Mississippi, LGBTQ life in the St. Louis region was characterized as much by movement between different spaces as by concentration in the city.
This was shaped by Midwestern deindustrialization (which created abandoned and isolated spaces both within and outside of the city) as well as by the relationship between city and countryside characteristic of the South.
More
The geography of St. Louis's LGBTQ spaces has always been related to the region's history of racial segregation, socioeconomic inequality, suburbanization, and urban decline and renewal.
Recognizing the long and complicated history of the St. Louis region as a place allows us to connect the dots on the map, and think about the ways that LGBTQ people and communities have come together or remained apart.
Sources
Andris, J. GLTB History in St. Louis (2011) Website. http://www.siue.edu/~jandris/history/hgltb.html
Howard, John. Men Like That : a Southern Queer History (U of Chicago Press: 2001)
Smith, John F. Historical Geography. (1888) Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002624023/
Vogler, Jesse and Matthew Fluharty. (circa 2019) Charting the American Bottom. Website. http://theamericanbottom.org/about.html
Keona K. Ervin. (2016) "We Rebel: Black Women, Worker Theater, and Critical Unionism in Wartime St. Louis." Souls, 18:1, 32-58, DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2016.1162561
