This South Side spot is a destination for sandwiches and snacks, in addition to great drink specials. It's also got a great patio open in summer. The front lounge features retro-style leather chairs and memorabilia from films like "Animal House" and "Psycho." Pool, darts and other diversions available, too.Īs the name might suggest, this Walker's Point bar is a meeting place for the leather / Levi's crowd. Drink prices are up to a lottery system on Tuesdays and Thursdays and, if you're lucky, cocktails can cost as little as 25 cents. With rotating, provocative art shows, a full-service cafe and live music, Art Bar draws an eclectic group of people for coffee, happy hours and late-night entertainment.īoasting the longest cocktail hour in town and opening at 2 p.m., this classic gay bar offers nightly drink specials. This Riverwest bar welcomes a mixed crowd of men and women, both gay and straight. If you don't see your favorite spot listed here, use the Talkback feature to let us know about it.
The nearest gay bar full#
With PrideFest in full swing (June 12-14), we thought it was a good time to revisit out LGBTQ lineup. Now, these bars house eclectic and diverse crowds of patrons who enjoy dancing, karaoke, pool, shows or simply drinking and being sociable. We're going to wind up losing these places one by one.While many of Milwaukee's gay and lesbian bars were once exclusive single-sexed joints unfriendly to outsiders, times are changing. The cultural use should be given more weight. Maybe so, but local preservationist Richard Adkins complained to the Los Angeles Times, "It's hard to see how far you have come when you have no evidence of where you began. Imagine the insane cost of maintaining the megaclubs from yesteryear once they have ceased operations." "Nightclubs have their own natural lifecycles. "I think it would be near impossible to designate non-functioning nightclubs as landmarks," he continues. "Increasingly that's starting to change." "People traditionally haven't focused on use" when considering landmark status, Mayes noted. Of the two others, Webster Hall, built in 1886, became a nightclub in 1992 and the Church of the Holy Communion became the notorious Limelight (now closed). But in New York, only four have been landmarked so far, and of them, exactly two began life as dance clubs: the Rainbow Room, a high-end supper club in Rockefeller Center and La Casina, an Art Moderne building on the eastern fringe of the city, long used as a factory. Of course, many local nightclubs could fall under that requirement. "It's always easier to save beautiful buildings than ugly ones, but buildings of cultural significance are still important." "There's a lot of interest right now in LGBT history," said Tom Mayes, deputy general counsel of the National Trust for Historical Preservation. In addition to Stonewall, there are four other sites already given National Historic Landmark status, all of them private homes. The National Park Service project has identified close to 400 sites deemed of historical LGBT interest across the country, from bathhouses to places of worship. The music was mostly Motown, a lot of Martha and the Vandellas." Everyone went because it was the best place to dance and the jukebox was so good. We were angry that we couldn't dance."Īs for the music that soundtracked that dancing, "it was totally eclectic," Lanigan-Schmidt says. "That had everything to do with the rebellion," he continues. Because you were having an affectionate moment, you felt totally humanized." Being able to dance with someone of the same sex changed everything in the way you felt about yourself. "It was the only bar where we could slow dance," recalls artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, who participated in the riots. The violent protests in reaction to the police raid were motivated-at least partly-by these marginalized groups feeling that their freedom to dance was being threatened. Even before the riots, the Stonewall had already achieved underground fame as a rare space where gay men, lesbians and drag queens could lock limbs with each other with impunity. While its centrality to the modern fight for LGBT rights in the United States is widely acknowledged, the point that gets lost in the historicity of the place is that the Stonewall was, above all, a dance bar.
Coverage of the Stonewall riots was tinged with homophobia