Sites of refuge, connection, creation, resistance and loss: the queer bar and nightclub in the twentieth century

Borders were marked and real; vice laws, police, and organised crime representatives controlled our movements in and out of our ‘countries’. But what could not be controlled was the creation of these spaces in the first place – our need to confront a personal destiny, to see our reflections in each other’s faces and to break societal ostracism with our bodies. What could not be controlled was our desire.

– Joan Nestle¹Joan Nestle, ‘Restriction and reclamation: lesbian bars and beaches of the 1950s’, in Anne-Marie Bouthillette, Gordon Brent Ingram & Yolanda Retter (eds), Queers in Space: Communities, Public Spaces, Sites of Resistance, Bay Press, Michigan, 1997, p. 61. 

Queer people have long sought out spaces within which they can express themselves and connect with one another without judgement or punishment from external, anti-queer forces. One such space is the queer bar/nightclub, which has its origins in the late eighteenth century. Using various legal sources, including police and court records, such academics as Randolph Trumbach have demonstrated that ‘minority gay culture’ was ‘fully established by 1750…in the Netherlands, France, and England’ and that ‘twenty or thirty of these “sodomites” would gather at ‘particular taverns’.² Randolph Trumbach, quoted in Maxine Wolfe, ‘Invisible women in invisible spaces: the production of social space in lesbian bars’, in Bouthillette, Ingram & Retter, pp. 305–06.

Despite their existence prior to the twentieth century, queer bars, nightclubs and other nocturnal haunts did not proliferate until the 1920s.³ ibid., p. 307 Following the Second World War, the presence of these spaces in cities across the US, UK, France and other parts of Europe expanded dramatically. They only continued to grow in numbers throughout the 1950s and 1960s, despite heightened hostility and intimidation from various external, oppressive forces, which culminated in such activity as police raids, arson and forced closures. In the 1970s, following the Stonewall uprising and amid the growing gay liberation movement in many Western nations, these spaces were increasingly used by queer people to politically organise. This contrasts dramatically with the final decades of the twentieth century, during which many queer bars and nightclubs were viewed with antipathy and subsequently disappeared amid the discrimination and devastating loss associated with the HIV/AIDS epidemic.⁴Joel I. Brodsky, ‘The mineshaft: a retrospective ethnography’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 24 no. 3–4, 1993, p. 233.

Throughout this century of turbulent change, very briefly described above, queer bars and nightclubs became and remained central to queer community. However, the histories of these spaces, many of which have now closed, are often incomplete. Much of what was recorded about these venues when they were operational was written for such sources as police reports and conservative news articles, and is therefore often bigoted and hateful.⁵Wolfe in Bouthillette, Ingram & Retter, p. 305. Further, many of the memories recounted by patrons have been transferred from generation to generation by word of mouth and other sources not typically deemed legitimate. To unearth the rich histories of these spaces, and better understand their centrality to queer life and community, one must, in the words of queer activist Maxine Wolfe, ‘dig hard and do a lot of interpreting’.⁶ibid., p. 304. This is where artworks become vital sources of information. The complexity of queer bars and nightclubs, which often simultaneously function as sites of refuge, connection, creation, resistance and loss, has been captured by many artists, some of whom are represented in the NGV collection.

Brassaï and Le Monocle

Obsessed by their unattainable goals to be men, they wore the most somber uniforms: black tuxedos, as though in mourning for their ideal masculinity […] And of course, their hair.

– Brassaï⁷Catherine Lord & Richard Meyer, ‘Case Studies (1930–49)’, in Art & Queer Culture, Phaidon, New York, 2013, p. 85.

Many of the first queer bars, which catered primarily to gay, lesbian and other gender non-conforming patrons, first arose in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their emergence is linked to a number of broader social and economic developments; most significantly, the law of 17 July 1880 instating liberty of commerce for retailers of alcohol, and the decriminalisation of homosexual behaviour during the French Revolution.⁸Leslie Choquette, ‘Beyond the myth of lesbian Montmartre’, Historical Reflections, vol. 42, no. 2, Summer 2016, p. 77. An establishment founded under these social and political conditions was Le Monocle, a former lesbian bar in Paris that opened on an unknown date in the 1920s.⁹Florence Tamagne, ‘A myth is born: those flamboyant days’, Historical History of Homosexuality in Europe Vol. I & II: Berlin, London, Paris 1919–1939, Algora Publishing, New York, 2006, p. 50. The bar was owned and run by Lulu de Montparnasse, who features prominently in several of Brassaï’s photographs of the venue. While the bar primarily catered to lesbians, it welcomed and celebrated a range of non-heterosexual genders, sexualities and identities.

