Exploring St. Paul’s oldest LGBT bar: The Townhouse

With roots that go back to 1949, The Town House is St. Paul’s oldest LGBTQ bar and everyone knows it.  Everyone but local historians consulting on the Central Corridor Light Rail project, who have suggested that the bar is an ineligible contender for the National Register of Historic Places. Without the Register’s protection, the Town House could very well fall to the wreckers in an effort to attract ‘family friendly’ businesses to University Avenue’s fancy new train in 2014. … Continue Reading

From the Archives: The 70′s Drag Queens of Hennepin Avenue

A pioneer ancestor of Minnesotan centers for young people—continued by St. Paul’s Club Vogue (1991-1992) and, years later, by District 202—the Club was a pivotal space in the history of Minnesota’s queer youth. The “theatre lounge” was a nonalcoholic social venue for gender nonconforming teenagers and young adults that occupied the second floor of an opulent—if small—2 -story building next to the Orpheum Theater on Hennepin Avenue. Once a headquarters of local circus managers and carnival hosts, [i] the space opened on Halloween in 1970 as “the ‘new’ after hours coffee house for gay people” that marked a southward shift in queer nightlife away from the Mississippi River and towards Loring Park. [ii] … Continue Reading

From The Archives: “Counterculture Queens” Making History at Gay House

In the early 1970s, the American Psychological Association defined homosexuality as a character disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.   Though attitudes amongst psychologists varied (indeed, many vocally disagreed with the designation), the Association’s official stance made professional mental healthcare an unhelpful obstacle to young people struggling with their sexual orientation. Thus, and unlike their heterosexual counterparts, young queer people frequently began their sexual and romantic lives without the guidance of older mentors of professional therapists.   Few positive representations of queer people existed, and these were not reinforced by mental health institutions.

Young activists, political radicals, and University of Minnesota graduates took over a rundown single-family home on Ridgewood Avenue (now demolished)  in 1971 to create a first in the state.  Gay House was literally a house of, by, and for gay people—selected for its close proximity to the former nucleus of Minneapolis’ “gay ghetto,” the structure served as an office building, meeting space, and crash pad for young people in need of help as they struggled to come to terms with their identity. Led by Jim Frost, a group of volunteers set up a telephone hotline to counsel troubled youth in the Twin Cities.

The Gay House hotline and its positively gay volunteers became immeasurably successful; the center received 50,000 phone calls and provided counseling services to well over 5,000 by 1975.[i] Thematic similarities in the callers’ problems surfaced; clients frequently desired basic information about sexuality, and they sought perspectives from others who shared their pain.  With the help of Michael McConnell, a librarian fired by the University of Minnesota for gay activism—Gay House offered the first-community-run queer library in the Upper Midwest.  Organizers reached out to new gay and lesbian publications in larger cities, including The Los Angeles Advocate, and contacted librarians for bibliographies. Barbara Gittings—founder of the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis and editor of its magazine, The Ladder—sent Gay house a bibliography and a message to “keep on gay-ning.”[ii]

To Steve Endean, the future founder of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C., Gay House was a brave first step towards self-acceptance:

“…I was straightlaced and was somewhat taken aback by the ‘early Salvation Army’ look of the drop-in center.  Inside, I met several outrageous counterculture queens who seemed to personify every stereotype I’d heard about.  But since it was basically clear that my sexuality wasn’t just a phase but a reality, I was incredibly anxious to meet people that might assist in helping me develop a positive self-image as a gay man.”[iii]

The differing personalities of “counterculture queens,” straight-laced activists, and troubled youth often produced conflict. Gay house’s “rap sessions” inspired everything from genuine synergy to complete dissension. Meetings occasionally devolved into a series of “loud, angry, and seemingly pointed requests…for participation in some activities.”[iv] One anonymous participant complained “the house was basically run by kids above 18 for kids below 18.”[v] Four years and a move to south Minneapolis later, these and other interpersonal issues forced the center to close in 1979.

Ultimately, the legacy of our first community center offsets its negative end.  Some of our most important institutions, such as OutFront Minnesota, the Twin Cities Pride Committee, and the All God’s Children MCC have roots in Gay Houses’ seat-of-the-pants activism.  Without it, the Twin Cities would have likely been much less livable.

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[i] “Gay House Starts Fifth Years of Service.” Gay House Newsletter, 7/14/75.

[ii] Barbara Gittings Letter, OutFront Minnesota Collection, Box 1. Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies, University of Minnesota Libraries.

