It’s also a hidden history, Detwiler said. “The stories and voices that come out of this community have often been repressed and suppressed,” he said, adding that studying the bars is worthwhile because they are part of America’s and San Diego’s history. Gay bars had a different meaning for each generation, Detwiler said. After World War II, LGBTQ members of the armed forces settled in San Diego and other cities that were relatively liberal. “These port cities were foci for high concentrations of queer people,” he said. In those days, there weren’t gay bars per se. Instead, bars had straight patrons during the day, and at night, gays weren’t excluded. “The bars tolerated gay people to an extent,” he said, adding that bars in those days were the only spaces where gay people could be themselves in a public setting. (In the late 1950s, The Brass Rail, founded in 1934 at a different location from where it is now in Hillcrest, was bought by a straight man who didn’t mind gay patrons - and it gradually started being more gay-friendly, Detwiler said.) In the mid- to late 1950s, when McCarthyism loomed, things again became harsher for gay bars and their patrons. “It was the blossoming of gay culture,” Detwiler said, following civil rights movements across the U.S.
and the pro-gay-rights Stonewall riots, in the summer of 1969, in New York. In San Diego, gay bars suddenly took off. The early and mid-1980s marked the beginning another chapter, with the rise of HIV and AIDS. Bars took on a new function, also serving as centers of public health learning as people traded information and anguish about the disease’s spread and raised funds to combat the epidemic, he said. The disease remained “a big cultural stressor” until the launch of the more effective combination HIV therapies, known as drug cocktails, in the 1990s.ĭetwiler, a biology professor who moonlights as a filmmaker, sounded wary about the title “director” in this case, since the project reflects what his sources are telling him rather than his own artistic vision.ĭetwiler and Cashman, the producer, met almost a decade ago at the San Diego Film Festival. A few years later, Detwiler pitched his idea. Cashman, who has made four documentaries, most recently about the Tijuana soccer club known as the Xolos, was immediately hooked. He knew nothing about gay bars, and that was the draw. Later, as the token “straight man in the room” during interviews, he acted as a stand-in for the film’s audience.Ĭashman was surprised to learn about the bars’ multifaceted history, including from a business and economic point of view.
“I never knew the backstory,” he said.ĭetwiler and Cashman both elaborated: They used to be hard to operate back when there were “no touch” rules, a homophobic police presence and unwelcoming city policies. These days, it’s getting harder to bring in customers - but for very different reasons.
There were 40 gay bars in San Diego in 1986 today there are around 20.Īs property values and rents have risen, gay bars in San Diego and elsewhere have shut down.Īlso, people have the Internet for dating, and younger generations are more comfortable partying with people of all sexual orientations.