Gay bars in st cloud mn

It’s the year 2020. Pride is cancelled. This is very hard to exclaim out loud. It feels like saying we’re cancelling happiness and progress. Of course, the cancelling of Pride—the festival, the parade, the week when tens of thousands of far-flung LGBTQ peeps come streaming home—represents an act of love to maintain people healthy.

But its absence presents us with an opportunity to consider all the profound and essential local LGBTQ landmarks that built Pride—and often disappeared. Living in a capital is complicated. Each of us lives in a other Twin Cities: We share the Foshay Tower and the Mississippi, but we go home to different bars and bedrooms. 

LGBTQ cultures have, historically, needed to obscure their bars and bedrooms for horror of eviction, firing, imprisonment, or worse. As Ricardo J. Brown put it in his St. Paul memoir, The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s—one of the best mid-20th century looks at American gay experience—the LGBTQ life was “a ruse that kept all of us safe,” conducted in “a fort in the midst of a savage and hostile population.” 

Hiding in forts was useful, crucial, necessary. But what was long disguised is easy to