However, “you wouldn’t call them gay bars,” warns George Chauncey, author of Gay New York and co-director of The Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities. (Several years earlier Walt Whitman even featured the spot in an unfinished poem: “The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse…”) By the 1890s, there were also what Lustbader says were called “pansy bars” that were “commercialized places of vice.” It was popular with gay men as well as with straight men and drew a crowd of writers and artists.
In the 1870s, there were establishments that were known for their “bohemian” atmosphere, like the subterranean Charles Pfaff’s Beer Cellar that was staffed by effeminate men. There’s “a way longer history,” says Ken Lustbader, who is one of the directors of the New York City LGBT Historic Sites Project. Thanks in great part to the protest and the publicity that it generated, this outrageous policy was changed, which paved the way for a new generation of bars that welcomed gay men and lesbian women.īut this wasn’t the first time that New York bars helped shape gay identity.
