"It just wouldn't cut it when you have 5,000 square feet and the only time you really made money was on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night when the place was at capacity for hours."īut even though Johnson won't be part of it, he said he is confident New York's gay nightlife will come back. "We couldn't open up for delivery to-go out of Therapy with burgers and nachos, and a 20-foot space in front," Johnson said. In 2003, Therapy Lounge became one of the first gay bars to open up in Hell's Kitchen, paving the way for a slew of others and changing the face of the neighborhood into one that, these days, has lot more rainbow flags that it used to.īut Therapy's business model was no match for the past year's COVID restrictions. "If we're not selling drinks, what are you going to do?"
"We sell drinks to people to pay for ourselves, to pay for our shows, to pay for everything," Johnson said from his new home in Chicago. When we first closed, it was awful."īut thanks to federal loans, community support, and donations from the LGBT-focused nonprofit Gill Foundation, the city's oldest gay bar is here to stay.īut others - like Tom Johnson, the former owner of Therapy Lounge - weren't as lucky. "I had such a deflated feeling," Buford said. "That would be the first case against homosexuals actually proactively documented," Lustbader said.Īnd it all happened in 1966 - three years prior to the Stonewall riots, widely seen as the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement.īut this piece of history, Julius' Bar, was almost gone for good thanks to COVID. The incident has become known as the "sip in." So they brought a photographer and newspaper reporter with them to document it. "We wanted to have a place refuse to serve us for being homosexual," Wicker said. So those protestors thought something might go down.
See, those well-dressed patrons - some of the earliest gay rights protestors - knew that Julius' Bar in Greenwich Village was already being closely watched by state authorities due to prior infractions. 'Cause we already have trouble with that,'" Wicker said. That's when the bartender held out his hand. "We were saying, 'We are homosexuals and we want to order a cocktail,'" Wicker said. And Randy Wicker, on the far end of the bar in that photo, was one of those men.
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Download for FREE!īut you could easily argue that a certain black-and-white photograph - showing a group of men being denied a drink - laid the groundwork for the gay bars of today. Get breaking news alerts in the FOX 5 NY News app. "Disorderly people were considered homosexuals." "After prohibition, the State Liquor Authority is formed, which has a regulation that basically says if you serve people who are disorderly you can lose your license," Lustbader said. You'd have to either be in possession of an underground guidebook listing places considered "safe" or rely on word of mouth. "They were bottle clubs, you had a sign, a fictitious name in many cases to get in." "In many cases, they were private clubs with bouncers at the door," Lustbader said. "So bars became really safe spaces."īut the gay bar of the past was much different than the one we think of today where every inch is covered in rainbow flags. "People could lose their jobs, their families, employment, religious associations," Lustbader added.