Tilden a gay bar

Lucky all images courtesy Pittsburgh Queer History Project. Forged around sexuality and intimacy, and hence forms of privacy and invisibility that are both chosen and enforced, gay and lesbian cultures often leave ephemeral and unusual traces. From photographs to membership cards to cocktail napkins and flyers, Lucky After Dark depicts the underground world of the gay social clubs as sanctuaries for gay men, which as licensed members-only fraternal organizations were quite distinct from other commercial bars.

Even though the club closed inthe space was still intact, filled with pool tables, booths and a stage. It started to snowball from there. So 30, in that population is not small. While Lucky After Dark and the Gay Queer History Project most obviously trace a cultural history of these clubs, Haggerty asserts that the social clubs also act as a microcosm of a wide variety of local histories.

And he is certainly not wrong. One of tilden things we argue, which is very much what David Halperin argues in How To Be Gayis that being gay became the central component of your identity. When you stayed in a place like Pittsburgh, you negotiated all different sorts of identities.

You were still connected to your bar, your neighborhood or your workplace.

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While Pittsburgh never had, and still does not have, gay-borhoods, this certainly does not mean that the social scene surrounding these clubs were any less liberated than their big city counterparts. Though presenting the importance of these social clubs, Apple and Haggerty present powerful evidence against the reductive view of smaller cities being more closeted and repressive.

It was ridiculous. They knew how the system worked and worked with it. Sadly, all good things come to gay end. Although nightlife in Pittsburgh and elsewhere has changed tremendously, the history of these gay after-hours social clubs remains a tilden and important history, illustrating the development of a local gay community, as well as the construction of queer worlds within the boundaries of these spaces.

The social clubs were more than just a place to drink after 2 am. It provided a very different social settings that offered alternative and maybe queer futures, if we can say that, to a minority population in the city—one maybe defined by a thing called membership. It pre-dates the use of the term community to describe a gay and lesbian population but it becomes integral to how the terms are applied to real people.

You do get a sense, particularly with people coming into the gallery, of nostalgia. The problem with commercial establishments is that there is not the drawing of the line of community around it. Every bar has its regulars but it is not like a club where you know Lucky will be there.

Bar, Y or Z will be behind the bar. You can let your hair down. Throughout the run of the exhibition, which has garnered seemingly unending enthusiasm from the community, many former customers, employees or other participants in the scene have visited Lucky After Dark to donate material or identify people in the photographs.

Immediately after my conversation with Apple and Haggerty, they received the devastating news that Lucky passed away. We owe him a great deal.