Brassaï gained access to Le Monocle through a regular patron named Claude, who he befriended and accompanied to the bar one night in 1932. This was typical of Brassaï’s approach to photographing nocturnal city sights for his 1931–35 Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night) series: ‘I had to make friends – buy drinks’.¹⁰Francis E. Hutchins, ‘The pleasures of discovery: representations of queer space by Brassaï and Colette’, in Renate Günther & Wendy Michallat (eds), Lesbian Inscriptions in Francophone Society and Culture, Durham University, Durham, 2007, p. 191. In contrast with many of the other venues he attended and photographed for the larger series, it was difficult for Brassaï, a heterosexual male, to blend into the predominantly lesbian crowd at Le Monocle. According to historian Francis E. Hutchins:

At the Monocle, there is no chance that Brassaï will be mistaken for ‘une amie’. At Le Monocle […] the contradiction inherent in Brassaï’s belief in photography as a truth recording mechanism, coupled with his willingness to construct seemingly candid scenarios, comes to the fore.¹¹Michael Goldschmidt, ‘Brassaï, young Lesbian at Monocle’, Nov. 2014, Tate, <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/brassai-young-lesbian-at-monocle-p13108>, accessed 1 June 2021.

Brassaï’s difference is further evidenced by his reflection on visiting Le Monocle, which is recorded in his 1976 publication, The Secret Paris of the 30s.¹² Brassaï, The Secret Paris of the 30s, Pantheon Books, New York, 1976. While recounting his memory of the bar and its patrons, he tends to focus on their perceived oddities, as is evidenced by the quotation that introduces the entry dedicated to this venue. This is typical of much of the literature pertaining to queer bars and nightclubs that emerged during the twentieth century, which was often penned by men with heterosexist biases.¹³Wolfe in Bouthillette, Ingram & Retter, p. 303. Ultimately, Hutchins argues that Brassaï’s recollections of Le Monocle ‘perpetrated the trope of queer exoticism’.¹⁴Hutchins,p. 190. His observations aside, beyond these images, very little visual evidence of the bar and its patrons exists.

A form of gender expression adopted by many of Le Monocle’s patrons and represented in most of Brassaï’s photographs of the bar is the female masculinity of la garçonne.¹⁵‘“This sudden silence”: a brief history of the literature of Caribbean women who love women’, in E. L. McCallum & Mikko Tuhkanen, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014, p. 371. These women wear a combination of traditionally masculine clothing, including, as the bar’s name would suggest, a monocle, as well as a topcoat or military uniform, and a crisp white shirt with a bow tie or a cravat. In several photographs, garçonnes are accompanied by femmes – women dressed in highly feminine, often revealing, dresses and evening gowns. One such couple is captured in Le Monocle, the bar. On the left is Lulu de Montparnasse, where a garçonne/femme couple is pictured alongside Montparnasse, who leans against the bar, surveying her establishment. Both the garçonne and the femme are important examples of early twentieth-century queer gender expression. According to cultural anthropologist Esther Newton, the gender-bending appearance of many of the bar’s patrons ‘was and remains an important sign of rebellion against male hegemony, and […] of one significant pattern in lesbian sexuality and gender identification’.¹⁶Vicki Karaminas, ‘Lesbian style’, in Sandy Black et al.,The Handbook of Fashion Studies, A&C Black, London, 2014, p. 138.

Like many other queer venues that proliferated in Paris during the interwar years, Le Monocle was forced to close under Nazi occupation. Although the bar no longer exists, these photographs serve as visual records of the important role played by visual codes and symbols in queer bars and other nocturnal venues prior to liberation. The tuxedos, the gowns and, of course, the monocles, were all signifiers embraced by Le Monocle’s patrons to take ownership of and express their identity in a space they felt comfortable inhabiting.

Rainer Fetting and the Anvil

Tension was usually contained by an extraordinarily fine-tuned etiquette of glances, gestures, movements, and whispered encouragements or “dirty talk”.

– Joel I. Brodsky¹⁷Brodsky, p. 247.

