1960s gay dance party
Pride News
Photo:The Tea Dance Est. 1966 – Fire Island & Pines Historical Society
The Raven Resort was a popular Gay destination in New Hope PA from 1979 to 2019
Their Sunday T-dances were legendary for a petite town in PA.
Learn more about Gay History at New Hope Celebrates History Archive
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History of the Gay Tea Dances – These were events organized on Sunday afternoons in the homosexual community, originating in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. The original dances included tea service. They were a place for singles to meet. The label alludes to traditional tea dances of the English countryside.
It was illegal through the mid-1960s for bars in New York to exchange alcohol to people recognizable to be gay, and New York City police would conduct raids on establishments catering to them. Hence, gay men in the area began to hold tea dances outside the city as an alternative venue for meetings. In New York, these generally took place on Fire Island, in Cherry Grove and the Pines, on Sunday afternoons. Serving tea rather than alcohol made them more acceptable and less law-defying. Because they were
There is a dangerous myth that queer life did not exist in a public way until the 1960’s – the assumption being that LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) identified people were “closeted” in isolation and invisibility. This could not be further from the revelation. Historical scholarship has unearthed a world of saloons, cabarets, speakeasies, rent parties, and drag balls that existed since the belated 1800’s as spaces where LGBTQ identities were not only visible, but openly celebrated. Some of the most influential residential enclaves for these communities were in New York, one of the most notable being Harlem.
Richard Bruce Nugent, Tom Wirth, Wikimedia Commons.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a distinctly black LGBTQ culture took shape in Harlem. The Harlem Renaissance (1920-1935) was particularly influential to this process. The intellectual, cultural and artistic movement took the neighborhood by storm, bringing with it a flurry of literature, art, and music that centered black life. Many of the movement’s leaders were openly gay or identified as having nuanced sexualities including Angelina Weld Grimké, Claude McKay
Komrads
The scene at Stages. Photo by Terry Robson, courtesy of Arnie Kliger.
Article originally published December 4, 2012 by The Grid online (thegridto.com).
With the help of two rare DJ mixes, we revisit the early-‘80s Yonge Street club that provided Toronto’s gay people with a safe haven and showcased cutting-edge dance-music sounds, before the spectre of AIDS brought the party to a close.
BY: DENISE BENSON
Club: Stages, 530 Yonge
Years in operation: 1977-1984
History: The northwest corner of Yonge and Breadalbane was once occupied by the Hotel Breadalbane. In 1945, the Bolter family purchased the hotel and would transform the downstairs of 530 Yonge into The Parkside Tavern. The Bolters also owned The St. Charles Tavern, at 488 Yonge. By the mid-1960s, both taverns were famous to be gay bars.
At that point in history, gay nightlife in Toronto was still very much underground. It was frequent for the heterosexual owners of gay bars to be contemptuous of their clientele. This seems to possess been the situation at The Parkside, a dingy beer hall largely frequented by a daytime crowd. The Parkside’s owners allowed police to regularly spy on patrons in t
Gay
(L to R) Michael Griffiths with Albert, Michael, David and Tony Assoon. Photo by Charmaine Gooden.
The original Then & Now: Twilight Zone article was published October 5, 2011 and was second in the web series originally developed for The GridTO.com. As the Then & Now series expanded in extend, so too did the length of each story and number of participants who contributed to each. This expanded history of the Zone was written in March 2015, and was exclusively available in the Then & Now book until this time.
Trailblazing 1980s nightclub Twilight Zone brought diverse crowds and sounds to Toronto’s Entertainment District prolonged before such a designation even existed. Those who were there lovingly investigate its lasting legacy.
By: DENISE BENSON
Club: Twilight Zone, 185 Richmond Street W.
Years in operation: 1980 – 1989
History: Long before the Entertainment District was awash in condos, clubs, and restaurants—back when the area was still largely non-residential and known as the garment district—four brothers opened a venue that ultimately influenced the neighbourhood’s development.
Tony, Albert, David, and Michael Assoon fo
Though the rainbow-adorned Davie Village now beats proudly and openly as the heart of gay Vancouver, it wasn’t always so.
Bars, clubs, bathhouses and other male lover spaces only began congregating on Davie St in the early 1980s. Before that, they softly dotted the streets of the downtown core, concentrated particularly on and around Richards and Seymour Sts, between Robson and the Granville Bridge.
In was into this world that Don Hann stepped in the ahead 1970s.
Like many fresh gay men and lesbians at the time, Hann moved to Vancouver in search of others like himself. He soon settled in the nearby, residential West End, which was already emerging as Vancouver’s same-sex attracted ghetto.
Finding the bars meant finding himself.
“These public spaces gave me a vision of being part of a much larger community,” he says. “This sexual orientation was not only mine.”
Until he discovered the bars, Hann lived alone, isolated and closeted. In an age when homosexuality was barely legal and society made no effort to disguise its disgust, those early gathering spaces gave him a place to openly connect with other gays and lesbians, to develop a shared sense of ident