[iii] Steve Endean and Vicki Lynn Eaklor, Bringin Lesbian and Gay Rights Into the Mainstream: Twenty Years of Progress (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2006), 11

[iv] Sic.

[v] “Open House-Meeting at Gayhouse [sic]” Hundred Flowers, 10/1/71. Page 11.

From the Archives: Molding a Generation, and Keeping Boys From Wearing Lacy Stockings

The idea of queer place goes beyond simple physical geography, as a queer place can be a “place” in the past or a passage hidden within an old volume. Newspapers are, perhaps, the most readily-available sources of otherwise sporadic information that pertains to everyday queer phenomena. Regardless of the time period, headlines and back stories reveal constant battles between oppositiong genders and sexualities.

This essay is excerpted from Stewart Van Cleve’s upcoming book, Land of 10,000 Loves: Queer Places in Minnesota History, from the University of Minnesota Press – Ed.

At the dawn of the 20^th century, Minnesota’s middle class was booming and anxious to scale the social ladder. In the Twin Cities, companies were particularly attuned to the populace’s constant quest for goods and services—especially for those products that suggested the buyer’s wealth and prestige. Local papers carried advertisements for everything from women’s products that made voluminous hair to men’s living quarters that guaranteed social respect. These ads often evince the underlying distress that many up-and-comers had over their attractiveness, success, and–of course–their particular brand of gender expression.

This consistent feeling of unease was not limited to adults. Early 20^th-century parents subjected their children to expectations that mirrored those of older people. A supplement of the Minneapolis Journal (ancestor of the Star Tribune) called The Journal Junior was, literally, a smaller version of the “adult” paper. It carried entertaining tales (and ubiquitous comics) of boyish adventure and girlish imagination for decades, and likely helped to construct the local gender identities of an entire generation. Newspapers frequently assisted these businesses (for a price) and presented depictions of girls and boys to sell toys, games, and garments. “Little women” were expected to be precious angels with hopes of becoming married homemakers, while boys were drawn as briefly mischievous future heads of household.

On Tuesday, February 18, 1908, The Minneapolis Journal took out a full-page ad for its subsequent Sunday Magazine. Depicting a cartoon boy with long hair, lacy stockings, and bad posture (looking remarkable like a miniature Oscar Wilde), it proclaimed “Feminzation of Boys is a subject handled without gloves by G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University.”

The ad continued: “There is something the matter with the boy in the early teens who can truly be called a perfect gentleman, as his lady teachers wish him to be,’ declares Dr. Hall, whose articles on childhood’s problems have won him a national reputation. The article will appear exclusively in next Sunday’s Magazine of the Minneapolis Journal.”[i] The Journal’s notice gives a taste of Hall’s ideas concerning the problem; snippets surrounding the effete boy suggest that “a spirit of sugary benignity” results from “maternal coddling and spoiling.” Women were to blame, but all was not lost. Hall declared that “boys need to beat and be beaten,” and that “a good sound flogging is the only medicine.” The ad ended with the promise of argument: “A number of well known women have written replies to Dr. Hall for the succeeding issue.”

Unfortunately, and with an understandable need to conserve space, the Minnesota Historical Society transferred its vast newspaper collections to a problematic format—microfilm—and scanned every page onto the new media. The tedium of this process produced many mistakes, including a numerical error that accidentally omitted Dr. Hall’s article (not to mention dozens of issues of The Sunday Magazine). As no original master set was preserved, Hall’s recommendation (and alas, the replies of “well-known women”) were irreversibly destroyed. Historians will never know the full extent to which Hall’s theories were accepted or rejected by local mothers, but the article’s preserved advertisement is worthy of immense historic value on its own. Rarely can one find a literal advertisement for gender, let alone one that advertises a means of “fixing” nonconformity.

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[i] The Minneapolis Journal, Home Edition, 2/18/1908, page 6.