The Anvil was an after-hours sex club located at 500 West 14th street in New York’s Meatpacking District, specifically the ‘triangle’ district – a triangular-shaped block just north of the West Village that housed several prominent queer nightclubs in the 1970s and 1980s. ¹⁸ibid., p. 239. Sex historian and photographer Efrain John Gonzalez has described the queer geography of the area in the latter part of the twentieth century: ‘You had a series of clubs a short walking distance from each other all basically open to different types of sexualities and expressions of sexuality’.¹⁹Efrain John Gonzalez quoted in Mike Miksche, ‘Tour the infamous sexual history of NYC’s Meatpacking District’, 11 Jan. 2016, Xtra* Magazine, <https://xtramagazine.com/travel/tour-the-infamous-sexual-history-of-nycs-meatpacking-district-69782>, accessed 20 May 2021.

The Anvil first opened its doors in 1974 and catered exclusively to gay men. According to queer historian and former patron, Will Kohler, ‘while some drag queens were welcome, women were not’.²⁰Will Kohler, ‘Forgotten gay history – The Anvil’, 21 Feb. 2018, Back2Stonewall, <http://www.back2stonewall.com/2018/02/nyc-forgotten-gay-history-anvil-500-w-14th-street-1974-1986.html>, accessed 25 May 2021. An average night at the bar consisted of a combination of drag shows, disco music and drugs upstairs, and sexual activity downstairs. One of the bar’s main attractions was provided by its male dancers, who routinely climbed onto the bar wearing knee-high boots and not much else and danced while bartenders poured drinks around them.²¹ibid.

One such performance was recorded by the German artist Rainer Fetting in his 1979 painting Another murder at the Anvil II. Fetting’s monumental depiction of the then-notorious bar and its famed dancers is in part fictitious. Beneath the line of men maneuvering their bodies across the bar and between glasses, Fetting imagined a brutal sequence of events. An erotic and celebratory scene is punctured by Fetting’s depiction of someone being stabbed. Much of the painting consists of expressive red and orange strokes, with the murderer painted in neon green and deep blue, drawing the viewer’s eye down and towards the violent scene. According to artist and writer Emmanuel Cooper, this differentiation in colour, paired with the painting’s ‘immediate, dramatic, almost theatrical quality … heightens the tableau’.²²Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West Routledge, London, 1994

Despite the painting’s fictitious narrative, Fetting did spend time at the Anvil, and the scene depicted is said to be inspired by ‘his observations of the gay night-club life of the city’.²³ibid. After receiving a German Exchange Grant in 1978, Fetting travelled to New York, where he had various encounters with the city’s queer community, including multiple visits to the Anvil.²⁴Jason Smith, ‘Rainer Fetting’, in Ted Gott & Laurie Benson, 20th Century Painting and Sculpture in the International Collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2003, p. 117. It was after one of these visits that Fetting produced Another murder at the Anvil II. While he has never alluded to the painting’s underlying meaning, it is difficult to separate the dark scene depicted from the broader, anti-queer forces that affected queer bars and nightclubs and their patrons throughout the US in the 1970s and 1980s.

Despite the existence of spaces like the Anvil and the ‘triangle’ within which it was situated, homophobia was rampant in New York, and often found expression in violent attacks against queer people. Throughout the 1970s, gay activist Arthur Bell wrote articles for The Village Voice centred on several unsolved murders of gay men who had been picked up in queer sex bars and nightclubs.²⁵Jason Bailey, ‘Making sense of Cruising’, 21 March 2018, The Village Voice, https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/03/21/making-sense-of-cruising/, accessed 28 May 2021; and Arthur Bell, ‘Death comes out’, The Village Voice, 26 Nov. 1986, https://www.villagevoice.com/2020/12/16/death-comes-out/, accessed 28 May 202. In 1980, the film Cruising, conceived and directed by William Friedkin, was released. The film’s script centred on the same string of murders reported by Bell and, according to academic Joel I. Brodsky, made the troubling implication that ‘such violence was inherent in the world of leather and S&M, and indeed, in gay community life’. Brodsky goes on to explain that ‘such distortions implicitly legitimised anti-gay violence as beyond the control of rational political authority’.²⁶Brodsky, p. 239.

Discrimination and violence against the queer community only intensified in the 1980s, amid the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Just five years after Fetting painted the harrowing scene depicted in Another murder at the Anvil II, the bar was forced to close its doors for the final time. The Anvil’s closure was part of a larger, mass disappearance of queer sex bars and nightclubs amid the homophobically motivated push to ‘clean up sex establishments’ and halt ‘high-risk sexual activities’ amid an atmosphere described by Brodsky as being characterised by ‘lurid headlines, right wing agitation, and panic over AIDS’.²⁷ibid.

