Gay bars cleveland ohio
A Place to Thrive
Trivia Night! Every Wednesday – Cleveland, Ohio
Muze GastropubPut your brain to the test with our ultimate trivia challenges! Studio West is partnering with Sporcle to bring you trivia EVERY Wednesday! Free to participate. Prize giveaway! Trivia reservations at trivia.sw117.com. 1st place team gets their tab covered on us — up to $50!* Check out our happy hour and daily specials at SW117.com/menu. […]
Community Meal (Free)
Muze GastropubVisit the Lakewood Fieldhouse, in the private dining room of Muze Gastropub, for a FREE Community Meal. No charge or reservation required. Everyone is welcome. Come and dine-in at 4pm or take something to go! ***While Quantities Last*** This is a program of The Homosexual Community Health & Wellness Foundation, an agency of the Greater […]
When Governor Mike DeWine ordered bars and clubs to secure down in Protest 2020 to end the spread of the coronavirus, Kevin Briggs panicked.
He and his husband John had owned Vibe Bar & Patio, a male lover bar on Lorain Avenue near West 117th Street in Cleveland, for only about a year. Early in the pandemic, they didn’t know how lengthy the shutdown would last or if their fledgling business would survive it.
Gay bars and nightclubs in Cleveland and nationally had been closing at lofty rates for more than a decade before the pandemic, according to explore by an Oberlin College professor.
Would the pandemic add to these closures? Not in Cleveland.
Vibe and the handful of Cleveland same-sex attracted bars and nightclubs in business before the pandemic, stay open.
They’ve often survived by tapping federal Covid relief for small businesses and by coming up with programming that has appealed to patrons’ desires for Covid-safe entertainment.
Briggs remembers the anxiety he felt when he first learned of the shutdown, extended before vaccines were available.
“We lose coins, that’s one thing, but I was really freaking out about my employees,” Kevin Briggs said. “What are they going to do?”
A Per The Cadillac Lounge opened at 2016 East 9th Lane in 1946. Owned by Cleveland bar and restaurant entrepreneur Gloria Lenihan, the Cadillac Lounge was one of the first openly gay-friendly bars to run in Cleveland. The Cadillac Lounge provided a relatively tolerant social space for gay men in Cleveland to socialize and congregate for nearly 27 years. Nestled within the Schofield Building (2016 E. 9th St.) in downtown Cleveland, the Cadillac Lounge contained a full 2-story lock and lounge that regularly hosted live musical show. The bar, a “long, narrow room” lined with large mirrors, featured lavish wood paneling, velvet and leather booths, and a variety of large tropical murals painted by creator William C. Grauer. Unlike the few other gay-friendly bars in Cleveland throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the upscale and relatively lavish Cadillac Lounge was regularly praised by patrons as being “comparatively scrub, well-lit, and well furnished.” Like its contemporaries, however, the Cadillac Lounge was a frequent target of Cleveland’s Board of Liquor Control and received numerous liquor-related citations throughout the 1950s. During the daytime, the Cadillac Lounge c With this entity National LGBTQ History Month, I also think it is significant to celebrate the present. Our city, Cleveland, has had a few victories this year that definitely need celebrating. While we still have a fight ahead of us, acknowledging where we have made advances gives us strength to fight on. Disseminate with me in this and know that each of you are a part of this. Say what you want, but male lover bars have been the cornerstones of LGBTQ culture for a very long time. They possess been sanctuary, front lines of rebellion, keystones to neighborhoods, and starts of our “out lives”. As we move forward through our history, we are seeing a decline in those establishments. In the 1960s, as New York’s gay community started coming into its own, we needed a place where we could arrive together without fear of reprisals. Until that point, there were laws in place, in most of the country that queer men could not be served in public. All it took was for a bartender to assume you were gay for them to not serve you and even have you arrested. Sit to close to another guy, busted. Touch a dude that looked intimate, cops showed up and probably smashed your head
History of Gay Bars