The Travelers Social Club was Pittsburgh’s Stonewall Inn.
Shortly after the May 2 raid of P-Town, a Baum Boulevard LGBTQ nightclub, by the Pennsylvania State Police Bureau of Liquor Control Enforcement (BLCE), statements and news accounts compared the episode to the 1969 raid of New York City’s Stonewall Inn. The historic Stonewall raid sparked protests that marked a turning point in the push for queer civil rights nationwide.
Almost 20 years after the Stonewall raid, Pittsburgh had its own Stonewall moment when multiple law enforcement agencies raided the Travelers Social Club in Larimer on Feb. 14, 1988.
Dubbed the “Valentine’s Day Massacre” by members of Pittsburgh’s queer communities, the Travelers raid proved to beone of the most important chapters in modern Pittsburgh civil rights history.
“It was not so long ago that police raids on gay bars were routine,” Mayor Ed Gainey said in a statement three days after the P-Town raid. “It was one such raid, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, that sparked the modern movement to establish safe places for people to be open about their gender and sexuality without fear of arrest.”
The Travelers raid sparked protests at the City-County Building and an immediate change to Pittsburgh’s civil rights law, making gays and lesbians protected classes alongside race, religion, and ethnicity.
A safe place
Five men founded the Travelers Social Club in 1967. It was one of several LGBTQ nightclubs owned and operated by Robert “Lucky” Johns, a Korean War veteran who grew up on the North Side. Johns learned the hospitality business in the 1950s working in clubs owned by local racketeers, according to research by Pittsburgh Queer History Project founder Harrison Apple.
Johns and his partners, some of them married men with suburban homes and living closeted lives, had opened several bars after buying the charters of defunct social clubs founded decades earlier. Some of these clubs included the Transportation Club of Pittsburgh (founded 1949) and the Samuel J. Tilden Democratic Association (founded in the 1890s), which Lucky changed into the House of Tilden in the 1960s, says Apple, Johns’s biographer.
Travelers was a special club. “It was a place where gays, especially … gays in some kind of political power or medicine or law or whatever, could go and feel comfortable that … they’re not going to get outed,” says Michael Rosenfield, one of the attorneys who represented Travelers in a federal civil rights lawsuit after the raid.
Johns’ clubs were mobile, renting older buildings and converting them into places where queer people could socialize, dance, and drink safe from surveillance and harassment. Eventually, complaints by neighbors and law enforcement raids, mainly for serving alcohol to non-members, would force the clubs to move.
In 1983, Travelers found a new home in Larimer. A club member bought the building at 6525 Hamilton Ave., owned since 1963 by the Spigno-Saturnia Italo-American Society. The Spigno club had been on Hamilton Avenue since the 1940s in one of Pittsburgh’s earliest Little Italys. Before the Spigno club moved in, the building had been one of the last slaughterhouses in one of Pittsburgh’s earliest meatpacking districts.
Demographic changes and urban renewal propelled many Italians in Larimer and East Liberty to move to Penn Hills and other Pittsburgh neighborhoods, including Stanton Heights and Morningside.
Joey Musico, one of Johns’ employees, knew that the Spigno society was looking for a new home. “He knew this place. I guess his uncle was part of that social club and said it was used for weddings and poker games, and they were moving to Morningside,” Apple tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “The reason that they ended up there as Travelers was because they really couldn’t find anything else they could afford.”
Current Spigno society leaders don’t know if their predecessors were aware that their old clubhouse would become a gay bar. Spigno society treasurer Chris Pirollo, whose family has been part of the club since its founding in 1927, wasn’t surprised.
City Paper interviewed Pirollo last year for a feature on the city’s ethnic social clubs. “Your article made the point that the gay community established these types of clubs here in order to have a place to go without the scrutiny or without the discrimination right to them,” Pirollo says. “I guess our club was one of those — our former club became one of those types of safe havens.”
Raided by “Rambo”
But Travelers wasn’t as safe as its founders had hoped. Raids on Travelers began within two years of the club opening. In 1983 and 1984, liquor control agents raided Travelers five times. They seized the club’s books and abused club officers and members.
In September 1984, Travelers sued the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) and several of its then-agents for selective prosecution and harassment (liquor control enforcement transitioned from the PLCB to the BLCE between 1987 and 1988). The 1984 case was working its way through the Commonwealth courts when, on Feb. 14, 1988, BLCE agents, along with fire department officials and Pittsburgh police officers, burst into Travelers and forced everyone out into the freezing pre-dawn weather.
The law enforcement officers swept through the club, attacking members and hurling anti-gay slurs. Three club members required hospitalization, and four men were arrested on charges of simple assault, resisting arrest, and obstructing the administration of the law.
Attorney Jon Pushinsky recalls representing them and, with his partner Rosenfield, filing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Pittsburgh, individual officers of BLCE, the Pittsburgh Bureaus of Police and Fire, and Pennsylvania State Police.