While the motivation behind Fetting’s partly imagined depiction of the Anvil is unclear, it can be said that, like Brassaï’s photographs of Le Monocle, Another murder at the Anvil II is one of the only surviving depictions of the sex club. Beyond an image of the sign that greeted patrons upon entry, no photographs of the Anvil’s interior exist. Instead, its legacy is remembered and shared by its patrons.

Viva Gibb and Trish’s Coffee Lounge

If you like sleazy surroundings in the run-down end of town, you’ll love Trish’s … A garishly decorated BYO coffee lounge, it nestles alongside the city’s fruit and vegetable market, but is far less colourful or interesting.²⁸‘Trish’s’ GAY, no. 41, 1978, published by Star Newspapers Pty Ltd.

That description, taken from issue 41 of GAY, a former publication of Star Newspapers in Sydney, was part of a review of Trish’s Coffee Lounge, a queer venue formerly located at 126 Peel Street in North Melbourne.²⁹An important resource that features Trish’s Coffee Lounge is the extensive report compiled by the Australian Queer Archives, A History of LGBTIQ+ Victoria in 100 Objects and Places, see Graham Willet et al., A History of LGBTIQ+ Victoria in 100 Places and Objects, Australian Queer Archives, Melbourne 2021, p. 39. The review’s writer, whose name has not been located, goes on to take issue with the establishment’s outspoken proprietor, Trish (Jon) Barrie, who they describe as ‘the overbearing drag queen who runs the place’.³⁰‘Trish’s’, GAY, no. 41. The unknown reviewer ends their tirade against Trish and her BYO coffee lounge by awarding the establishment one star, ‘reluctantly’.³¹ibid.

This is one of the only published descriptions of Trish’s Coffee Lounge located in the course of researching this essay. It was identified on the rich and comprehensive Facebook page ‘Lost Gay Melbourne’, along with a bevy of photographs uploaded by former patrons, recording everything from the handpainted sign at the entrance to the modest stage that regularly hosted themed drag performances, watched by audience members sitting in the nearby booths. Unlike the other queer bars and nightclubs considered in this essay, Trish’s is not as easy to pin down. Trish had not managed to secure a liquor licence for the venue and opted instead to serve coffee. ³³Willet et al., p. 39. Based on its operating hours alone – 9 pm until late, Tuesday to Sunday – it clearly wasn’t a cafe in the conventional sense. Instead, Trish’s has been variously described as a ‘coffee lounge, cabaret venue, and disco’.³³Willet et al., p. 39.

In 1979, one year after the scathing review of Trish’s published in GAY, the late, Melbourne-based social documentary photographer Viva Gibb, who lived in North Melbourne at various times throughout the 1970s and 1980s, visited the coffee shop-cum-drag bar-cum-disco and captured a striking photograph of one of the drag queens – Maxine Du Barry. On a cigarette break between performances, Maxine looks directly into the camera. Wearing a curly blonde wig, a full face of make-up and what appears to be a black bodysuit cinched at the waist with a belt, paired with a necktie and a translucent vest embellished with swirls of sequins, she looks as if she’s stepped straight out of the 1950s. In the same image, Gibb also managed to capture several distinguishing features of Trish’s decor; namely, a coffee cup behind Maxine’s arm, and in the background, a group of patrons sitting in a booth, likely waiting for the next performance.

One of Trish’s regulars in the 1980s, Michael Baxter, is not surprised that little can be found about Trish’s online. During a recent interview, Michael described Trish’s as ‘tiny’, ‘nothing fancy’, and ‘in need of a bit of a paint job’.³⁴Baxter It was the last stop on a night out for Michael. After partying at 397, Mandate and other queer nightclubs of the period, he would visit Trish’s around 3 am or 4 am for a coffee. He would pull up a chair at the long table facing the doorway, where the queens would be sitting and drinking coffee, all seated on one side, like Christ and the apostles.

When asked about who typically went to Trish’s, Michael’s response was ‘a mix of everything’.³⁵ibid. He describes it as a place where everyone was welcome. It is these very people, Trish’s patrons, who have kept the venue’s memory alive. As is the case for many queer histories, the legacy of Trish’s has been recorded and archived by the people who were connected to the space. In this way, 25 years following its closure, what survives of Trish’s continues to connect queer people from all walks of life.

Leigh Bowery and Taboo

We can do anything, anything we want. Total pleasure, nothing is Taboo. I feel so released. No embarrassment at all. Oh, my God, this fantastic feeling. It’s so gorgeous.

