Queer Streets: A Brief Look
- Al Preston
- 13 hours ago
- 6 min read
By Al Preston
The Castro in San Francisco. Greenwich Village in New York. Philly’s Midtown Village ‘Gayborhood’. All of these areas are where the majority of that city’s queer folks live. Pittsburgh, as we’ve mentioned, doesn’t have a street or section of the city where gays flock and mostly live. In fact, Pittsburgh’s queer populations seem to be everywhere and going everywhere and have for a long time.
There are some interesting reasons, or more theories, as to why Pittsburgh doesn’t have a gayborhood. From the way liquor laws and districting laws work, to the way LGBT+ people are treated and viewed. The reason that cities like New York and Philadelphia have gay streets and sections are just as interesting.
Comparing Pittsburgh to Philadelphia seems like the easiest way to describe these differences. While Pittsburgh’s queer community was able to remain free from mob influence but also had tight restrictions from city laws, Philadelphia’s queer folks initially gathered around places that were safe, that welcomed them…and some of those places did have mob connections.
Historically queerness is connected to illegal activities for two reasons. One is that various forms of sex, gay and straight oral sex included, were ruled as illegal for decades. Crossdressing was punishable by a number of years in jail. The second reason for the connection to illegal activities is that organized crime is more than willing to exploit a vulnerable community.
Many bars in many cities paid the mob money to keep the police out of their bars. Some bars were completely run by the mob. Not only did this make gay bars indebted to the mob, allowing drugs, gambling, and other vices in their spaces, but also made them easy targets for the police.
Philadelphia’s gay bars paid the mob to keep the police off their backs. While some of the bars were run by and for LGBT+ folks, they needed help knowing about or preventing raids from the police. This did allow the bars and the queer community to build themselves up around their own likes and places.
Pittsburgh’s mob cared very little about what gay bars were doing. Gambling was the Pittsburgh’s mobs’ bread and butter. They did little when it came to gay bars and ‘rub’ parlors. Gay bars, therefore, were on their own when it came to the police. Bar owners either paid off the police themselves or let them drink for free one night a week. Raids occurred, of course they did, but only if the bars made an obvious infraction, such as being open later than they should have been.
That didn’t necessarily protect the bars or their patrons from the unfortunate legal repercussions of being gay. Nor did it guarantee the safety of patrons and the bar itself in the same way. While the mob could ensure that buildings were protected, mostly because they had a vested interest in them, Pittsburgh’s owners had to tread lightly. Whether they realized it or not, too many raids, one too many gung-ho straight people, and they could have lost the bar entirely.
Pittsburgh’s city laws make it difficult for certain kinds of businesses to gather together. Buildings have liquor licenses, not businesses. Getting a liquor license for a building is no easy feat. Bar owners bought the buildings that came with liquor licenses and tried their best to keep those buildings within the community. Bars landed wherever they could. Many times, multiple bars could be within the same couple of streets. Pockets popped up throughout the city all catering to a multitude of the same audiences.
Without one central location or bar or leadership group, Pittsburgh’s community couldn’t gather and live in that one area. Pittsburgh also fought long and hard to push out ‘undesirable’ bars, stores, and businesses as well as reducing housing accessible to similar ‘undesirable’ groups also kept queer folks from being able to even afford housing near the bars they frequented.
Philly was very much the opposite. The city’s queer community felt safe and loved the bars in and around Rittenhouse Square. The park was considered a safe place to cruise and meet up. From there, the community took up housing and opened their own businesses, all within the same area. Of course, the community was not fully centered only in this one area. However, Rittenhouse Square and the rest of Midtown Village became the ‘gayborhood’ where queerness was the most visible.
Having a central location meant that Philly’s queer folks were able to easily find each other and gather when they needed to.
Philly’s gayborhood is old. There are records of underground gay parties all the way back to the 30s and 40s in Center City, West Philly, and Germantown. The mob owned bars were around 13th and Locust Streets while Washington Square West or Midtown Village is what is considered the ‘gayborhood’.
Philly is also a historic location for national queer history. In 1965, queer activists protested annually on July 4th in front of Independence Hall. These marches pre-date pride as we know it and were some of the first displays of protest from LGBT+ people. They purposefully dressed like average Americans and did not overly showcase their queerness to make being gay and lesbian seem perfectly normal.
The city didn’t become that way overnight, however. Philly had a rapidly expanding city after World War II. To accommodate, mass amounts of housing were made. Cities are often considered the best places for queer folks because they are just one in a huge crowd and therefore it’s difficult to pinpoint or find one person amongst the masses. Rittenhouse Square and the coffee houses on nearby Sansom Street were welcoming to queer folks as there was a culture of alternative views and beliefs. As the gay friendly locations were in that area, just South of the square where more housing was built, gay men filled the apartments.
The bars and clubs of the 1940s were filled with jazz bands, chorus girls, and nationally known entertainers. By the 1950s, however, the entertainment got cheaper but the prices remained the same. Organized crime saw dollar signs as they quickly took over the same clubs and bars by the 1960s. Philly’s queer folks began their stay in Midtown Village before organized crime but rapidly became a captive audience as their historic entertainment spots got bought up.
While the mob allowed some bars to continue to cater to LGBT+ folks, the fact that other ‘vice’ crimes (be that prostitution, gambling, or drugs) were rampant in the same area, being queer and going to gay bars was also seen as criminal. Philadelphia’s police raided the bars often throughout the 80s.
However, after Stonewall in the early 1970s motivated and mobilized LGBT+ people in Philadelphia just like the rest of the nation. A community center and a gay newspaper began to be published. There was a Gay Pride demonstration that marched from Rittenhouse Square to Independence Mall.
Within the gayborhood, businesses advertised themselves as being by and for gay people. A Gay Business Association was formed and the queer folks who lived in this area started to change their neighborhood to help themselves.
To some extent, Philadelphia’s queer community may have had a slightly easier time with collective actions and finding each other. As they were in a central location, it was easy to find a safe space. They could organize with each other easily and they could interact with multiple groups of the community more easily. However, they could be found by the police more easily as well.
As there is a physical space just for queer folks, there can be a lot of gatekeeping. Many LGBT+ communities in the US struggle with being welcoming to people of color or transgender people. With a physical space where gay people are known to live, it can be easier to push out people who do not meet the made-up ‘standard’ of what a queer person looks like in that community.
Pittsburgh’s spread out and diverse system did mean that organized crime did not get a foothold. With the sheer amount of bars the city once had, there must be somewhere for everyone. However, it did divide the community pretty severely based on their identity.
This bar, this location, that was where the cis-gender white men were. This other part of the city was where the cis-gendered white women went. Gay people of color, transgender people, transgender people of color…all of these people had their own nooks and crannies they filled, giving them particular safe spaces, but also keeping them separated from other members of the community which can worsen dividing lines.
Even within the kink community, there were and are different gatherings, groups, and parties for cisgender, transgender, and of color kinksters. Those divides are so deep that when one group tries to do something for the whole, the other groups instantly reject them, critical of their role in the kink community at all.
Neither method of existing is perfect, nor were they overly intentional. It’s easy to look back and point at all of the reasons these things exist now, but in the moment, it just was. Today, we must understand how it came to be, why it came to be, and accept it so we can work with what we’ve got. It takes a lot of time and effort to fix some issues but also understand the community itself.
Understanding how we got to this point makes it just a little easier. The Holiday Pride is hoping to do all of that work and hopefully provide that central location that Pittsburgh has most certainly lacked.
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