One official involved in the raid, Pittsburgh Assistant Fire Chief Kevin Mellot, had already gotten a reputation citywide. “We had a fire chief in the city at the time who didn’t last very long, who liked to walk around in fatigues,” Pushinsky remembers. “I heard this fire chief was telling the officers what they could do. And they were all kind of like, “Who is this guy and why should we listen to him?’”
Mellot abruptly resigned six months after the raid. Melott “earned the nickname ‘Rambo’ for wearing Army fatigues and a gun at arson scenes,” the Pittsburgh Press reported in 1989. Mellot told reporters at the time that he had resigned because Pittsburgh Mayor Richard Caliguiri died in May 1988.
Persad Center founder Randy Forrester asked Rosenfield to take the case. It was a no-brainer for Pushinsky and Rosenfield, who shared an office on the 18th floor of the Law & Finance building downtown. Rosenfield now lives in Albuquerque, N.M., and Pushinsky still has a practice, now on the 14th floor, in the same building.
Pushinsky remembers the criminal charges being dispensed with quickly. “I don’t remember going past the magistrate’s proceeding,” he tells CP. The arrested men pleaded no contest to the charges and received sentences of a day in jail and a $100 fine.
Pushinsky didn’t recall much from the criminal cases, except one hearing where a witness testified that he was positive that an officer he had just identified was the one who had beaten him in the raid. “He had such a cute ass,” the attorney remembers the witness testifying about how he positively identified the cop.
A moral victory
Response to the raid was swift. LGBTQ rights organizations mobilized supporters to sign a petition demanding an investigation and to attend a protest at the City-County Building. Video from the protest is archived by the Pittsburgh Queer History Project.
Both of the lawyers representing Travelers were new to LGBTQ issues. “We had a lot of experience representing predominantly Black people in civil rights actions,” says Rosenfield. “There may have been a Muslim or two or something like that, but civil rights were civil rights.”
The attorneys spent a lot of time speaking with Johns, learning about the gay communities and the ways Pittsburgh’s queer men and women navigated a city with hostility towards them. They experienced some of it themselves after taking the case.
“Occasionally somebody would say, ‘Oh, you represent those queers’ or whatever,” Rosenfield recalls. “We could very easily say, well, those people are no better and no worse than anybody else.”
Of the charges listed in the federal complaint — unreasonable search, violation of the right to freely associate, conspiracy to violate civil rights, violation of privacy, violation of due process rights, and equal protection of the law — “I threw the kitchen sink,” says Pushinsky. “The whole thing was offensive. It seemed to us that the raid was designed to intimidate the gay community.”
Pushinsky and Rosenfield didn’t take the case to get rich. But still, someone had to foot the bill for suing multiple law enforcement agencies and their leadership, the City of Pittsburgh, and the BLCE.
“They did a fundraiser for us at the Pegasus club, down on Liberty Avenue downtown,” says Rosenfield. “It was a drag show.” The lawyers and their wives had front row seats.
“I don’t remember if they raised a lot of money. They raised some money,” Pushinsky recalls.
Travelers and their attorneys got lucky, sort of, by drawing District Judge Gustave Diamond.
“After the hearing, the judge ruled against us, that we did not meet the standard for a preliminary injunction because we couldn’t prove that this wasn’t a one-time event and wouldn’t occur again,” says Pushinksy.
“I believe that after that hearing, a decision was made that it was not really productive to proceed with the case, and that, basically, was the end of the case,” says Pushinksy.
Diamond put the city and commonwealth on notice in the published opinion. “If the Club were to be raided in the future and again brought allegations of similar unconstitutional conduct, they may then possess the standing they currently lack,” Diamond wrote.
“The city won, so they were happy, and we had a moral victory because he acknowledged that gay people should not be treated any differently than other people, and that the police have to learn to control themselves and be better enforcers of the law,” says Rosenfield.
History repeats itself
On April 3, 1990, amendments to the Pittsburgh Code became effective, adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes under the law.
Travelers remained open until 2006, when the PCLB declined to renew the club’s liquor license. Reasons given included fights at the club, improper record keeping, and a long history of citations after 1988 for unlawful contests and drink specials, and for supplying false information to the PLCB.
“Long after the Valentine’s Day Massacre sort of event, it continued to be a nightclub that was a frequent target of the Nuisance Bar Task Force and everything that comes along with that,” says Apple.
Pushinsky emailed an answer to a follow-up question after the May 2025 incident at P-Town. The attorney wrote, “I thought of [Travelers Club] … when I saw the news reports of the recent gay bar raid.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article conflated the BLCE and PLCB’s differing roles in enforcement following the bureau’s creation in 1987. This error has been corrected and a caption updated to better reflect the timeline of events around the Travelers raid.
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2025.