From the Archives: Chocolate Dandies, Vice Cities

Considered by some to be America’s “golden age,” the Art Deco era of the 1920′s and 1930′s has been romanticized ever since the Great Depression as a time of relaxed social restriction.[i] It was a time of “New American Women,” a period when African Americans migrated to northern cities from the south, and an explosion of new cultural expression.  The  latter two phenomena created an often-overlooked and occasionally-ignored facet of the “Harlem Renaissance.”  In many U.S. cities, large African American districts—then referred to as “negro areas”—supported smaller queer cultural circles.  Most notably in Harlem, these undergrounds centered on “rent parties,” drag balls, and particular entertainment venues.[ii] Gladys Bentley sang dirty songs (with a sophisticated voice) in a white tuxedo at the Clam House,[iii] while Langston Hughes and Richard Bruce Nugent partied with other “gay” (in the sense that they had sexual relationships with other of the same gender) literary greats in private apartments.[iv] While Minneapolis was a little too far upriver to enjoy the same kind of cultural output of New York City or Chicago, and the associated “out” LGBTQ communities there, among the scraps of evidence left by local Jazz Age partiers, we’re left with a few hints of the “gays” that might have been.

That is not to suggest that the Twin Cities were completely bereft of black folks or queer undergrounds, but the evidence is scant.  Roy Wilkins, future president of the NAACP, grew up in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood – at the time, the capital’s most integrated neighborhood and arguably one of its most culturally vibrant.  While Wilkins was a youth, the neighborhood was home to numerous “good time parties,” which were Minnesota’s nearly-identical answer to more famous rent parties out east.[v] Little information, and certainly no known written accounts, attest to the existence of a queer subculture in old Rondo’s party scene.  Minneapolis’ northside also supported a larger black neighborhood near Sumner Field on the North Side, but scholars again run into a similar dearth of information about LGBTQ life in this neighborhood.

I found one clue in old issues of the Minneapolis Journal. In January of 1924, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake brought their Broadway show, titled “Chocolate Dandies,” to the Metropolitan Theater in the Gateway District (located at 320 Marquette, if you’re a geography nerd like me). Among the show’s dancers was none other than Josephine Baker, who challenged gender roles and had numerous affairs with other women during the 20s.  The show was well-received locally by an entirely white audience,[vi] but some critics believed that it presented white stereotypes of black people to entertain white audiences.[vii]

Another piece of the puzzle sits within an old book at Hennepin Central Library.  In 1937, years after the Stock Market Crash, Calvin F. Scmid wrote an impressive sociological analysis of the Twin Cities area.  The project, funded by the Works Progress Administration, used an entire chapter to describe the “negro areas” of St. Paul and Minneapolis.  The study interestingly framed these areas as part of a greater series of “Vice areas;”[viii] Schmid noted that black citizens were socially forced to live in “marginal areas of the city, in which vice, crime, disease, bad housing, dependency, and other forms personal and social disorganizations are prevalent.”[ix] Other vice districts included the Gateway District, Loring Park, and the “Seven Corners” created by Washington Avenue and Cedar Avenue—each of these vice areas had a queer future ahead of them.

Great steps have been taken to note the significance of LGBTQ people of color in queer history, but our society still runs the terrible risk of losing a century’s work of queer life experiences, if only because so little has been recorded about the experiences of people of color.  Queen Latifa may have sang a single number in Chicago as Matron Mama Morton, but few can identify her character as a reference to (a definitely lesbian) Ma Rainey.[x] Likewise, we can draft a comparison between Harlem’s rent parties and Rondo’s good time parties, but without personal accounts, this remains a conjecture.

If you know a longtime local resident who is LGBTQA and lived near Rondo Avenue or on Minneapolis’ northside during the 1930s-1960s, please contact me at vanc0092@umn.edu.  I would love to include their stories in my upcoming book.

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[i] Lawrence R. Broer and John D. Walther, editors. Dancing Fools and Weary Blues: The Great Escape of the Twenties (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1990)

[ii] Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 18-25

[iii] James F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 174

[iv] Wilson, 27

[v] Evelyn Fairbanks. Days of Rondo: A Warm Reminiscence of St. Paul’s Thriving Black Community in the 1930s and 1940s, (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1990) page 153.

[vi] “Sissle and Blake at Metropolitan: ‘The Chocolate Dandies’ Latest of the Colored Musical Shows,” The Minneapolis Journal, February 23, 1924.

[vii] Nadine George-Graves, “The Chocolate Dandies,” Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 223-224

[viii] Calvin F. Schmid, Social Saga of Two cities: An Ecological and Statistical Study of Social Trends in Minneapolis and St. Paul (Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Council of Social Agencies, 1936) Chart 195

[ix] Calvin F. Schmid.  “Your Minneapolis: An Abstract of Social Saga of the Two Cities” (Minneapolis: Minneapolis council of Social Agencies, 1938), 41

[x] Of course, this is a suggestion.  Take a close look at Latifa’s costume and bawdy performance, and then take a look at photos of Rainey in action.  The similarity is unmistakable.

