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Instead - maybe alone, maybe behind a bar, maybe at a cruising spot - they found ways to survive within communities they'd been born into, in a society opposed to a central part of their identities. "It's not a utopian history."Īs Pittsburgh entered economic decline, many in the city's working class gay community didn't join the era's out-migration. "The biases and prejudices of Pittsburgh repeat themselves in the gay world," he said. Haggerty added that the opportunities and access to be found in the gay community at the time were easier for men than for women, easier for white people than black people.
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"There are these vacancies that we're starting to look at because those start to articulate the archive through their absence." "While faces may not end up in our photographic archive, it doesn't mean they're not there," he said. Not everyone in Pittsburgh's gay community frequented the bars and clubs, said Apple, noting that people of color, women and trans women aren't well-represented in the photographs donated to the project. And you negotiated that world differently."
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"Many of the people who went to these clubs were closeted, except for maybe the one or two nights a week where they went out to these clubs and had a gay identity," he said. The private nature of the clubs allowed gay life to develop in relative safety, Haggerty said.
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"It was one of those things you forgot, just in case." Just 40 years ago, serving a drink to a gay person could be a criminal offense, and most club and bar patrons preferred a degree of anonymity, Rehrer said. "What Lucky saw was a loophole through which one could have a gay club that would not be a public nuisance because of its private membership.” “These private clubs were built for what we think of as fraternal interests, and we were just a really big fraternity," Haggerty said. And we used them to work to our advantage,” said Tim Haggerty, Apple’s adviser and director of the Humanities Scholars Program in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “Anyone who’s ever tried to buy a six pack of beer in Pittsburgh will tell you our liquor codes are insane.
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A chartered club could obtain a liquor license to serve registered members and operate after hours.
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All of Pittsburgh’s clubs, and there were hundreds of them - the Elks, the Moose, Veterans of Foreign Wars - required a charter to operate.
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Openly gay, he worked at a series of bars around the city and developed a loyal following that helped him obtain a social club charter. “His name was Robert Johns, but everybody knew him as Lucky,” he said. The crux of the excavation was pulled from a found wallet: a membership card for Travelers, an after-hours club run by the fulcrum of the city’s LGBT community, said Apple. I know every brand of cigarette somebody smoked at that club.” There were keys from an employee of the Nabisco baking company, clip-on earrings. Soda cans had been sitting there for so long that the acid had eaten through the aluminum. There he uncovered the remnants of a nearly extinct ecosystem of gay clubs and bars. A friend invited Apple to excavate an abandoned after-hours club in East Liberty. The project began as an undergraduate research fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University in the summer of 2012. “What our project really tries to do is preserve a bygone era from the 1960s to the 1990s of all these LGBT individuals,” Apple said. Rehrer’s story is one of thousands collected by Harrison Apple, co-director of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project. They were stealing my food from the community kitchen I would walk into a bathroom and they would just run out and it’s like, don’t flatter yourself,” he laughed. “My life for the remainder of the school year was very interesting. Risking alienation, Rehrer wrote a letter to the administration and unfortunately, his identity was leaked. A fellow student told Rehrer he was being targeted for homosexuality and asked Rehrer to formally come out to the school. "It was liberating.”Īt the time, Rehrer needed a little liberation. Rehrer worked at the Tender Trap, a gay bar located on South Highland Avenue in East Liberty. “I got involved in the bar scene because my work-study fell through."Īlmost every night, from 9 p.m. Rehrer is not talking about his religion classes. “It was a fun time but you always had to be aware of your surroundings because you could end up in a very bad situation,” he said. Doug Rehrer started graduate school at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1978.