Gay90s about

The Pride Behind Pride

It’s the year Pride is cancelled. This is very hard to say out loud. It feels like saying we’re cancelling joy and progress. Of course, the cancelling of Pride—the festival, the parade, the week when tens of thousands of far-flung LGBTQ peeps appear streaming home—represents an act of love to keep people healthy.

But its absence presents us with an opportunity to consider all the profound and important local LGBTQ landmarks that built Pride—and often disappeared. Living in a city is complicated. Each of us lives in a different Twin Cities: We share the Foshay Tower and the Mississippi, but we proceed home to different bars and bedrooms.

LGBTQ cultures possess, historically, needed to hide their bars and bedrooms for apprehension of eviction, firing, imprisonment, or worse. As Ricardo J. Brown put it in his St. Paul memoir, The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s—one of the leading midth century looks at American gay experience—the LGBTQ life was “a ruse that kept all of us safe,” conducted in “a fort in the midst of a savage and hostile population.”

The nation’s first gay and lesbian talk radio show, The Gay 90s, aired from downtown Cleveland, Ohio and started off with a bang. Not literally, but given the bomb threat called in before the show’s premier broadcast on WHK AM it was a possibility. Despite the potential danger, The Gay 90s aired as scheduled on March 26, , and became the country’s first commercial live, “call in” radio program by, for, and about the gay and lesbian community. Given Cleveland’s history of settling disputes with explosives, coupled with the homophobic atmosphere surrounding lesbians and gay men at the time, the threat was taken seriously. Not willing to risk the consequences of ignoring the threat, the Cleveland Police Department provided the show’s staff with personal escorts to and from the radio station for the next two weeks. The police attention and protection was motivated, in part, by the station’s location: Cleveland’s iconic Tower City Center. Thankfully, no bomb exploded at Tower Municipality that night or any of the following nights during The Gay 90s six-year run. It was, instead, the radi

Gay 90’s nightclub isn&#;t about sexuality, it&#;s about freedom

Posted inCommunity Voices

Where I grew up in Yemen, we do not include a nightlife club because men and women are forbidden from mingling in daytime, let alone nighttime. Yemen has a strict, conservative culture that maintains some of the most arcane gender norms and rules. Growing up, I did not talk to girls because they were out of sight. They are concealed in the house, and when they appear in public, they are with a guardian, and covered in a Black uniform from head to toe. The culture of Yemen did not allow for any mingling between the two genders.

I emigrated by myself at the age of 19 from Yemen to the United States. My sole purpose of immigration was to attain the best education and to return back to Yemen upon completing my degrees. But due to the ongoing civil war in Yemen, which instigated one of the worst humanitarian crisis in modern history, I am no longer able to go back back to Yemen. So I have to adjust and convert to American culture, especially as it relates to the uncertain and precarious gender

Web site contributor 'Bunny' remembered the "Old Gay 90s" as being a piano bar and showtunes place next door to the Royal Hotel. This was not necessarily a gay bar but it was most definitely a gay hangout.

Research by Michail Takach found the "Gay 90's" bars was in three locations over its life, with registered owners as shown:

Somehow, none of these iterations ever made it into one of the national "gay guides". Perhaps the editors thought the contributor's submission was a joke or hoax because of the name!

The 's incarnation also had food available (as indicated by the January advertisement to the right).

The final location was also known as "Baron's Gay 90s". It was open until the block was cleared in for parking for the Royal Hotel.

More information about this business is welcomed from anyone who can contribute it.