From the Archives: Looking For Gays in the Gateway District, Part 2

A Minneapolis patrolman immediately took James Flood into custody—in full drag—after Flood shot and killed A.P. Camden on Nicollet Avenue in the dead of night. As part of the booking process, the officers measured more than a dozen parts of his body and noted the measurements in a “Bertillon Book.” These ledgers recorded body measurements for identification, and accompanied the first use of mug shots in the late 19^th century,[i] offering a firsthand account of criminal activity in the Gateway District during one of the most volatile periods in the city’s history. 

Murder is murder, of course—regardless of the time period, Flood was arrested because he killed someone.  However, it is entirely possible that Flood’s flagrant challenge to gender norms influenced his treatment by the police, and equally influenced his confessions, conviction and incarceration.   Six years before Flood’s arrest, a federal grand jury sentenced Mayor A. A. ‘Doc” Ames to six years in state prison for running one of the most corrupt administrations in the United States. The disgraced politician instituted a number of surreptitious practices, but he is perhaps best known for his permissive (some would call tolerant) treatment of prostitution, gambling, and liquor in the old Gateway area.[ii] Mayor Ames’ arrest marked a clear change in the police department’s arresting criteria, and likely inspired a crackdown on prostitution and other kinds of “abnormal” sexual behavior in Minneapolis.

Flood’s arresting officer pasted a small clipping from The Chicago Tribune next to his entry in the 1908 Minneapolis Bertillon Book, which gives additional details of that night in June:

“A.P. Camden, an elevator builder and for fifteen years a resident of St. Paul, was shot and instantly killed late last night in front of the store at 315 Nicollet avenue, by James Montague, 16 years old.

Camden was a total stranger to Montague.

As the man passed the boy he [Montague] took the revolver from his pocket and without reason of provocation, shot Camden in the head, and the victim fell dead at his feet.  The murderer then walked away whistling, but was followed by messenger boys who had witnessed the tragedy and was captured at Nicollet and Washington avenues by Patrolman R. E. Champlin.

At the time of the shooting, the boy wore some articles of woman’s apparel.  His story today in the sweatbox  was a fantastic tale of boyish adventure and depravity.  This story, which the police believe is true only in part, is being checked up carefully by detectives.  The prisoner is clearly insane.”[iii]

The Tribune’s report illuminates two questionable aspects of testaments to Flood’s “insanity.” The first—that Camden and Flood were “total strangers,” (thus Camden’s murder was completely unprompted) is hard to accept as indisputable fact.  The police originally suggested that the two were strangers in their report, yet the police only became involved with the case after Camden was dead.  No one is quoted, either by the police or by the Tribune, as saying that the two had never met before.

Second, the paper notes that Montague told his “fantastic” (and perhaps incoherent or crazy) tale of “boyish adventure and depravity” durring interrogation “in the sweatbox,” an interrogation procedure where suspects were put in a small room with several officers, and subjected to hours of verbal abuse and misleading questions.  In a 1902 article, The Public, a Chicago newspaper, censured the practice of sweatboxes, claiming:

“Ordinarily the torture—for it is nothing more—is especially designed for the case under consideration.  It the police are satisfied that that any person possesses information which may reveal the principles or participants in a great crime, they will get it and they feel justified employing any means, no matter how severe and cruel, and it will result in a confession.”[iv]

Flood’s unspecified confession of “depravity” could have involved anything the officers wanted or suspected—indeed, the police questioned whether or not the teenager was being completely honest. It is interesting to also note that officer Champlin mentioned Flood’s wig and style of dress as an afterthought.  The Chicago Tribune, on the other hand, excitedly proclaimed Flood “Existed as a Boy but Slew as a Girl!” before it surmised that he was “possessed of a dual personality, with each element battling for supremacy…”[v]

Ultimately, the court accepted his admission; he was sentenced to spend his life in the Minnesota State Reformatory in St. Cloud.[vi]

Next Time: People of Color In and Out of the Gateway

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[i] Hess, Kären M., Orthmann, Christine Hess.  Criminal Investigation, 9^th edition. New York: Delmar, 2010. Page 53.

