This block on Thirteenth and Locust had clubs like the Bag of Nails and the Golden 33, which each featured nude revues. Doomed buildings and “lurid” establishments dotted Locust Street in the 1960s. As the character of the area changed, a few of the “musical bars” on the hidden, smaller streets like Camac and Quince began attracting a gay clientele and a few venues became predominantly gay. By the 1950s, however, some of the spots did away with the expensive first-rate entertainers and began featuring Las Vegas-style showgirls instead. The street was dotted with nightclubs, restaurants, and musical bars that featured top national performers like Fats Waller (1904-1943), Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996), and Patti Page (1927-2013). Close to the hotels and theaters on Broad Street, by the 1940s the Locust strip became a major center of Philadelphia nightlife. They described themselves as being “straight during the 9 to 5 work week, but damned gay on weekends.” The parks, bars, and restaurants that crowded Center City streets provided semipublic spaces where LGBT people could socialize and be themselves.Ī number of factors worked together to turn the few blocks that radiated from Locust and Thirteenth Streets into the neighborhood that became known as the Gayborhood. Many gay men, lesbians, and gender-variant people who lived through the 1950s and 1960s experienced compartmentalized lives. The cliched “twilight life” described by early newspaper and magazine articles did have some basis in fact. Only a few years later, from 1965 to 1969, Philadelphia activists collaborated with groups in Washington, D.C., and New York to stage annual demonstrations for gay rights in front of Independence Hall. Despite its semi-sensationalist subtitle-“Philadelphia’s homosexuals lead a strange twilight life outside the law and outside of society”- the story steered away from the lurid and focused instead on the problems of gay people in Philadelphia and the burgeoning gay political scene.
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Fonzi also interviewed a handful of gay people, many of whom remained anonymous. The article mentioned a dozen or so gay bars and coffeehouses scattered along Spruce Street west of Broad and along the Locust Street area east of Broad.
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Titled “The Furtive Fraternity,” it was the first article in the country about a city’s LGBT population to appear in a mainstream publication. In December 1962, Greater Philadelphia Magazine published an essay by Gaeton Fonzi (1935-2012) about the city’s gay community. The LGBT presence in Philadelphia became increasingly visible. In an era when racism extended even into the LGBT community, many African American gay men and lesbians socialized in bars or through private parties north of Market Street, in North Philadelphia, or across the Schuylkill in West Philadelphia.
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So many gay men moved into apartments south of the square that even straight people commonly referred to gay men who lived in Center City by the coded term “Spruce Street boys.” Gays, of course, lived all throughout the city, with a significant lesbian presence in the Germantown/Chestnut Hill area. LGBT Archives)īy the 1950s, Rittenhouse Square and the beatnik coffeehouses nearby on Sansom Street had become part of the public gay geography of the city. In the 1950s and 1960s, Rittenhouse Square was known as a place where gay men and lesbians coming into the city could meet others and socialize.(Photo courtesy of the John J. Postwar downtown Philadelphia, or “Center City,” as it was beginning to be called, had the largest concentration of apartments and rental rooms in the “ City of Homes,” providing gay men, lesbians, and transgendered people with the privacy and urban anonymity they sought. The war had uprooted millions of men and women across the country and exposed them to urban life here and abroad they had never seen before.
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The community and the geographical spaces it occupied played a vital role in the social and political struggles of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people locally and in the nation.Īfter World War II, Philadelphia’s gay geography, like that in many American cities, expanded greatly. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Center City neighborhood that became known as the Gayborhood formed in the vicinity of Locust and Thirteenth Streets.