Gay bars richmond va
All too often, queer history is ignored or veiled from us by societal strictures of both the past and present. This map is a minute attempt to remedy that.
It’s our hope to shed some light on Richmond faces and places that haven’t received the attention they deserve. From leading rocker Sister Rosetta Tharpe to the Mulberry Home, the evolution of the local queer press to the formative days of Hollywood’s first openly homosexual star, William “Billy” Haines, many here should own a higher profile in our collective conscience.
The knowledge included in the chart is deeply indebted to the work of others, including Beth Marschak and Alex Lorch, The Valentine, Virginia Department of Historic Resources’ Blake McDonald, Yelyzaveta Shevchenko’s “Reconnaissance Survey of LGBTQ Architectural Resources in the City of Richmond” for DHR’s LGBTQ Heritage Working Group, author John Musgrove, and Cindy Bray’s “Rainbow Richmond: LGBTQ History of Richmond, VA, 1625-2010.” Marschak and Lorch’s manual, “Lesbian and Gay Richmond,” should be required reading for every Richmonder.
By formatting this information as a map, we hope to give Richmonders a immediate link to their past. Undoubtedly, we have
When a Homosexual Bar in Richmond was an Introduction to a Society
Bill Harrison is the executive director of Diversity Richmond, which serves Main Virginia's LGBTQ communities. Harrison grew up in the compact farming community of Emporia, Virginia and moved to Richmond as an grown-up. This week he led a vigil for the victims of the Orlando shooting, and here he shares about the significance of gay bars in Richmond.
“I’ve lived in Richmond since the mid-70s, and actually my initial introduction to the same-sex attracted community was through a gay exclude. I was in college, and I had become friends with a guy who was a good friend, and a few months into the friendship he came out to me. I, at that hour, did not even know what the word ‘gay’ meant. I knew that I was queer, but I did not think that you actually did anything about it. I thought you would just set it in the back of your mind and unite a woman.
“And so when Jack came out to me, he told me about a male lover bar in Richmond, the Dial Tone. And he said ‘I know a couple hundred lgbtq+ men,’ and I thought to myself, ‘he’s really a liar, because there’s not 200 male lover men in America.’
“And so we got in his red Vega, and we drove down Je
.
.