[ii] Minneapolis Vice Commission, Report of the Vice Commission of Minneapolis to His Honor, James C. Hayes, Mayor.”  Minneapolis: Henry M. Hall Press, 1911..  Written almost a decade after Ames arrest, this lengthy report analyzed the “recent” history of prostitution in Minneapolis.  It also weighed the pros and cons of legalizing, tolerating, and criminalizing prostitution—the report even suggested establishing a single red light district on Nicollet Island.  In the end, the Commission recommended criminalization.

[iii] “Camden Had Premonition.” The Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1908.

[iv] The Public (bound edition). Originally printed March 29, 1902.

[v] “Existed as a Boy but Slew as a Girl: Woman Personality Drove Youth to Kill A. P. Camden in Minneapolis.” The Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1908.

[vi] Minneapolis Department of Police. Bertillon System Record No.1: From Jan. 4, 1907 to Dec. 19, 1907.  Minneapolis: Cerber Bros, 1906.  Record no. 382, June 3, 1908

From the Archives: Looking for Gays in The Gateway District

Little of downtown Minneapolis belies the city’s 19th-century beginnings.  The City of Lakes constantly reacts to changes in popular trends, adopts the latest fashions, and makes every effort to obscure signs of old age.  Nowhere is this practice more evident than in the city’s Gateway District.  For decades, “The Gateway” was Minneapolis’ go-to area for prostitution, vagrancy, and yes, surreptitious queer behavior. The area’s flagrant disregard of Postwar norms eventually brought about its destruction; in the early 1960s, the City of Minneapolis used Federal money to completely demolish the area, which comprised 40 percent of downtown Minneapolis.  A few of the neighborhood’s survivors—such as the Brass Rail and the Gay 90s—remind us of LGBT life in early-to-mid 20th century America.

My study of the Gateway began with a single passage in a sizable book.  In Lost Twin Cities, Larry Millet wrote extensively of the Gateway’s architectural grandeur. Millet noted that, for almost a century, Minnesota businessmen built stately offices, lavish hotels, and grand public buildings near the intersection of Washington, Nicollet, and Hennepin Avenues to impress investors with the power of the Midwest’s industrial production and its commercial prestige.  Following decades of decline, Minneapolis’ oldest neighborhood came to be a civic embarrassment—Millet summed up its eventual population with  two sentences. “Not all of its drinking establishments were rotgut dives, and some—such as the Persian Palms nightclub—attracted a middle-class clientele searching, often with considerable success, for a taste of sin.” He wrote.  ”The area also featured bars that catered to blacks, gays, and others not welcome in mainstream Minneapolis.” (1)

Surely, I thought, there’s more to the story of “gays” in the Gateway than a passing mention.  How did the Gateway come to attract a queer underground?  What Gateway bars catered to queer people? What bars catered to people of color? Why are these two groups assumed to be historically separate?

I set about finding answers to these difficult and began with the Tretter Collection in GLBT studies—where all local quests for LGBT history should begin.  The Tretter Collection had a relatively small amount of information—I discovered that, sadly, queer Minneapolitans did not actively produce many written accounts of their experiences during this era.  As a result, the Tretter Collection has little source material to preserve.

Luckily, there are many other resources at the disposal of local historians.  I contacted the City of Minneapolis’ records management office in February of 2009 and explained my quandary. The office’s staff helpfully recommended a few sources within their collection.  Located below the clocktower in City Hall, the Municipal Archive is itself a piece of history.  Modeled after other late 19th century libraries, the (often-forgotten) space contains four levels of oak shelving, wrought-iron railings, stone floors, hundreds of brittle volumes, no heat source, and (to my shock) a sole electrical outlet.

After reading hundreds of run-of-the-mill criminal reports from the Minneapolis Police Department, I ran across an entry that suggested queer goings-on were part of the Gateway for most of the 19th century.  In the summer of 1908, police responded to a gunshot on Nicollet Avenue and 3rd Street (the present-day location of Central Library).  James Montague, a 16 year-old youth donned head-to-toe in women’s clothing (complete with shaved head and wig!), walked up to a middle-aged man and shot him in the head. (2)  The Chicago Tribune reported that Montague’s victim, an elevator builder named A.P. Chandler, had a “premonition” about his death, yet the paper claimed that Chandler was unacquainted with Montague before being shot. (3)  Police took Montague into custody, and reported that the young man was “clearly insane.”  Jackpot.

To be continued…

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(1) Millet, Larry. Lost Twin Cities. St Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1992.  Page 267.

(2) Minneapolis Police Department. “Bertillon Ledger: 1917.”  Record No. 382.

