San Diego's Gay Bar History (NorthSide Pictures, KPBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Chicago Stories tribute to AIDS activist Danny Sotomayor, KPBS ran a locally produced documentary called San Diego’s Gay Bar History, written and directed by Paul Detwiler. Though the imdb.com page on this program lists only two of the people who are in it, Marie Cartier and Steven Dupus II, the interviewees featured far more individuals than that, many of them people I’ve known personally. Detwiler’s documentary traces the Gay bar culture back to World War II (though other historians like George Chauncey have dated it even farther back than that), when millions of young American men either volunteered or got drafted and ended up in cities far from where they’d grown up. As a result, they were not only in sex-segregated environments for the first time (I’ve met a lot of Gay men who served in the military and many of them have told me it was by being in the military, and thereby cut off from most social contact with women, that they realized for the first time they were Gay), they were away from the stifling atmosphere of the small towns where they’d been born and raised. When the war ended, Detwiler claimed, most of the straight servicemembers went back to their old home towns. Most of the Gay ones stayed in the cities near where they’d been stationed, and this meant that the first Gay bars in San Diego were located near the big Navy bases downtown and in the beach areas. Between the late 1940’s and the 1970’s it was illegal for actual Queer people to own Gay bars because the law in California and almost all other states said you have to be of “good moral character” to hold a liquor license. So the first Gay bars in San Diego were owned by sympathetic straight people like Lou and Carol Arko, who opened the original incarnation of the Brass Rail in 1958 inside a downtown theatre. Later it moved to Fifth and Robinson in Hillcrest, and after it was first located across Fifth from where it is now, ultimately it moved to its iconic location on the southwest corner of that intersection.

At the time there was intense social repression directed against the Queer community, and not always in the ways you might think. Not only were Gay bars and other Queer-friendly spaces regularly raided by the San Diego Police Department vice squad, but afterwards the police would release the names of everyone they’d arrested to the media and the San Diego Union-Tribune would publish lists of not only who the arrestees were but where they lived and where they worked – which meant they usually got fired. The logic behind this was that, since same-sex sexual relations were illegal under California law until 1975, people who went to Gay bars were as-yet-unapprehended criminals. Most of the arrestees were cited for “lewd and lascivious conduct,” which could be something as simple and innocuous as holding someone else’s hand. One odd quirk of the law was that two women could dance together and be considered O.K., but two men dancing together and touching each other were breaking the law. One man remembers dancing with his partner, keeping away from him on the dance floor to avoid breaking this ridiculous law, until the woman in charge of the bar tapped him on the shoulder and said it was O.K. with her if he and his partner actually touched and held each other. If anything, the laws regarding Transgender people were even weirder and more strict than the laws against Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals. Female impersonators who worked at the Rail and the other bars that sponsored drag shows had to show up for work in male attire, put on their costumes in the bar, then change back to men’s clothes before they went home. San Diego had a local ordinance that you had to have on at least three items of gender-appropriate clothing at all times, which meant that one Lesbian in FTM drag was forced to strip by a local vice cop to show she was wearing female undergarments under her suit. I was involved in the campaign to repeal this ludicrous ordinance in 1998, and when the police representatives said violating this law was usually an “add-on charge” for cross-dressing prostitutes, Doug Case, then president of the San Diego Democrats for Equality, joked it was “the johns’ truth-in-labeling law.” I wondered why the city would make it more illegal for a man dressed as a woman to be a prostitute than for a woman dressed as a woman.

Most of the downtown Gay bars eventually fell to the urban renewal projects that created Horton Plaza and other monuments to commercialism and the kinds of projects the city fathers wanted downtown, and eventually the center of Queer life in San Diego moved to Hillcrest – which, like Greenwich Village in New York and the Castro in San Francisco, went through two waves of gentrification. Queer people, including business owners serving them, led the first wave of gentrification only to fall victim to the second wave, in which more affluent heterosexuals drove up the prices to own or rent in these now-desirable neighborhoods and started driving the Queers out. I know quite a few Queer people who’ve had to leave Hillcrest and North Park to relocate in areas farther east like City Heights, Rolando and the suburbs of La Mesa and El Cajon because they simply can no longer afford the housing costs in the so-called “Gay Ghettos” of Hillcrest and North Park. One of the most interesting interviewees in the show was a man named Norman who’s performed for decades at the Brass Rail and other local clubs as a female impersonator called “Norma.” What made them unusual was that they were Black, so Norma gravitated to performing as Black female music stars like Diana Ross and Tina Turner. (Before Norma arrived, she said, white performers in whiteface would perform both white and Black impersonations.) A bit of Norma’s Tina Turner act is shown in the documentary, and she’s quite good and surprisingly energetic given her age.

San Diego’s Gay Bar History details how the city’s bars responded to the AIDS crisis – or didn’t. Some bar owners refused to put up safer-sex posters or make condoms available to their patrons, but most not only did so but held fundraising events for local AIDS charities. A number of now-gone Gay bars feature prominently in this narrative, including Diablo’s (which for years was San Diego’s leading Lesbian bar), The Flame (which replaced it), The Loading Zone (San Diego’s pioneering Leather bar) and Numbers on Park and University, whose 2017 closure forms an emotional ending to the show. One odd thing about this program was the word “Internet” is heard only once, yet it is the Internet, more than anything else, that has destroyed the Gay bar culture not only in San Diego but nationwide. Online programs like Grindr and Adam4Adam (the latter an offshoot of the straight hookup app “Adam&Eve”) have pretty much eliminated the need for Gay bars as places to find casual sexual partners. I once saw Adam4Adam in action when a friend of mine asked me as a personal favor to let him log on to it. I was shocked at how mechanical the site made finding a casual hookup, like ordering at McDonald’s. Indeed, the whole process seemed so impersonal – just identify what you want to do, find someone who wants that done to them and get a location to meet – I jokingly called it “McSex.” As someone who’s been in a long-term relationship for nearly 30 years and have been legally married for the past 16 years, I’ve often quipped that one advantage of being married is never having to go to a Gay bar again (though I do occasionally to support a community event), and we’ve been together so long we haven’t had to deal with the vagaries of Internet dating either! Also part of my disinclination to go to Gay bars comes from the fact that I do not drink alcohol, and therefore I’m not part of the communal ritual that the bars are there to celebrate. Nonetheless, part of me still mourns the passing of the Gay bar scene in San Diego and elsewhere, and the loss of the community camaraderie it created at its best.