New to Town

By Al Preston

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Pittsburgh has a diverse and complicated history. That was a fact I was not fully aware of when I arrived for the first time to attend Duquesne University’s Public History Graduate program. Despite living in Johnstown for a short time and constantly visiting my family who lived there, I had never visited Pittsburgh. My parents told fond stories about the city. My father played rugby at a number of the fields, some long gone now. My mother was “that kid” who vomited on the bus to Kennywood in elementary school. I watched the Pittsburgh Penguins growing up and heard my dad talk about the smog that always coated the city time and again.

My very first time in the city was to visit Duquesne University, but as anyone can tell you, visiting one college campus tells you little about the city itself. My second time was my wife’s first. We were looking at apartments and that, truly, was my first time in Pittsburgh.

And I loved it. The blob of smog in my imagination that held only an ice rink became a city scape and three rivers. It became the open views of point park, and an exhibit about stairs at Frick Park. It became tight streets and strangely polite drivers. It was a small downtown and my future campus on the steepest hill I’d ever had to climb.

I left the city with bubbling excitement. In the thrill of getting into a graduate program, I forgot there was a city attached. I have a lifelong goal of creating an LGBT+ museum and until I moved to Pittsburgh, I wondered what it would look like and where it would be. Just a month into living in the city, I knew I had found a home.

I hit the ground running, reaching out to whoever I thought could help or would have any interest in my ideas. To my great surprise, I got responses. One of which was a University of Pittsburgh undergraduate student. Silas Switzer had been doing work in the LGBT+ community for a long time. He was born and raised in Pittsburgh and knew the history and people far better than I could ever hope to. And, to my extreme luck, our goals aligned. The more I learned about the city and its LGBT+ community, the more my goal seemed to solidify. There was a deep and amazing LGBT+ history and a startling lack of space for the community.

Then Silas told me a surprising fact about the bars in the city. There was only one true gay bar left in the city and many of the previous bar owners believed that there was no longer a need for gay bars.

In 2012, before Covid, the second to last bar closed and the owner claimed that there was no reason for them to stay open. There were some financial struggles, but the real reason was a lack of need.

Why? Gay bars have a powerful place in LGBT+ history in the United States. They were where queer (I use queer as a catch-all term for the LGBT+ community) folks found each other. Where they organized and fought together. Where the modern movement was born. How could a gay community not want their gay bars anymore?

The most famous riot, the most cited spark of the modern LGBT+ movement, the Stonewall Riot, was at a bar where queer people were tired of police invading their spaces and arresting their people. It was the boiling point. The work influential figures had done up until that faithful night had boiled the pot and the water bubbled out the moment that brick was thrown. That brick was thrown with the anger of decades of abuse and activism where gay bars were at the center.

They were one of the few places where queer adults could be themselves and love who they wanted. However, they were not always safe. For a long time, from the 1920s to the 1960s gay bars were illegal, being queer itself was illegal for a large portion of that time as well. That status caused more than a few crime organizations to take advantage of gay bars. Across the nation, the gay bar became a front for the mob and organized crime. Police raids and violence were common occurrences. While the police arrested and humiliated the queer people in the front, the illegal dealings in the back could slip away (JSTOR: Gay Bars and Gay Rights).

Fear was a constant for anyone who went to a gay bar. Any moment the police could break in and arrest you if you could not escape fast enough. If you were lucky, you would only spend a number of nights in jail. If you weren’t, you would be beaten, and your queerness would be flaunted in the newspapers the next day. Regardless, queer people kept going. Queer people found comfort in gay bars and a tight community. When AIDs swept through and killed so many people, young and old, bars were instrumental to the community comforting each other through the loss.

That violence and fear lead to queer groups organizing and protesting. The stories of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, two of the first queer organizations, were archived and saved through the use of oral history (See: The LGBTQ History Digital Collaboratory or Making Gay History).

Queer history of the United States has far more depth than one would think. I had studied it in depth before moving to Pittsburgh. I knew gay bars were a piece of the community’s culture that brought them together. New York and California and their queer history were stories I knew well, but I had never read about Pennsylvania’s history before. A whole new history was before me, and I only had it in pieces from brief conversations I had with LGBT+ folks I met by happenstance.

Gay bars had featured in Pittsburgh’s queer history, but their relationship with crime and the police was vastly different from what I was used to. However, their purpose had not simply “gone away.” At least, not in my eyes.

My eyes, however, didn’t matter. The owners of the bars and the people who frequented them had a different opinion. Pittsburgh itself was a different story than the one I knew and the people who were there could tell me it all. Silas had already started the work.

A gap between the generations in Pittsburgh, seemingly larger than in other cities dropped the attendance of the bars and new generations had no one to introduce them. The impact of AIDs on Pittsburgh created a generational struggle that divided the community between the young and the old. And the elders were rapidly disappearing.

I was in an oral history class, learning how to enter a community as an outsider. Very luckily for me, I met Silas, who acted as my gatekeeper into the community. In oral history, the ability to build rapport with your interviewees is an important element. Some of the key figures you may want to speak to may not be willing to trust a stranger, so some oral historians will work with a trusted member of the community to introduce them to possible interviewees.

Silas was my gatekeeper and a vital piece of the project. He knew the people, but he also knew the history. I could bring the equipment and knowledge of the field. I could speak of the broader movement and the larger pieces of history Pittsburgh was subject to, but Silas knew the personal histories and he knew the people. Between the two of us, we could ask the questions that got us closer and closer to the reality of growing up queer in Pittsburgh. Closer to the reason for the divide. Closer to understanding the city through the eyes of its people.

Pittsburgh, I have decided, will be my home and it will be the home of an LGBT museum and community space where, just maybe, we can bridge that gap.