(3) “Camden Had Premonition.” The Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1908.

From The Archives: A Woman’s Coffeehouse

In the process of organizing some of the Tretter Collection’s assorted material, I ran across an undated pamphlet from A Woman’s Coffeehouse that is reminiscent of a nearly-forgotten period in local queer life–when lesbian and bisexual women overcame paranoia, fear, and prejudice to simply socialize with each another. Organizers and participants in the coffeehouse quickly realized that they had prejudices of their own – women of color felt unwelcome, and transgender people were outright banned from participating. This pamphlet, like many other items in the Tretter Collection, is one of the last of its kind. It offers insight into one of the most significant organizations in local queer history–one that is relatively unknown by younger members of the LGBT community.

Stewart Van Cleve is a library assistant working with the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection at the University of Minnesota, and compiler of the 100 Queerest Places in Minnesota History. This is the first installment of Stewart’s new, regular column on queer Minnesota History.

In 1975, a group of lesbian-identified women organized an alcohol-free night of performances and dancing at the Lesbian Resource Center in south Minneapolis. [1] The evening was a surprising success, and its organizers formed a collective to continue offering a “sober space, women’s space, celebration space, forum space, caring space, and sharing space”[2] to the lesbian and bisexual community. After a few more meetings at the Resource Center, the Collective relocated to the basement of the Plymouth Congregational Church on the southern edge of downtown Minneapolis.

The Collective’s appearance marked a point of departure in the social scene of Minnesota’s queer women—before ’75, women either met through quiet social networks and house parties, by participating in activist organizations, or they socialized in the respective lesbian-designated bar that operated at the time. A Woman’s Coffeehouse was one of the first community-run social spaces that attempted to blend the sociability and safety of house parties with the visibility of lesbian bars.
At the time of the Coffeehouse’s founding, many women feared participating in political movements or entering “known” lesbian spaces. The FBI kept tabs on several Gay and Lesbian activist organizations during the Nixon Administration (1969-1974); in some cases, agents infiltrated radical groups with instructions to spread discord, take names, and orchestrate raids.[3] Paranoia among queer women was abundant, and it conflated fears of arrest, fears of being “outed,” and fears of losing gainful employment. Toni McNaron and Karen Clark both participated in “the Coffeehouse” during the mid-1970s, and considered their attendance as a risk to their livelihoods.[4] This ultimately proved to not be the case; McNaron became a respected University of Minnesota professor and Clark became one of the first openly-lesbian politicians in the United States.



The Coffehouse’s purpose was twofold. It served as an empowering social space as it simultaneously served as a venue for lively (if sometimes heated) discussions about issues facing queer women. As its name implied, the Collective’s meetings were run by members and required substantial input for every decision made. The meetings, though largely constructive, occasionally dissolved into infighting and controversy. In the early 1980s, Collective members wrestled with regulations that banned young boys and transgender people from entering the all-woman establishment. Some women of color felt unwelcome, and white regulars also noticed the disparity—these sentiments encouraged the Collective members to reconsider their outreach to communities of color. In a 1985 flyer, the collective announced “some of our main goals are to bridge the cultural gaps between white women and women of color and break down the walls of alienation that have been built up over the years.”[5] This spirit of inclusion only went so far, however. In 1984, the Collective narrowly passed a ban on transgender people that permitted—but did not expect or require—participants to ask transgender people to leave immediately.

Several lesbian bars and alternative social organizations (such as Out to Brunch) organized and opened in the mid-1980s and actively competed with the Collective’s once-unique status as a social venue for women. The Coffehouse’s competitors offered an easygoing alternative to the contention of regular meetings. Thus, the majority of women who just came to dance went elsewhere. Membership dwindled, and the organization closed in September of 1989.[6] A decade later, many of the Coffeehouse’s pioneering members held one last event in the basement of the Plymouth Church, where women had established lifelong friendships and relationships for more than fifteen years.

[1] Enke, Anne. Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007. Page 224.

[2] Excerpt from a speech by an unidentified woman, recorded at a Woman’s Coffeehouse Collective meeting on 2/9/85.

[3] Glick, Brian. War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It.” Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1989. Page 27.

[4] Enke, page 225.

[5] Anderson, Shelley. “Coffeehouse Makes Changes.” Equal Time, 12/18/1985. Page 9.

[6] Dryer, Peg and Porte, Trina. “The Coffeehouse: A Final Accounting.” Equal Time News, 8/3-8/17/90. Page 4.