– Leigh Bowery³⁶Gary Carsley, ‘All his own make-up’, in Take a Bowery: The Art and (Larger Than) Life of Leigh Bowery, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2003, p. 22.

In the late 1970s, in pockets of London known for cultivating subversive cultural forms and trends, the New Romantic movement emerged. Influenced by the fluid fashions of such music icons as David Bowie and Marc Bolan, the movement was characterised by similarly gender-bending, eccentric looks, many of which were worn at infamous nightclubs like Billy’s and the Blitz.³⁷David Johnson, ‘Spandau Ballet, the Blitzkids and the birth of the New Romantics’, 4 Oct. 2009, The Guardian, <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/oct/04/spandau-ballet-new-romantics>, accessed 19 May 2021. As well as being sartorially influenced by the likes of Bowie and Bolan, those involved in the movement drew from fashion trends across centuries, and particularly from the Romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.³⁸ibid. Sunshine, Melbourne-born artist, musician, fashion designer and performer Leigh Bowery inserted himself into this period of transformative subcultural change when he moved from Melbourne to London in 1980.

Bowery quickly became enmeshed in London’s club scene, and after hosting a series of informal, underground parties, officially opened Taboo nightclub in 1985, in the former Maximus discotheque in Leicester Square.³⁹‘Bibliography’ in Take a Bowery, p. 169. Despite being short-lived – Taboo closed after just one year due to alleged drug soliciting – the nightclub had an enormous cultural and creative impact, particularly within the city’s queer community. While it was not an exclusively queer venue, Taboo attracted a predominantly queer crowd, largely due to Bowery’s interest in experimental fashion. Taboo provided a canvas upon which Bowery was able to present many of his most daring looks, which he crafted by hand using materials sourced from discount fabric stores, often with the help of his wife, Nicola Bowery.

As the nightclub’s founder, Bowery set the tone at Taboo. He once described the dress code as follows: ‘Dress as though your life depends on it, or don’t bother’.⁴⁰Robyn Healy, ‘Taboo or not Taboo, the fashions of Leigh Bowery’, Art Journal 42, 2 June 2014, <https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/taboo-or-not-taboo-the-fashions-of-leigh-bowery/>, accessed 28 June 2021. Bowery practised what he preached. Borrowing a description of Bowery offered by his friend and collaborator Boy George, Bowery was ‘modern art on legs’.⁴¹Carsley in Take a Bowery, p. 12. His radical and wonderfully weird ensembles, which were often recycled but always tailored to fit his six-foot-three, curvy body, transformed Taboo into a space that, according to curator Robyn Healy, ‘symbolised the excesses of the 1980s’ where ‘looking fantastic was taken to extremes’.⁴²Healy.

Bowery, like many other patrons at Taboo, took advantage of the fluidity of the nightclub environment, which was conducive to creativity. He wanted to move beyond what had traditionally been classified as ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ territory in fashion by creating looks and performances that disrupted boundaries and binaries. This is clearly evidenced by his 1992 ensemble, Pregnant tutu head. Beyond a protruding belly, Bowery ‘impregnated’ other parts of his body; namely, his head and his feet. Emerging through an exaggerated collar is a spherical headpiece made from tiers of orange tulle that would have engulfed Bowery’s face while he was wearing the ensemble. He completed the look with a huge pair of half-circle shoes covered in brown fabric.

According to academic Anne Marsh, Bowery ‘undid and remade’ the ‘paradigm of the beautiful body’.⁴³Anne Marsh quoted in Michael Winkler, ‘The secret successes of a Sunshine boy’, The Age, 4 Jan, 2003. His defiant rejection of conventions of identity, sexuality and gender shaped Taboo’s distinctively queer architecture. When we look back at the photographs of Bowery, Boy George, Gerlinde Costiff and other patrons who frequented Taboo, we see the potential for the queer nightclub to function as a site of creativity. Whether in Rococo-inspired make-up or floor-length formal gowns, patrons adhered to Bowery’s instructions to ‘dress as though your life depends on it’.

It is important that going forward, the histories of queer bars and nightclubs continue to be recorded, and that such recordings reflect the complexity of these sites, which have been and continue to be places of refuge, safety, connection, creation, resistance and loss. I am indebted to queer academics, curators, archivists and, most importantly, former owners, performers and patrons, who have recorded the many memories of these life-affirming spaces, both verbally and in writing.

Meg Slater is Curator, International Exhibitions Projects, National Gallery of Victoria.

This essay was originally published in QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection.

Notes